Aiming at the anisotropy of woven fabric, the changes of the crease recovery properties of 100% plain and twill fabrics with the orientation angle are explored in this research. The recovery parameters, such as initial recovery rate, instant recovery time, instant recovery angle, stable recovery time and stable recovery angle, were obtained by a dynamic crease recovery tester. The test results illustrate that only the recovery angles changes with the orientation angle. The trend of plain fabric shows that its recovery angle generally increases at first and then decreases with the increase of the orientation angle. The trend of twill fabric differs from folding ways. It is proved that the diagonal direction is the optimal orientation angle for a balanced plain fabric, while the two orthogonal directions, the twill direction and its perpendicular direction, were found to be more reasonable for testing a twill fabric. © 2016, Periodical Agency of Journal of Textile Research. All right reserved.