Most velvet sold today is polyester. From across a room it can pass. Up close, and once it moves, it can’t.
Light in the pile
Velvet is a cloth with a pile: thousands of short fibres standing up from a woven base. Where the pile faces you, light falls between the fibres and stays there, and the colour turns deep, almost black. Where the cloth bends over a shoulder, the sides of the fibres catch the light and send it back.
Why silk shimmers
Mulberry silk is spun by the silkworm Bombyx mori, which feeds only on mulberry leaves. Each cocoon unwinds into one filament several hundred metres long, made of two strands of protein, each about a hundredth of a millimetre across. Under a microscope the strands are triangular rather than round, and each works like a prism, returning the light at slightly different angles, so the colour seems to travel across the cloth as it moves.
Other cloths behave differently. Most polyester is plastic pushed through a nozzle as identical smooth rods, so the whole cloth flashes at once with one flat, glassy shine. Viscose, made from wood pulp, imitates the gloss but is weaker when wet and creases easily. Cotton is a short, twisted ribbon and wool is covered in tiny scales; both scatter the light, which is why they look matte. Silk is the only natural fibre that comes as one continuous filament, and the only one that bends the light like this.
A velvet poncho is never one colour.
What touches the skin
Silk breathes. It holds about a tenth of its weight in moisture before it feels damp; polyester holds less than one per cent. Every velvet poncho is lined in 100% mulberry silk, so what touches the skin is silk too. The Nomad, Blue Poppy and Cornflower are mulberry silk throughout.
Each poncho is finished by hand. The difference is easiest to see when it moves.
See the ponchos