Cotton Against All Odds Pt. 1 – The Fabric
Once upon a time, in the not-so-distant past, the bigwigs of sports met to prosecute cotton. They deemed it unsuitable and set about banning it from clothes and minds with a great deal of efficacy. Indeed who has heard nowadays about a technical cotton tent, or jacket? Cotton, dishonoured and defeated, left the citadel, never to be heard from again.
This is the story of its return.
Chapter 1: The Forgotten Hero
It all started with a question, raised by countless hours spent on ski slopes and dewy mountain trails. How can our garments breathe better to help us go further? The question led to a realisation: as long as we look at membranes, we cannot improve. Membranes protect against rain and wind, but they protect too well, preventing any circulation between the skin and the outside, and you can see the problem coming.
Maths doesn't lie: you can't have both breathability and protection maximised. In fact, despite what all the sportswear brands will tell you, you don't need to. At a certain point, too much protection comes at the expense of breathability, the most important factor for comfort. But for us, it was never a dilemma. Breathability was the non-negotiable at the heart of the project and we had to locate the sweet spot that would maximise comfort.
Our first mission was to find what had been lost: a fabric without plastic, meaning it was uncoated, unlaminated and membrane free, but dense enough to stop water. With all modern technology focused solely on the development of synthetics, we had to follow in the footsteps of the early explorers. And they didn't let us down. We found Ventile®, an early cotton development that protected Tensing and Hillary on their legendary climb. There is no better proof of performance than Ventile's ability to carry men to the top of Everest. In Ventile, the strands are woven so tightly together that they defy the absorbency of ordinary cotton fabrics. Of course, they will never surpass the impermeability of membranes, but the trade-off is beneficial, more than that, it is relevant. It compensates for a relative loss of water protection with an absolute gain in breathability. As Jørgen Amundsen puts it when commenting his own expeditions: he’d rather be wet 1 hour in Ventile, than 5 days in Gore-Tex.
Not just spectacular waterproofing, Ventile comes in several formats and weight per m2, for a wide array of usages ranging from the mountains snow to the high sea winds, including Etadry®, a light windproof version. We had a fair compromise between weight and results. It was good, really good, but it wasn't enough, we knew we could do better. After 2 years of hard work and tireless scouring of the market, we found the nugget: a ripstop cotton fabric of unbeatable lightness (85g/m2), totally windproof and extremely sturdy.
