Drape: How Fabric Falls
Two shirts, same size, same price. One puddles like liquid, one stands like cardboard. That's drape.
Grounded in the research on drape coefficient
Watch how it falls
Drape is how a fabric deforms and hangs under its own weight. Pin a panel up and look: does it cascade into soft folds, or jut out in stiff planes? That single behavior decides whether a garment skims your body or boxes it. Textile scientists nailed it down with the drape coefficient on Cusick's Drapemeter in 1968: drop a fabric disc over a smaller disc, measure how much shadow it casts. More fold equals more drape.
Read the coefficient backwards
Higher number, stiffer fabric. The drape coefficient is the draped fabric's shadow as a percentage of the flat ring. A crisp wool gabardine throws a wide shadow and scores high. A fluid silk or rayon collapses inward and scores low. So when a mill quotes you a number, flip your instinct: low coefficient means it flows. Stiff structured tailoring wants high; a bias slip dress wants low.