Against All Odds Pt. 2 – The Shape
Down The Rabbit Hole
Designing without plastic means shaking up the foundations of modern outdoor clothing. You have to be prepared to cut them to the core.
Stretch:
Nowadays, the stretchability of a fabric is a major factor in the legitimacy of a sports garment. It accompanies the body in every movement, but we should first ask ourselves which movements require fabrics to stretch up to three times their resting length. Do we really play worse tennis in a Lacoste cotton polo? Our approach goes against the grain of contemporary sportswear, and refuses to engage in the reinforcement of empty measures. To allow amplitude of movement, we designed looser shapes allowing the limbs to move freely. To provide protection, we lengthened silhouettes where they were needed.
Weather protection:
It's easy to make a perfectly waterproof shell because it's plastic and you can seal the components by fusing them together with heat, pressure and glue. Stitches, on the other hand, allow water to penetrate. Every hole in our technical fabrics is an entry point for water. But they are unavoidable in natural fabrics. Our mission has never been to beat plastic membranes with brute force. Instead, we use a more subtle approach to identify where waterproofing is really needed. In fact, it varies from sport to sport: for hiking, water is concentrated on the hood and shoulders, for cycling on the front of the garment, and reinforcement is needed on the knees and the buttocks where most friction happens. Our rule is to design garments that don't have these critical seams and, if we can't avoid them, to use a special seam that reduces water penetration.
Pockets, too, need to be thought about. They are subjected to many constraints: big enough to be useful, small enough to prevent unbalance, minimal to avoid seams. As with any process, it always boils down to what's needed and what's not.
In the end, our approach to pattern-making is subtractive and functional: the form follows the fabric and we carve it to remove the frills until we reach the essence of the garment. In this respect, our designs are radically opposed to fashion.
