SOIE. Design guide · Site 20 of 25
How this site was made

Cloth, computed
thread by thread.

SOIE is a fictional silk maison in Lyon. Its hero is not a video of fabric — it is fabric: a Verlet-integrated cloth simulation pinned along its top edge, breathing in a procedural draught, shaded with the physically-based sheen model made for textiles.

Concept

Silk sells by the hand — how it moves when touched — which no photograph can carry. So the page simulates the drape and lets the visitor disturb it. Everything else stays out of the way: a dark fitting-room, champagne accents, and copy in the voice of a house that has been right about fabric since 1873.

Palette

Fitting-room ink#191621
Raw silk#E9DFD2
Champagne#D9C6A5
Plum rim-light#7C3F58

Typography

Woven light, sold by the metre.

DM Serif Display — a didone with the poise of a Lyonnais label; italics for the words that drape.

The banner drifting behind these words is cloth.

Jost — body; a geometric sans that stays out of the silk's way.

Techniques

ElementHow it works
Verlet clothA 34×44 particle grid integrated position-minus-previous-position, pinned at intervals along the top edge like a hung banner. Structural, vertical, and shear constraints relax over three Gauss–Seidel iterations per frame.
The draughtTwo crossed sine fields push x and z with strength growing toward the free hem — the bottom billows while the pinned edge holds.
TouchThe pointer is unprojected onto the cloth plane; particles within its radius take a radial push, so a slow pass drags a wake across the silk.
Silk shadingMeshPhysicalMaterial with the sheen layer (the textile BRDF), a warm key light, plum rim, and a whisper of iridescence for the changeant effect. Normals recompute every frame so highlights slide along the folds.
Weave iconsSatin, twill, and organza drawn as literal SVG weave diagrams — floats, diagonals, and open plain weave.
AccessibilityReduced motion computes one settled drape and holds it. All content is HTML text over the canvas.

Interaction map

You doThe page does
Move across the bannerThe silk parts around your cursor and settles behind it
WaitThe workshop draught keeps the hem breathing
Read the weavesEach card diagrams the actual thread structure it describes
← Back to the fitting room