New things gleam, but only for a while. After you have seen something enough times, you stop noticing the shine and start noticing that shine was all it had.
Old things, made honestly, do not gleam. They wear in instead of wearing out. A wooden table takes on the marks of the hands that used it. A cotton shirt, garment-dyed, fades exactly where you fold it, where you sit, where your keys have sat in the same pocket for two years. It stops being a shirt you were sold and starts being a shirt that is actually yours.
We do not finish our fabric to hide this process. We do not want a piece that looks the same on day one thousand as it did on day one — that would mean nothing happened to it, which would mean nothing happened to you while you wore it, and that is not true of anyone worth dressing.
There is an old idea, older than fashion, that real beauty shows up in restraint and in age — in what time and honest wear do to a good material, not in what a finish does to hide the absence of one. We did not invent this idea. We are just trying to make clothes that do not get in its way.
A garment that ages into character looks better in its fifth year than a garment that was only ever trying to look good on the day you bought it.