Fabric Weight - Topic of the day 4/22/25
From the lightest silk to the heaviest chain mail, fabric weight is an invisible yet still notable part of clothes and fashion. How does fabric weight impact what you buy and what you wear? Are there any must have (or must skip) fabrics because of their weight? Weigh in here! ⚖️
18 Replies
Matters a good amount, impacts drape primarily for me.
heavy and mid weight linen
is what im obsessed with currently
Silk is also one of those fabrics where weight can make or break a garment
I tend to aim for heavier weight but breathable fabrics for pants and extremely lightweight for tops in warmer weather.
think fabric weight contributes most to the premium hand feel of a garment, that "heft"
i think we had a conversation at one point that boiled down to a lot of ppl thinking "heavier weight = higher quality"
which i do not agree with, but i do think there's 4 sure a satisfying feeling when thing is heavy
I think there's like a real psychological effect there that causes that but agreed that it's very much not necessarily true
one of my favorite pairs of pants rn are like impossibly thin and I love them specifically for that
I'm gonna say the line
it depends
yeh, everything has a time and place or w/e
the fabric weight should match the use case
"this is the highest quality white t-shirt we made, with a gsm of 500 it is ultra heavyweight biological cotton"
lmao
would sell out in an instant
lightweight denim tends to drape pretty bad imo, and lightweight shirts can be billowy and fun
Yeah, but heavyweight denim does drape even worse ime
Lightweight vs heavyweight cotton is two different worlds
I got a pair of lightweight mtm cotton chinos and they instantly winkle the second you look at them
Picked up some casatlantic ones recently at a third of the price of those MTM ones and the difference is insane
Love the heavier weight casatlantic ones
I feel like last year there was a rush of brands all competing to say they had the highest gsm hoodie - I'm sure a lot of people learned why you might not want to wear 1200gsm all the time
This is a bit of a tangent, but if you are looking for lighter fabrics that still have good drape, one of the factors you want to look at is the ply. Three plan four ply are more likely to retain their shape.
Western brands tend to use heavier fabric ime and I don't really like that but idk why
I have come to think of it like I do materials (in large part thanks to you all). Heavy or light isn't inherently better but it should be deliberate. Synthetics used in clothes explicitly to make them cheaper is bad. Paper thin fabric explicitly to make it cheaper is bad. Both synthetics and lightweight can be done for specific reasons and that's fine.
Personally, I prefer jeans on the heavier side, but everything else it very much depends.
For so many fabrics, it’s about the intersection of traditional fabric and garment type.
Give me a super heavy old cotton hoodie over the modern lightweight fleece lined ones any day. But my favorite pajama pants? Flannel worn to the point of being paper thin. You can feel the fabric losing integrity at the same time as the fibers are getting continuously softer, and the fabric itself simply remembers your body.
Denim is the one that I can’t go traditional on though— I need elasticity in the waist for comfort and that little bit of elastane thins out the fabric but makes it adjust to your body that much faster. Plus, I worry less about wrecking cheap jeans by tossing in the wash.
Weight can do so much to enhance structure when tailoring is not an option (or, I suppose, in the case of fisherman’s pants, when it depends on how you fold up and tie the waist). Billowy fabrics can work extremely well in hot —even humid— weather while retaining only a whisper of stiffness or “weight” I guess from the length of the cotton fibers.