Rick Owens T-Shirt- SL Seb Top

Velvet is a construction, not a fibre: a pile is woven into the ground and then cut, so the surface stands up in short fibres that catch light from one direction and absorb it from another. In viscose and silk the pile is fine and the ground is fluid, which produces a velvet with none of the board-like stiffness the word usually implies. It hangs. Standing still it reads as a matte black top; in movement the pile turns and the same garment goes from flat to lit, which is the entire reason to make a soft top in this cloth rather than in a jersey.

Everything else on it is arranged to let that happen. A cowl at the neck adds cloth where it can fall, the sleeves are cut as flutters rather than set as tubes, so they move independently of the arm, and the hem is left raw so there is no turned edge adding weight at the bottom. Three decisions, all of them about movement, on a garment with no other detail at all.

Fine velvet is the material most likely to disappoint and the most obvious when it is right, and this is one we would defend. It is also unusually adjustable in register: with a trouser in daylight it is a soft top, and with nothing changed but the hour it is evening wear. Very few things we carry do both without a costume change.

The viscose and silk velvets run through this house's women's line, always cut so the cloth rather than the seaming carries the piece.

Eighty-two percent viscose and eighteen percent silk, made in Italy, in black. Velvet, with a cowl neck, flutter sleeves, and a raw hem.

The cowl means the neckline sits where the cloth falls rather than where a seam puts it, so it will look slightly different on different shoulders and is meant to. Viscose has very little recovery, so this follows the body and relaxes across an evening rather than holding. The raw hem will soften with wear. Take your usual size.

With a black trouser or a long skirt, where the pile is the only surface interest and needs nothing beside it. Under an open leather jacket, which is the version that works in the afternoon. Not under anything that presses on the shoulder, since crushing a pile is what marks velvet.

Velvet is the one cloth where pressure is worse than washing: the pile crushes where it is compressed and does not always come back, so it should be hung rather than folded and never ironed on the face. Viscose and silk together are also weak wet, so hand wash cool or take it to a cleaner who is told it is a fine velvet, and never wring it. Our care guidance covers silk and viscose in more detail.

The same viscose and silk velvet cut as a gown is the Abito Taco Gown. Below it, the Knee Bias Skirt, and underneath it, the Basic Rib Tank. Everything we currently hold from Rick Owens is listed together.