A hotel bed gives a guest one thing: ease. Everything that puts it there happens out of sight. Between one guest and the next, a sheet is sent through a commercial laundry: an alkaline bath that lifts the body’s oils from the fibre, bleach held at high heat, a final wash to settle the pH. Boiling water, strong chemistry, heavy machines. It is a brutal thing to do to cloth.

Hospitality sets a number for what the cloth must survive. The bar is roughly two hundred industrial washes, after which a sheet should still lie flat and pass for new. Labs pull the fabric apart at fifty cycles, a hundred, two hundred, to see how it weakens. A cloth that cannot meet that never reaches the room.