Explaining waterproof clothing design principlesfrom @frontoffice.co

Transcript

Primarily, when people think about waterproofing, water resistance, they think about the coating, rubber, oil, paraffin wax, vortex, but something being water resistant is so much more than just a coating. Fabric isn't just like a square that floats above your head, right? You have to cut that fabric to fit your bad. And when you cut the fabric, you've got panels. And when you join the panels together, you've got seams. And those seams need to be stitched together. And every time you run a needle through a fabric, you've created a pathway for water. The early trench coats from the twentieth century were coated in rubber. They're coated in paraffin wax and oil, which were really fantastic solutions. The seams was the weakness. A modern solution arrived in the sixties and seventies in the form of modern seam sealing tape. This was a thermoplastic tape that applied over the seams, and they were sealed with heat. Really high grade applications like the military and outdoor wear required a fully seam sealed garment. But because that's quite laborious, quite time consuming, that was and is very expensive. So some brands opt for limited or critical seam sealing. So seam sealing just over the most exposed seams. And crucially, the shape, the patterns also matter. If you think ahead and you're smart, you reduce the number of panels to reduce the number of seams. In technical outerwear, you may do a raglan sleeve, so you can orient a seam away from the rain. Different genres of clothes will require different levels of water resistance, waterproofing. A technical outdoor garment will be pretty extreme, but something for city life will be much less. For example, this is a coat we designed for Umbro. It's called the deadline coat. It was inspired by historical picture advertising the very first collaboration Umbro ever did with Manchester United legend, Matt Busby. This coat is for short walks in the city, not for weeks in the Amazon. No we opted for a long silhouette no that water can come off the bad. Our garment is completely seam sealed on the inside. Even the pockets have flaps no that water can run off and not in. So waterproofing, water resistance is a bunch of little decisions working together. It is about materials, yes, but it's also about silhouette, it's about construction, it's about small little details, it's about how everything fits together.