Explaining why military pants are strongerfrom @theironsnail

Transcript

These green pants were developed in the nineteen forties by the US military and MIT researchers and found to be 110% stronger than denim. No how do they make them so much more durable? That is the question. The first thing they did was switch the weave to a reverse sateen weave. Before the sateen weave, they were using a twill weave. At first, they were using denim and then they were using a herringbone twill. Twill weaves have a really strong diagonal line that you can see on denim pretty clearly. And when a fabric tears, it can run down those diagonal lines really, really easily. So denim got replaced by herringbone twill in the military because herringbone twill shifts direction every few rows and breaks up how a tear could propagate. But if you look at sateen, you can't really see that offset row anywhere. It's all pretty darn smooth no tier have a tough time going anywhere. Because of the nature of a reverse sateen, they can pack the yarns of the fabric way, way, way closer together and make it super dense. That density helps add a ton of strength and is also part of the reason this fabric's a little shiny. And then my personal favorite, number three, the blue yarns on the outside of denim, those are called warp yarns. Warp yarns are typically the big fancy super important yarns in a weave and they hold the structural integrity of the fabric together. So if those go, the fabric goes. So you usually put them on the outside because they're gonna handle anything you throw at them better than the weft yarns. But with fatigues, they said, hey, wait a minute. What if we worse that and had the weft on the outside and the warp on the inside? And that turned out to be a fantastic idea because the weft yarns then acted like a shield to the warp yarns under it. So you had to break through something to hurt the structural integrity of the fabric, and it became a 110% more durable.