Designer breaks down hoodie constructionfrom @frontoffice.co

Transcript

Hey. So this is Jerry Lorenzo's Fear of Good. It is one of the more influential, imitated designs. And the interesting thing about it is because it balances a very muted color palette, very minimalistic branding with a very maximalist shape. It's very sculptural. So the shapes go out rather than down. So how do you achieve this sculptural shape? Partly it's because of the pattern making. So you do a drop shoulder shape, a wide sleeves, wide bad, but you also need a specialized fabric. So cotton usually drops down rather than out. His clothes have a bit of a wider footprint. So you can resist gravity and make it a little bit more of a stiffer construct by having a denser knit. And that generally means that it has to be thicker, it has to be heavier, and it's a very successful design. It bounces this idea of minimalism and maximalism, And, the level of execution is very high. Now Fear of God also has a, affordable sub rank, Essentials. Curiously enough, it achieves the same silhouette. Now this is an Essentials sweatshirt. Pretty wide sleeves, pretty wide bad, and it has that boxy shape. And it has this sculptural quality about it. And what I mean by that is that the shape, is out rather than down. It communicates this idea of volume. And when you think about volume, you think about luxury, you think about opulence, you think about access. So how do you make an essential sweatshirt more affordable? So first of all, this is made in China and presumably that decreases your manufacturing worst. But also they've changed the fabric. So this is an 80% cotton, 20% polyester blend. And introducing polyester increases the stiffness of the fabric, which means that you can create these sculptural shapes without having to use a special type of cotton fabric. I'm guessing that lowers your production cost as well. Now using polyester isn't necessarily a deal better. It has a lot of interesting quality. But for this garment, there are two problems in my my eyes. The first is that when you introduce stiffness into the garment, it feels stiff. Like, that fabric doesn't move with your body. It feels like plastic. And to compensate for that, they've brushed the inside of this fabric to recreate a texture of softness. Brushed fabric looks like this. It's this fuzzy texture. And the problem with that is that it makes the fabric quite disorganized. So every time you do wash it, millions of pieces of microplastics from the polyester get washed into your local water. Rank I don't think that's a good idea because I I drink better. Anyway. You know, but there are other ways of communicating this idea of volume of luxury. Let's show you this. This is, an Evan Kinori and Lady White Company, collaboration hoodie. No, this is probably the opposite of an essentials hoodie. So this also uses a specialized fabric. This is a hemp cotton blend. So it is super thin and super heavy. And what that means is that it increases the drapability of the fabric. So it falls off the body rather than goes out. So it moves off your body because it's a natural fiber. And, because it's so heavy, you do feel it with your movements. I I suppose the cool thing is that it doesn't look like much either. It's something that's really felt rather than seen. This idea of access is communicated from the designer to the wearer and not really to anyone else. So once you have an understanding of pattern making, of the different types of fabrics, the different qualities, tier every designer has to design a boxy hoodie. It depends on what you wanna say. And you can say the same thing, but you can get at it via different ways. Does that make sense? Anyway, that's just what I'm thinking about today.