With temperatures soaring in many parts of the world right now, everyone is trying to avoid the hot weather. Unless you’re lucky enough to work in a cold storage facility or are following our blog from your igloo in Greenland, this is the time of year when dress shirt wearers suffer the most; but thanks to some creative chemists, designers and engineers, your shirt could take you to a whole new level of cool.
First on the list of future cooling cloth innovators comes Çabasan, a textile manufacturing company based in Turkey, which has developed a fabric that’s literally the bomb. According to an Anatolia News Agency story from last Sunday, Çabasan has created a natural coating substance which, when applied to clothing, will “explode as a result of the movements in the outfit and … produce a cooling effect.” Unfortunately the article made no mention of the safety standards such a coating might live up to – we’d be a little reluctant to wear an exploding dress shirt while pumping gas or handling 4th of July fireworks.
A much less volatile development comes from India, where a group of textile researchers from Jaya Engineering College are taking cues from (of all things) pine cones in their search for cool cloth. It’s actually not as strange as you might think, since pine cones know a thing or two about adapting to the weather; in fact they naturally open their scales when it’s dry and close them when it’s wet. By replicating and reversing this process, a smart fabric with expanding and contracting pores could increase air circulation to sweaty shirt wearers on hot days. Currently textile researchers and pine coneologist are still working on producing a functional prototype, so you may have to be patient as you’re waiting for this nature inspired fabric to find its way to your local tailor.
Finally, for the shirt wearer looking for some immediate heat relief, we bring you a design more perhaps more kitschy than classy – the air conditioned shirt. Made by a Japanese company called Kuchofuku, this dress shirt features a built-in fan powered by 4 AA batteries and controlled via USB. Available in long and short sleeve versions, this product runs about 12,40o yen on Kuchofuku’s website (Japanese language only) – however once you turn on the shirt’s fan and puff up like a sumo wrester, the real cost may be to your dignity.
It may take some time for science and technology to replace linen and cotton as the standard cool-down fabrics. Meanwhile though, at least you can take comfort in the fact that so many clever minds out there are working on this problem and a practical shirt solution to your warm weather woes could be available in the not too distant future.
Tags: Fabric, Intelligent Textiles, Keeping Cool, Shirts of the Future, Summer, Technology
