The weave behind the illusion

A towel is a flat picture you hang on the wall

Most of the time a bath towel hangs flat on a rail, at eye level, in a small white room. That is exactly how a painting is shown. REEDORA starts from that thought: if a towel is going to be looked at every day, the drawing on it should be worth looking at.

We chose op-art — optical art — because it works at bathroom distance. Concentric rings, ripples, shifted checks and fine crossing lines are simple shapes, but placed close together they confuse the eye. Walk past a towel on the wall, or let daylight slide across it, and the pattern seems to pulse, roll or tilt. Nothing on the towel moves; the effect happens in your eyes.

Where it comes from

REEDORA is run by MASSARI LTD, a fabric business in Dewsbury, in the old textile district of West Yorkshire. Towels are one of the cloths we know best, so we started there: twenty patterns of our own, drawn for terry and nothing else.

Woven, not printed

Every REEDORA pattern is a two-colour jacquard. Two colours of cotton yarn are fed into a jacquard loom, which lifts each warp thread individually. Wherever the drawing needs the dark colour, the dark loops come to the surface; everywhere else the light ones do. The pattern therefore goes right through the cloth. Turn a towel over and you see the same drawing with the colours swapped.

Because nothing is printed on top, there is no print layer to crack or peel. The colour is in the yarn itself, which is also why dark and mint pieces may release some colour in the first washes; our care notes tell you how to handle that.

Twenty patterns, twenty colour pairs

Each pattern comes in one fixed pair of colours. We numbered them from OP-01 to OP-20 in order of their ground colour, from jet through graphite, teal and mint to chalk and white. That is why our shop is sorted by colour rather than by collection: the number tells you where a piece sits in the spectrum.

• Fine-line patterns (Drift, Twist, Lattice, Cube, Orbit, Echo) are woven more densely, at about 700 g/m², so that thin lines stay crisp.
• The other bath towels are about 600 g/m².
• Beach towels are about 450 g/m², so they fold smaller into a bag.
• Robes and hair wraps are about 400 g/m², light enough to wear.

One pattern, the whole bathroom

Six of the patterns come as a full set: bath towel, robe, hair wrap and wash bag, all cut from the same jacquard. Hang the towel on the rail and the robe on the hook, and the room reads as one piece. Every piece is also sold on its own, and a set costs exactly the sum of its pieces.

What we do not claim

Our towels are 100% cotton terry. We do not claim they are antibacterial, quick-drying, organic or certified, and we do not describe our patterns as anyone else’s work: every drawing is our own. If you are sensitive to moving patterns, you can switch the animations on this site off with the “Motion” button in the menu; the site also follows your device’s reduced-motion setting.