The solution, which you can see in the first image, is to use a blurred reflection map made from the same map as applied to the hard metals. To do this, I loaded up starship_refl.jpg (it's in my JICC figure package) in Photoshop and applied a gaussian blur to it. Then I offset it (filter->offset) by half the width and height and blurrd out only the edge area that's now visible in the middle. That's to keep those edges from showing up as hard reflection edges. Then i offset it back so it again matched the original. This is the blurred map. I applied this ONLY to the *fabric* parts that I wanted to match the reflection used on the metals. All the rest of the reflections (the leather, gem, and silver) used the 'hard' reflection map. This could also be acheived with a VERY high res noise bumpmap, but that would slow the render unnecessarily, and a lot.