The right way to touch fabric
I've been doing it wrong all these years
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In today’s Plane:
Sick metal cups that look like midcentury bangers and cost little but are a much older American design we’d been sleeping on,
There is a Certain Very Sick Overshirt that looks great right now — we’ve got a tight selection of new & vintage versions for you,
I’ve been touching fabric sub-optimally my whole life but I finally unlocked the Correct Way,
And more…
Let’s get to it —
Sometimes the simplest epiphanies take decades to stumble upon, even though they’ve been hiding in plain sight the whole time. Case in point: The other day I (Jonah) realized that, for years, I’ve been feeling fabric wrong.
It hit me while I was writing Tuesday’s landmark sletter about cool stores that avoid selling clothes online as a matter of both economics and philosophical principle. I had a line early in the piece about how nice it is to go into a shop, spot a beautiful garment and, I wrote, “rub its fabric between your fingers.”
As I revised the sletter, this seemingly innocuous, commonplace phrasing gnawed at me. It felt inadequate & off. Because I have distinct memories over the years of rubbing fabric between my fingers to get a sense of how nice it is, in the way we’re conditioned to do, and coming away… sensorially underwhelmed. Two-to-three fingertips just weren’t giving me as much tactile information as I wanted.
And yet, since this is the gesture we associate most closely with fabric appraisal, for ages I’ve accepted my disappointment as a failure of sensitivity on my part, and I never interrogated “Finger-Rub Supremacy.” But the other day, all at once, it crystallized for me that the Finger Rub is Trash, whereas the Best Way to Feel Fabric is with your Whole Palm.
This epiphany hit as I did something I’ve done thousands upon thousands of times: Crossed my arms while wearing a dope shirt. In this position, both my palms and all my fingertips were touching fabric, and I was like, ‘Damn, this s**t feels very nice.’
In the course of wearing a garment, you press palm to fabric a lot when crossing your arms. You also press palm to fabric a lot when, e.g., brushing off schmutz from a shoulder or your thigh, reaching down to smooth your pants, tucking in a shirt, and so on.
And you know what you basically never do while you’re wearing a garment? Rub it with your thumb and forefingers.
The finger rub is a great gesture to communicate that you just came into a bag / that something is mad expensive / that someone who just asked you to perform a service needs to get their f**king paper up. But why have we as a society also tasked ~2.5 fingertips with the task of fabric assessment? Especially when the whole palm is right there? We don’t pet dogs by rubbing our thumb & forefingers against their fur. Why should we treat clothes any differently? If it’s about feeling both sides of the fabric, just flip the fabric over. If it’s about adjudicating the tensile properties or something, the answer is to use both hands and give the fabric a little tug. If you haven’t already paused reading to see for yourself, do an A/B test right now with some fabric. Tell me the difference between fingertips vs. whole hand isn’t night and day.
This approach is infallible, in the way of all Spyplane Holy Decrees, and it’s also scientifically inarguable. A quick search informs me that each fingertip has “3,000 touch receptors,” while there are some “17,000 touch receptors and free nerve endings” in a palm. This means that when you use your whole hand to feel some fabric you’re enlisting 32,000 receptors as opposed to ~9,000. You do the math. 🧮👋
Meanwhile —
The other day Erin and I were doing one of our favorite things: picnicking at a park in the crisp autumn sunshine with some friends.
Simultaneously, we were also doing one of our least favorite things: drinking wine out of plastic cups.
But then a dude we hadn’t met before showed up and graciously busted out a bunch of elegant, squat, handsomely scuffed-up metal cups and passed them around. It was a very fire Picnic Move that you could easily transpose into the indoors here in “Holiday Celebration” season…
These cups looked to me, at first, like some minimalist midcentury design, to the degree I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn they were, like, handsome but top-dollar Arne Jacobsen joints…
Quite the contrary, their design dates back ~150 years, no one is checking for them, and while you can still cop new ones, they’re also available secondhand for cheap: