Ministry of Supply is a Kickstarter-funded, new-materials-based fashion house that produces clothing (to date, men’s business clothing) based on new fabrics with exotic dirt/water-shedding properties, breathability, and stretch/give. A lot of this stuff has already made its way into the sportwear world, but it’s pretty new in business wear, and the result is things like no-iron shirts; slacks with invisible, breathable crotch-venting; odor-absorbing socks and so forth. The slacks don’t get wet in rain and are stretchy (“more elastic than cotton but not as stretchy as spandex”).
The company also makes a button-down dress shirt called the Apollo that uses a NASA-engineered form of polyester that pulls heat away from the body when it’s warm and keeps it locked in when it’s cold. They make socks with heat vents and carbonized coffee grounds woven into them, because coffee grounds are effective odor-absorbers. (The socks don’t smell like coffee. I checked.)
Ministry of Supply’s latest product comes in the form of the Aviator chino pants, which look like normal dress pants from afar but show their high-tech secrets once you get up close. They’re sort of stretchy — the material feels more elastic than cotton but not as stretchy as spandex — and they have a practically invisible ventilation system throughout the crotch.
The coolest thing about them is that they have a slick-coated fabric that won’t get wet in the rain. The pants also feel like they’re ketchup-proof; if you spill anything on them, it will probably just wipe right off with a napkin. They’re machine-washable in cold water.
The Lab-Engineered, Water-Resistant Dress Pants of the Future [Tim Moynihan/Wired]