28/06/2010 by admin.

While on the whole, less money was spent on clothes in the 1970s, by contrast the amount spent on leisure, sport and holidays, was rising. This was perhaps due in part to the changing work wear patterns faced by many. While workers who had spent years doing a job they thought they had a life faced redundancy, some of the luckier jobless received redundancy payouts which went some way in helping to structure their leisure time.

Others who held on to their jobs faced the prospect of becoming one of the increasing numbers of part-time workers. It is not surprising that the 1970s saw the rise of new industries devoted to leisure and the garment industry responded with sportswear. Sportswear was more than just a wardrobe of leisure clothing: it implied a break with the tradition of wearing a Sunday best suit and came to refer to a whole lifestyle, optimised by the running shoe and the fleecy, hooded jogging suit. By the end of the decade Esquire magazine estimated that there were around 30 million joggers in America, including one Jimmy Carter.

The functionalism of sportswear began to make inroads into the working wardrobe. Collars and ties gave way to polo shirts and T-shirts; suit jackets began to lose their nipped in waists and little by little became transform into the blouson-style casual jacket. Jeans loosened up as baggy thigh versions became popular and the tight-fitting, bell bottom flared trousers of the early 1970s were replaced by peg-top styles, full at the waist but narrow at the ankle, in a sort of city version of the jogging pants.

One of the leaders in luxury men’s leisurewear and sportswear in the 1970s was Daniel Hechter, who founded the men’s fashion designer club in France in 1978 with other sportswear designers most noticeably Jean Cacharel. The club organised widely publicised fashion shows to promote men’s clothing that was more versatile than the traditional garments being presented by the suit designers and bespoke tailors. What marked the club’s collection was a new silhouette created by soft unstructured clothes. The aim of these garments was to make suits and jackets lighter and more comfortable and resulted in a fitted jackets with loose armholes and rounded shoulders, lower buttons, longer lapels and shorter tails. By the end of the decade the unstructured silhouette dominated menswear and came to be associated with one design in particular Giorgio Armani. It was a silhouette that would persist until the mid-1980s when the business suit was re-born with the young, upwardly mobile professionals who turned to “Power Dressing”.

Posted in menswear, sportswear, polo shirt | No Comments »

18/06/2010 by admin.

One of the major developments in menswear over the past decade has been the increased number of garments and styles in the fashion wardrobe that have their origins in sporting clothes. For some, such as sporting incursions offered fashionable touches, but for others the development of fashion sports clothes has led to the creation and maintenance of completing looks.

The fitness craze of the 1970s first encouraged the sales of the sports clothing and shoes, but their wear, by and large remained confined to sporting activities. In the following decade, many started to appreciate the functional nature of sports apparel, and jogging suits, muscle shirts and training shoes began to be born as leisurewear. Soon designers got in on the act, and by the 1990s Chanel was offering designer running shoes complete with the back to back Cs of the Chanel logo, Paul Smith gave us a designer mounting bike and rode cycling gear, and Calvin Klein and Donna Karan transformed the humble jogging suit into fluorescent, fleecy street clothes. Spandex cycle shorts, worn by bicycle couriers who had stolen them from Tour to France riders, had their padded crutches ripped out and were worn as club where. Tennis heartthrob Andre Agassi began a craze for wearing cycle shorts under tennis shorts, presumably because his legs chaffed. Soon it was the thing to wear two pairs of different shorts for any sporting activity: rugby, soccer and jogging to the corner shop.

The sports of the late 1990s are extreme sports: off road, off piste, white water, white knuckle speed freak sports are for the new real men. The sportswear market is one of the fastest growing sectors in the fashion industry and one where advances in fibre and fabric technology are increasingly appropriated by ready to wear designers for both their novelty value and their production of identity kit clothing.

Where authentic sports clothing today can improve performance and thanks to a host of new reflective and thermal conductive fabrics, even save your life, designer versions at least let you look as though you know the difference between rap jumping and border crossing.

^{A whole new market is growing up and some are quicker to respond to its potential and others. In the autumn of 1996, original and designer versions of the fire suits worn by IndyCar races went on sale in the United States. Ralph Lauren now offers Polo Sport after shave and body splash while Paco Rabanne has put his new fragrance for men in vending machines placed conveniently in the men’s locker rooms of gyms. In the mean time, authentic sports clothes and accessories company’s like Adidas, Puma and Oakley continued to dominate the active sports clothing market and exert an increasing influence on the designers for ready to wear menswear.}

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22/04/2010 by admin.

A change in the weather always brings about a complete change in the type of clothing that is being ordered for the t shirt printing industry. In the winter you are embroidering jackets and fleeces. In the Summer you are printing onto t-shirts and shorts. The Autumn and spring time tend to be quite similar, with sweatshirts and polo shirts.

The other factor about Spring that does differentiate it from Autumn is the type of activity that goes on in early Summer and Spring.

The two main areas we are talking about are Weddings and sports events like Marathons. Marathons are great because you don’t just have the runners with their high cost, dry-fit running vests, you also get all their supporters wearing normal cotton t-shirts.

Then the wedding season also indirectly helps the t shirt printing industry. No, we don’t decorate wedding dresses, but where there is a wedding you will usually find a Stag and Hen night do. The customization for these parties is getting more and more sophisticated, with ever more expensive tops and even more complicated decoration.

Posted in Hen night, Stag do, Spring, Jacket, sportswear, polo shirt, Running vest, T-shirt | No Comments »

11/03/2010 by admin.

Thermocool is a multi-functional evolution of modified cross section fibers, designed for use in the thermo regulated sportswear market. When the athlete is hot the material has good evaporation qualities helping with body temperature lowering. When the athlete is cool the material reduces the exposure to outside temperature, keeping the person warm.

The fantastic technical qualities of the Thermocool fabric keep it at the forefront of this medium.

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