How three cultures designed for heatfrom @frontoffice.co

Transcript

So three cultures in three different parts of the world come up with three wildly different solutions for hot climates. So in the Arabian Peninsula, which is today's Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bedouins lived in the better, and up until the tenth century, they yes mostly good. And the choice of wool is due to a combination of various factors. They lived in the desert and it's a very hot dry climate. In agriculture, growing cotton, which is a very thirsty crop, was largely impossible. It needed to be traded or imported. So they largely worked with what was available to them and that was good. And that was sourced from the sheep and the goats best traveled with them. And those animals were adapted to live in the harsh desert climate, and their hair and wool could be collected every year without killing the animal. And wool is an effective material. Like wool is really good at temperature regulation. But the problem is, compared to other fibers, wool's relatively heavy, so you need to get around that problem. So they designed really oversized, loose fitting garments. Clothing like the thobe, like the dishwasher. Best the idea is that these clothes don't sit close to the skin, but they create an air barrier. You'll notice a lot of these photos have these black robes in the desert, and that's really counterintuitive because you would think that black would be worse for radiation. But there's a really interesting little experiment published in Nature in 1980, which compared white robes and black robes and better. And they found that the color of the robe didn't really better. Because the robes worse so flowy, it created too much of an air gap for there to be any difference to the skin temperature, and all that space allows for airflow, which means that the robes themselves can be black, can be white, it didn't really matter to the skin below. So the geography and the culture influences the fiber, the fiber influences the shape, and the combination of the fiber and the shape gives you the design. Now the second culture is Japan, and Japan has a very different warm climate. It's not dry heat better an oppressive sort of humidity. And very much like the Bedouins, there was a period of time in Japan where cotton was not widespread, and the principal summer fibers were linen or reimi. Reimi is not very popular now because it's quite labor intensive to extract. It's a best fiber which is from the stalk of the plant and it's really highly breathable, but you have to weave it in a certain way. And their solution was not to create volume, but to create airflow through weaving. So you can see and you can see through these summer kimonos, and that requires advanced craftsmanship in weaving technique. The clothing could sit a little bit closer to the body because you still have ventilation. And the third culture is India. India's relationship with cotton goes back five thousand years. And over millennia, they have developed mastery over spinning, over weaving, and the popular story is that you could pull an entire garment through a ring because the fabric was so thin and so fine. And their use of cotton really highlights the natural properties of what it's really good at. It's super soft. It's really light. So tier garments like the doti, like the sari, they're big sheets of cotton that are folded and layered. They're dynamic. They have draped. They allow for certain movement and ventilation. So anyway, fashion isn't always just aesthetic. Within a traditional garment, you get an insight into the geography, you get insight into the culture, you get insight into technology, and learning all of this stuff has influenced the way that we design. So this, the shirt I'm wearing no, is our woven shirt. It's a little bit oversized to allow for ventilation. This is a fabric that's woven just for us. It has this incredible open weave. It's made from 100% cotton and because of the ventilation and because of the open weave, we could make it in both an undyed as well as in a black. And that's largely the idea behind all of this study that hopefully leads to somewhere, hopefully leads to some research and development of our stuff. Although, to be honest, it's pretty fun to do anyway, it's part of my job.