Burberry's techwear origin storyfrom @frontoffice.co

Transcript

Alright. Let's talk about techwear. Rainproof, windproof, waterproof. When we think of techwear, we think of brands like Arc'teryx, Acronym, Stone Island. But that's now. What does a techwear company look like over a hundred years ago? And if you talk techwear, you gotta talk Burberry. Yes. That Burberry. Before Burberry was a brand, it was a dude. It was a guy. Thomas Burberry. A hundred years ago, Thomas Burberry has a clothes company, a company he started when he was 21, trying to make weatherproof clothing. And he's faced with a problem. The problem is waterproofing. The solutions at the time are coatings. They have fabrics made out of wool, out of cotton, and they are coated with rubber, oil, wax. And these early coatings are excellent at repelling better, but they don't breathe. So people are trapped in their own hot air, their own sweat. The coatings also make the fabrics very heavy. So Thomas Burberry invents a fabric called gabardine. He designs a combination of yarn and weave to create a fabric that is woven so tightly that it is water resistant better still allows air to pass through rank and forth. And this is so high-tech. This is revolutionary. And like any techwear company, he has to demonstrate the use of these things. So he sponsors these trips, these expeditions. Burberry's gabardine goes to the Arctic Circle. Edward Maitland wears a gabardine suit in a hot air balloon from England to Russia. Burberry sponsors a flight called the Burberry from Croydon to Cape Town, and the pilots wear gabardine. And Burberry uses this fabric in his early coats. This is the tie lock in, which is used by British military officers in South Africa. It's a belted rank around coat to protect you from the elements. And when the first worse war rolls around, the tie lock in becomes a little bit more sophisticated. It gains d rings to hang grenades, epaulettes to attach military ranks, storm flaps to prevent rain from getting into the button front. And this model is called the trench coat, a functional coat that helps soldiers in muddy, wet trenches. And after the war soldiers better home with their trench coats and these functional coats gain a second chapter in civilian life. And now it's a hundred years later and Burberry's identity as a techware company has changed. It's given away to a completely different identity, actually several different identities through time. But the game of functional design is still the same. And that is the really encouraging thing about design. The right fabric, the right silhouette, and solving problems big enough for people. You can create a design with so much energy, like so much velocity. It moves past your name, your company, your time. A great design can travel into the future and resonate beyond your own personal experience of the world.