On Drape

Drape is the behaviour of cloth under its own weight. It cannot be designed on paper, because paper has no weight, and it cannot be judged flat, because flat is the one state a garment is never worn in.

So it is tested on the stand. The cloth is pinned and left, and what matters is what it does over the following hours — whether it settles into the fold it was given, or finds a different one, or drops unevenly along the grain.

A bias cut makes this acute.

A bias cut makes this acute. Cut across the weave, cloth gains stretch it does not have on the straight, and a bias skirt will lengthen for weeks after it is made. The hem is levelled last, after hanging, for exactly this reason. A bias piece hemmed on the day it is cut is a piece that will be crooked by the time it is worn.

None of this is visible in a photograph of a still garment. It is entirely visible in the first ten steps.