The girls weren't the only ones cutting into found fabrics and repurposing them into new designs. After all, that's supposed to be the mantra around here. Worship Tradition, Destroy Convention.
One of the legends of the birth of modern jeanscraft is the story about American workwear tailors crafting pants out of the tough fabric intended for tents during the Gold Rush and the expansion West. There are other stories but the central notion of making clothing from fabric intended for temporary housing is what inspired this other exercise in re-purposing to be dislayed in Berlin.
Also developed as a limited edition for Spring 2010 the MEDIC INTEL employs reclaimed 3-Layer Gore-Tex Dutch Marine "bivouac" sleeping-shells which were taken apart in order to create a variation on the new 1KILO MELTON MEDIC which is soon landing in shops for Fall.
Like the Gold Rush canvas tents before them, the Dutch Marine Bivouacs contain all the rugged fabric-features required to produce a tough utlity garment and the MEDIC model provided the right tailored starting-point.
The construction introduces new ideas like a buttonhole-free buttoning closure and the employment of a biker's bi-swing action back as well as traditional techniques like felled seams...
Gore insists on seam-taping but we won ourselves a little creative latitude by using repurposed material (in other words we did it without asking). In fact, the traces of the original taped-seam assembly are visible within our reconstruction, the ghost of the fabric's first life showing through.
(NOTE: This is a use of Gore-Tex fabric that didn't go through the usual channels and we're still not sure how you "market" a jacket with this feature when it wasn't a sanctioned Gore project but we assume we'll find out soon enough)
Also like the Boro Spy jackets, these won't be in front of consumers until Spring 2010 (sorry about that), but they will be on show earlier at July's Bread & Butter event.
