The linen paradox
Why our French linen range softens with age rather than thinning.
A customer wrote to us last month asking why her two-year-old linen duvet cover feels softer now than it did when it arrived. She was worried the fibres were breaking down.
They are not.
European flax — the plant that produces linen — has a uniquely long fibre. Our mill in Normandy uses a variety that produces fibres around 80 cm end to end, which is almost double the average of Chinese-grown flax.
Long fibres do two things. First, they resist pilling. Short fibres catch on each other and form little balls on the surface of the fabric. Long fibres slide past one another and stay flat.
Second, they soften with washing. Each time you wash linen, tiny surface fibres relax further from the core. The fabric gains drape. The hand — what the textile industry calls the feel between finger and thumb — becomes softer. After two years of weekly washing, our customer's duvet cover is about 30% softer than when it arrived.
It is not thinning. We weighed one of our two-year-old test pieces against a fresh one last week. They were within a gram.
This is the linen paradox. The fabric that most people assume will wear out first is the one that lives longest and gets better along the way. As long as you wash it at 30°C, tumble dry low, and keep fabric softener out of the cycle.