In this article, the influence of texture surface of a fabric on its instrumental color is investigated. While former studies have found it is difficult to establish a quantitative relationships between texture of fabric and its instrumental color (color difference and color attributes, such as lightness, chroma, and hue), this article investigates from a theoretical and empirical perspective the interaction between texture and color. Eighty four knitted cotton yarn dyed fabric samples in four color centers and 21 texture structures were used in this study. It is revealed that fabric samples with different texture surfaces define a set of lines with identical direction in the reflectance space, and thus the normalized reflectance curves of these samples are identical. In the CIEXYZ space, tristimulus values of these fabric samples define a line, and thus their chromaticity coordinates are constant. In the CIELAB space, however, linearity is lost due to the non-linear transformation from the CIEXYZ space to the CIELAB space. The finding of this article has the potential to discount the influence of texture of a fabric on its color. Experiments show that the influence of texture on color for samples in the four color centers can be reduced by 79, 55, 71, and 57%, respectively comparing to the real measured color difference. (c) 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 40, 472-482, 2015