Abrawan
The eye lost the verification war years ago; the hand thought it was safe. On muslin named for running water, and touch made of empty air.
Have you ever opened a parcel and known, before trying the thing on, that somebody has lied to you? Not necessarily lied in the prosecutable sense. The label may be correct, the fiber percentages immaculate, the photographs technically photographs, but your thumb reaches the cuff, and the entire case collapses. Or you are in a hotel, and the sheets are described as something Egyptian and magnificent, and your calf says absolutely not. Or a shoe arrives looking exactly as expensive as it looked on the screen, right up until you touch the leather and discover that the photograph had somehow been doing half the work. What court hears that complaint, what instrument do you submit, and at what point did we agree that seeing enough pixels constituted knowing a thing?
My thumb is on the face of the cuff now, two fingers behind it, the whole thing moving half an inch back and forth, twice. Nobody taught me this. Nobody holds fabric perfectly still to find out what it is. The shirt is four years old, and there is nothing about it I need to know, which is probably why I notice that somewhere in the last few years the hand got a promotion. I am no longer satisfied by zooming into the black screen until the weave stops looking like cloth at all. Fuck the zoom. The hand is where I go when I want to know whether something is what it says it is. The eye can be flattered, the copy can lie, the label can be technically accurate and spiritually fraudulent; then the fingers arrive and issue their small, rude verdict.
Which would be reassuring if engineering had not recently learned how to make empty air lie to them. On May 13, 2025, NTT announced a technology that puts texture onto a naked hand with nothing worn and no object touching the skin. Focused ultrasound gathers into a moving point on the skin. The actual force is tiny, around a hundredth of a newton, yet sending that point around in a small circle five times a second can make the sensation as much as twenty times stronger. The researchers wanted to know whether the skin was responding to the traveling point itself or to the small vibration left along its path. It was the travel, by roughly six to one. Almost nothing had changed except the route.
There is something indecently useful in that. The hand can be persuaded not only by how much happens to it, but by the way an almost negligible event is arranged. Luxury knew this long before ultrasound did. A book published in London in 1851 records names for the finest muslins of Dacca that sound almost like provocations against the existence of cloth. Shubnam is evening dew, the pellucid muslin that could be difficult to distinguish from dew when spread upon the bleaching field. Abrawan is running water, ab for water and rawan for flowing. The compliment is disappearance. Weather impersonated by cotton, water you can fold, a material praised because the eye has trouble proving the material is there.
The textile trade has a beautifully blunt noun for what remains when appearance has done all it can: hand. A cloth has a hand; a buyer takes the hand of it; a mill engineers one; and in 1972 Sueo Kawabata helped organize the Hand Evaluation and Standardization Committee in Japan to do something both sensible and slightly mad: fix the hand of cloth to a number. Experts from the Japanese textile industry selected standards and evaluated large sets of fabrics according to qualities that retained Japanese names because their English equivalents either lag behind them or do not quite exist. There is koshi, stiffness; numeri, smoothness; shari, crispness; hari, an anti-drape stiffness; and fukurami, fullness and softness, which is the one I have wanted in English for years without ever once being able to ask for it properly.
Four instruments then subjected cloth to tensile and shear forces, bending, compression, and surface testing. Arithmetic joined those physical measurements to cultivated human judgment until a mill no longer needed the experts physically gathered around every sample. The machine did not discover hand hiding inside the cloth like an element waiting to be identified. Human beings first decided what the differences felt like, developed a vocabulary, chose standards and judged the samples; the instruments learned how to make those judgments portable.
The finest thread anyone had spun at Dacca had been graded by people with no such apparatus. The 1851 account remarks that local weavers commonly judged fineness by sight and possessed neither a standardized reel length nor an instrument for estimating a given weight of thread. There was a way to establish it by weighing skeins and measuring their length, but the operation demanded delicate manipulation and, the account conceded, few except the spinners or weavers themselves could perform it. Before machinery could regularize material judgment, certain human beings had already trained their senses into instruments.
Language complicates it further. NTT released Japanese and English versions of its announcement on the same day. The Japanese describes textures including tsurutsuru, sarasara and zarazara; the English offers slimy, smooth and rough. Tsurutsuru occupies the first position in one sequence and slimy in the other, while the Japanese headline foregrounds tsurutsuru and zarazara and the English headline settles for smooth, rough, and more. I don’t think this is an interesting gotcha about translation. It is interesting because nothing happened to the ultrasound while it crossed languages, yet something happened to the texture.
Somebody eventually has to choose the word that tells another nervous system what sort of sensation it should expect, and the word gets there first. Slimy does not enter an English-speaking hand empty-handed. It brings mouths, kitchens, algae, rot, okra, sex, pond water, whatever private archive the reader has been accumulating. The machine delivers its event, but language has already touched you.
Mitsuhiko Hanada made the problem lovelier in 2023. Participants at Future University Hakodate handled twenty-three fabrics and supplied Japanese onomatopoeic words for what they felt, producing a tactile vocabulary whose sounds could then be compared with judgments of luxuriousness and pleasantness. Consonants including s, h, and m became more associated with luxuriousness and pleasantness, as did the vowel u; k, g, z, and p, and the vowel a, were pulled toward cheapness and unpleasantness. Smoothness itself clustered around words beginning with sounds such as s and t. Apparently, luxury has consonants, which is the kind of sentence that sounds like perfume copy until somebody performs the regression.
Perfumery has been getting away with this sensory trespassing forever. We call an odor powdery, creamy, dry, velvety, sharp, smooth, although smell has no grain or nap that a finger could locate. Fortunately, the senses do not care much about our departmental boundaries. Experiments with non-synaesthetic adults have found consistent associations between odors and tactile textures; experiments with scented cosmetic creams have even shown odor altering some evaluations of the texture itself. That does not mean smelling cedar secretly stimulates a tiny piece of sandpaper in the brain. It means the traffic between senses is ordinary enough that velvet in a perfume may be doing more than metaphorical work. Cloth migrates into sound, smell borrows touch, and language wanders among all three pretending it owns the building.
NTT’s roughness can be built rather like a chord. The rotating focus supplies one part of the sensation while added vibrations around thirty and two hundred hertz contribute others, their strengths adjusted until the surface changes character. Those frequency ranges grow from research into the different tactile channels involved in mechanical touch, including the four-channel model described by Bolanowski and colleagues in 1988. What first sounds like the reproduction of a surface turns out to be an arrangement addressed to different parts of the tactile system. There need not be sandpaper. There need not even be paper. Arrange the events correctly, and the nervous system supplies the surface.
Then money enters, because money has excellent timing around beautiful sensory ideas. In 1790 the East India Company’s Resident at Dacca commissioned three pieces of the finest muslin that could be produced, choosing weavers for their superior skill and advancing two hundred Arcot rupees for each piece. When the cloth returned, the factory’s best judges decided it was not equal to the price paid. In related calculations, another exceptionally fine piece is broken down to thread and labor until the weaver’s return comes to forty-seven rupees for himself and two assistants for six months. That figure ruins any pleasant fantasy in which the hand belongs democratically to everybody involved. One hand spins what almost cannot be spun; another decides what that skill is worth. Luxury has always had sophisticated ideas about whose touch counts.
A force made from practically nothing has an awkward problem of its own: there is nothing obvious to weigh the sensation against. In NTT’s pressure work, the answer is almost comically bodily. Ultrasound provides the sensation to one hand while physical pressure is applied to the other and adjusted until the participant judges the two sensations equivalent. The useful unit, in the end, is not the newton. It is agreement between two sides of one person. Even when touch has become programmable and empty air has acquired a surface, the machine asks another piece of flesh what the invention amounts to.
Dacca had its own bodily standards. Yarn was measured by the hath, a cubit stated by the Commercial Resident to be nineteen and three-quarter inches, and weighed by the ruttee, roughly two Troy grains. Fine thread might be weighed in jewelers’ scales using four barley corns or a seed of Abrus precatorius as the ruttee. An arm for length, barley or a seed for weight, another hand to judge the thread. Later the arm gives way to a standardized measure, the seed to laboratory units, the committee to formulas, the cloth itself to ultrasound, but the underlying problem remains stable: what may one thing count as when compared with another?
Around 1335, Don Juan Manuel wrote down a story about three swindlers who sell a king a cloth visible only to a man who is truly the son of the father everyone says he is. The court admires the fabric because, of course, it does. Legitimacy, inheritance, property, name, and social position are riding on the answer, so suddenly everybody is an extremely attentive connoisseur of a textile that is not there. The person who finally says otherwise occupies a position from which the threat has less purchase and tells the king, essentially, either I am blind, or you are going naked. That cloth needed a liar in every mouth in the room.
Seven centuries later I am standing in a fitting room, feet a few inches apart, shoulders where they naturally fall, doing something my body knows well enough to perform without much supervision. I have been measured many times and, rather embarrassingly, I like it. There is pleasure in submitting temporarily to somebody else’s precision: the tape around chest and waist, the hand finding the shoulder point, the small correction for the fact that one side of a body has never quite agreed with the other. There is a mirror, a platform, chalk and pins, bolts of cloth nearby. The finished garment belongs comfortably in five-figure territory, and some of what I am paying for consists precisely in somebody noticing things about cloth and body that I would not know how to name. Standing still is part of the transaction. I know how to be useful here.
Except nobody puts the jacket on me. The cutter remains where a cutter should be, the mirror remains an ordinary mirror, and where the basted garment ought to settle over my shoulders there is simply air. My hand goes beneath the apparatus, palm down, fingers loose, nothing resting against the skin, and then the focal point begins to move. The sensation arrives without ceremony. I feel a surface, recognize what it proposes, and discover that the most troublesome thing it can possibly be is not strange, weak, or obviously synthetic. It is correct. No electrical revelation follows, nobody turns down the lights, the mirror acquires no sinister intelligence, and I do not shiver for the benefit of the essay. Correctness is sufficient.
If the sensation were bad, everything above could remain pleasantly intact. I could put one hand on the actual cloth, offer the other to the machine, laugh at the difference and restore the hierarchy in three seconds: imitation here, thing there. Instead, my free hand does something so ordinary that I notice it only after it has happened. It goes to my cuff. Thumb on the face, two fingers behind, half an inch back and forth, twice. The hand that is not being touched has gone looking for a reference. Kawabata’s instruments were taught against bodies; Dacca’s thread was known by bodies trained to know it; NTT’s force is checked against the opposite hand. Even the ghost is calibrated against flesh.
I put one hand on cloth and allow the other to receive the event. What is being adjusted is not a jacket but an equivalence, and after a few changes the distinction becomes irritatingly difficult to improve upon. I am not being asked whether the manufactured sensation is pleasant. I am deciding whether it is faithful, which is a different and less forgiving judgment. I had assumed the hand was trustworthy because eventually matter had to meet skin: photographs could flatter, descriptions could inflate, labels could arrange facts cunningly, but the fingers got the final appeal. Yet the hand was never detecting truth. It detected patterns of pressure, movement, vibration, friction, and temperature, compared them with everything it had previously learned, and assigned names to the result. Give it a convincing arrangement by another route, and the hand does not summon a lawyer.
That does not make touch stupid or obsolete. The hand may be functioning perfectly, which is exactly what makes the easy language of being fooled unsatisfactory. Fooling implies a perceptual failure, as though there were some purer tribunal of sensation we neglected to consult. But if the relevant tactile events arrive and the nervous system produces the surface it has learned to produce from them, the distinction between authentic and simulated may matter enormously to commerce, authorship, intimacy, consent and ownership while mattering considerably less to the receptor doing its job. I wanted the hand to be the honest one because I had confused honesty with access to matter. The machine does not defeat the check. It presents the check itself.
And this is where clothing quietly leaves the essay. NTT does not present bespoke tailoring as the technology’s destination. Its English release points toward immersive XR and remote social touch; the Japanese release also speaks explicitly about distant fureai, contact or communion between people, and future interfaces capable of creating those experiences without requiring a wearable device. I put the apparatus in a fitting room because cloth seemed like the hardest thing I could ask empty air to impersonate. NTT is thinking about people.
That makes the swindlers less useful as a warning than I had hoped. Their nonexistent cloth required everybody in the room to suppress what their own senses told them. This apparatus requires no court and asks for no lie. The hand feels something because something has actually happened to the hand, even if the person or object to which the sensation refers is nowhere near it. The problem is no longer simply whether I can distinguish cloth from the organized sensation of cloth, because cloth turns out to be the polite test.
If the destination is social touch, sooner or later the thing offered to the skin is not shubnam, cashmere, sandpaper, running water, or even the engineered hand of a textile. It is another body, or something claiming sufficient equivalence to one. I do not yet know what my hand will check that ghost against, although apparently it has already developed a habit for the problem. My thumb is still moving on the cuff.
Elías Delgado
Sources
PRIMARY
[James Taylor] Letter of the Commercial Resident at Dacca to the Board of Trade, Calcutta, 30 November 1800, the 1790 commission at two hundred Arcot rupees and the wage arithmetic. https://archive.org/details/1851cottonmanufactureofDacca
NTT Corporation, press release, 13 May 2025, English: https://group.ntt/en/newsrelease/2025/05/13/250513b.html and Japanese: https://group.ntt/jp/newsrelease/2025/05/13/250513b.html . Force, rotation, and frequency figures, the texture words in both languages, and stated destinations.
Don Juan Manuel, El Conde Lucanor, exemplo XXXII, c. 1335.
SCHOLARLY
Masako Niwa, “Hand Evaluation by Instrumentation: The Recent Development and Applications”, Journal of the Textile Machinery Society. Japan 28(9), 1975. https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/transjtmsj1972/28/9/28_9_P503/_article
Attila Bereck, “Evaluation of Handle of Textile Fabrics”, IFATCC plenary paper. https://www.ifatcc.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/PL10.pdf
Sueo Kawabata, The Standardization and Analysis of Hand Evaluation, 2nd edition, Textile Machinery Society of Japan, 1980.
S. J. Bolanowski, G. A. Gescheider, R. T. Verrillo and C. M. Checkosky, “Four channels mediate the mechanical aspects of touch”, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 84(5), 1988.
Mitsuhiko Hanada, “Tactile dimensions of fabrics expressed by Japanese onomatopoeic words and phonemic features related to fabric luxuriousness and pleasantness”, Frontiers in Language Sciences 2, 2023. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/language-sciences/articles/10.3389/flang.2023.1075055/full
Tao Morisaki and Yusuke Ujitoko, “Towards Intensifying Perceived Pressure in Midair Haptics”, and Tao Morisaki, Yasutoshi Makino and Hiroyuki Shinoda, “Midair 3D Texture Display Using Focused Ultrasound”, Eurohaptics 2024.
M. Luisa Demattè, Daniel Sanabria, Rachel Sugarman and Charles Spence, “Cross-Modal Interactions Between Olfaction and Touch”, Chemical Senses 31(4), 2006. https://academic.oup.com/chemse/article/31/4/291/437862
“Crossmodal Interactions Between Olfaction and Touch Affecting Well-Being and Perception of Cosmetic Creams”, Frontiers in Psychology 12, 2021. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.703531/full
REFERENCE, labelled furniture
NC State University, Textile Protection and Comfort Center, Kawabata Evaluation System. https://textiles.ncsu.edu/tpacc/comfort-performance/kawabata-evaluation-system/
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