How a fabric feels to the touch, including its softness, smoothness, stiffness and surface texture.
Handfeel, or hand, is judged by touch, under procedures meant to make the judgment repeatable. CottonWorks defines hand as the feel of a material, soft, raspy or stiff, also called handle. AATCC Evaluation Procedure 5 standardizes how fabrics are presented for subjective evaluation: each specimen is presented in a prescribed manner and handled in a prescribed sequence. NC State’s Textile Protection and Comfort Center follows it and has evaluators touch, rub and squeeze swatches and rate them on scales between paired words: warm or cool, hard or soft, stiff or flexible, rough or smooth.
AATCC Test Method 202 computes a relative hand value from mechanical properties, and states that its values are not known to match what human evaluators feel. Finishing changes hand: the denim mill Kaihara sizes its cloth to give it body and tests its stiffness before shipping.
Drape describes how the fabric hangs; handfeel describes what the hand senses.
In job listings
Hand feel appears in mill and finishing roles. One textile finishing listing describes running machines that treat fabrics to improve their color, hand feel and appearance. It also falls within fabric developer and textile quality roles, which cover material testing and supplier quality. See current textile quality roles.
