the draping behaviour of fabric treated as an orthotropic shell membrane is predicted by using a geometric non-linear finite-element method, and the results are compared with actual behaviour. a drape tester employing photovoltaic cells was designed and constructed to determine the drape coefficient of fabric specimens of 10-in diameter. the warp- and weft-direction tensile moduli of these samples were determined by using a kawabata tensile and shear tester, and literature values of poisson's ratio were obtained. with this approach, excellent agreement between experimental and predicted drape coefficients resulted. for a 100 cotton plain-weave fabric, a drape coefficient of 68.4 was experimentally determined as compared with a predicted value of 71.0. (author abstract) 18 refs