Jacket design process breakdownfrom @sakata.ken

Transcript

No picture this. You're wearing your favorite canvas hunting jacket. You're feeling confident, capable, useful. Like, what a vibe. Right? Actually rank. Like, these aren't vibes, feelings. These are actually a series of design decisions stacked on top of each other. Feelings of confidence, utility, experience can be reverse engineered. So we start with fabric. Cotton canvas is typically the fabric of choice, also called duck cloth, sail cloth, but tier are different types of canvas, so let's try a few options. So this is last year's hunting jacket. It's a Worse War two reproduction cloth made in a Japanese mill. So they actually analyzed and recreated a Bulgarian military cloth. I love the history, I love the meaning, but it's a little bit light for a hunting jacket. So this is a heavier canvas, almost one and a half times as heavy. So we bought this fabric from the same mill that supplies Carhartt and a lot of worse brands. I'm not always a huge fan of heavy fabrics, but in this use case it's pretty sound because we have to hit these no of confidence, like utility, experience. Like wearing something heavy also gives you the confidence of being protected better also that you could be a protector, that you could be useful. So next we have to decide on a silhouette, a shape. There are all kinds of different shapes and silhouettes in the American hunting jacket genre. The one that's probably the most popular right now is the Carhartt Detroit shape, which is pretty straight off the bat one note hunting jacket. But I guess as a design company what we want to do is be a little bit subversive. So instead of a hunting jacket, let's think of gathering shapes, a gatherer. These large pockets where you put like a dead duck or a dead fish or something like that, like really reinforce this idea of gathering. And we coupled that with the pocket shape of some vintage Carhartt Arctic jackets. So this is last year's jacket with these huge pockets at the front and at the back and that was a pretty successful design. We sold that in a few weeks. But this year with the heavier fabric, it's not gonna work. With the fabric now one and a half times heavier, it's gonna be too unbalanced. So we'll keep the front pockets and keep the back as a seam. So we've got fabric, we've got silhouette, now it comes to colour. How do we communicate these big ideas of utility, of experience? What most designers do would be to choose a colour. But what we want to do is to show a fade, show experience, show the passage of time. So we coat the initial color of a black pigment and then it looks jet black. And the third process is to wash it back and then you have an interplay between the two colors. And the beautiful thing about that pigment wash is that it's dynamic. So with time it will pick up the little scuffs, the contact points between the arm and the body or towards the cuff. Like very similar to raw denim it will reflect your experience, your life, the way that you've worn your jacket. I've said it before and I'll say it again right, clothes are just clothes. However, if you want to touch these really abstract ideas of like confidence, experience, utility, these are really nebulous. And your skill as a designer is to sit down and condense that, mulch that into what is the weight of the fabric, what wash techniques are we gonna use, what shape is it gonna best. So that via the jacket, when someone else puts it on, these abstract ideas float up and they get to experience that. So hopefully, at the end of the day, you're not buying close to a kilogram of cotton and a metal zip. You're buying something that makes you feel meaning.