Clothing Materials
Clothing Materials: A totally (or near-totally) subjective analysis of newer clothing materials for outdoor clothing by Keith Conover, M.D., FACEP (not © copyrighted at all, do whatever you want with it.) Allegheny Mountain Rescue Group, Appalachian Search and Rescue Conference/Mountain Rescue Association with thanks to Murray Hamlet, D.V.M., of the U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine, Natick, MA. version 2.7 9/8/11. Almost every word in this document is a trademark, registered trademark, or similar, and so I haven’t bothered putting in all of the © ® ™ * # @ etc. marks on everything. Trademarks are trademarks of the respective companies. Updates always available at www.conovers.org. You can also click the links on the online version, to visit websites, or to go from the table to the footnotes and back. Names and Fabrics: A Rose is a Rose, but Polyester isn’t just Polyester! There are zillions of fabric materials out there. For example, Malden Mills, which is the Polartec people, has only about 12-15 brand names. But each of these comes in slightly different flavors -- they actually make more than 150 different fabrics! Only some are suitable for the outdoors, and I’ve tried to limit the table to outdoor or travel clothing materials. Here’s just one example. Eastern Mountain Sports (EMS) sells a lot of outdoor clothing in the northeast. They had a brand name called Bergelene (though I haven’t seen it in recent years). I’d seen mention that Bergelene was nylon, that Bergelene was polyester, that Bergelene was Malden PowerDry, and then I bought a pair of men’s Bergelene briefs at the local EMS store, and the label says “CoolMax.” What gives? Well, I talked with Patricia at EMS, and she told an interesting story.
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