The fabric that looks best on the roll is very often the one nobody can wear after eleven in the morning. Weight and weave matter more than the price.
People choose cloth the way they choose a colour: by looking at it. Then they wear the garment for a week in Malé and it goes to the back of the cupboard, and the shop that sold it gets blamed for the making.
Two numbers decide whether a garment is wearable here, and neither of them is on the label of most cloth sold in this country. The first is weight, in grams per square metre. A shirting cotton at 110 to 130 grams is comfortable all day. At 160 it is a good shirt for an air conditioned office and a bad one for a walk to it. Suit cloth wants to be around 240 grams, and the beautiful heavy wool at 340 that feels wonderful in the shop is a garment you will wear twice.
The second is weave, and it matters more than most people believe. A plain poplin is smooth and it traps air against the skin. A fine twill breathes better than it looks like it should. An open weave linen blend is the most comfortable thing anybody can wear at thirty one degrees and it creases if you look at it, which is a genuine trade and not a flaw somebody can tailor out.
Polyester content is the argument we have most often at the counter. A little of it, up to about fifteen per cent, keeps a shirt looking pressed and saves an iron. Half of it turns the shirt into a bag. For uniforms, where a shop wants forty garments to look the same after eighty washes, a cotton and polyester blend at around sixty five to thirty five is honestly the right answer and we will say so, even though the pure cotton costs more and we would make more money on it.
One more thing about colour. The afternoon sun here takes the life out of mid tone dyes fast, and it does it to curtains in eighteen months and to a navy uniform shirt in about a year of daily washing. Pale cloth fades too and it does not show. If you are buying forty garments that have to match each other in two years, buy pale, or buy enough of the same roll to replace them from.
Bring the roll in before you buy it if the shop will let you. We will tell you what it weighs by hand within twenty grams, and we will tell you whether we have made anything in it before and how it behaved.
