Who Designs Your Gear?

There's not much worse that a hood that doesn't work properly. Next time you're struggling along an exposed ridge in a cross wind and icy sleeet granules are merrily sandblasting your nose and treating your to an impromptu facial exfoliation session, you'll have someone to blame though.

Yup, that crap hood, the one that allows rain to drip into your eyes and doesn't quite cover your helmet properly, or move when you turn your head, is the product of an outdoor designer. A human being is personally responsible for the performance of your outdoor clothing and equipment. Next time you see him or her, give 'em a good kicking.

Where?

But hang on, where do outdoor clothing designers come from? Good question and one that led us to a large studio at the University of Derby and one of the handful of specialist spotswear design courses in the world. Sitting opposite me are the latest batch of recruits to a post-graduate course whose alumni are liberally sprinkled through the design departments of the outdoors industry - they get everywhere, Mountain Equipment, Berghaus, Rab, Montane, Karrimnor, Sprayway, Arc'Teryx, Macpac and on and on and on.

It is, says Charles Ross, who lectures on marketing at Derby, a course that has made Britain the world leader in performance sportswear design. Ross has been involved with the course since its early days - it started in 1996 - and is an outspoken champion of the department and its graduates.

The course isn't a pure outdoors clothing one, but there's always been a strong outdoors involvement on the staff side - Charles was one of the original people at Rohan - and many of the graduates have ended up working for outdoors companies. There's a good chance that at least one of the bits of kit you use has been designed by a Derby graduate.

The current class - above - are a motley group that typify the Derby intake. Although the course is a post-graduate one, about a quarter of the intake usually come from industry, a quarter straight from design school, a quarter are already working in the sports design area and the final 25 per-cent come from totally unrelated areas.

Tony's a climber who's worked in the UK outdoors industry for years and who's own importing business went bust lastyear and hopes to get into the climbing clothing design field. Emily, from down under already has a fashion degree with a final collection of snow boariding clothing and hopes to design outdoor, hiking and snowsports kit.

Nicola, on the other hand, has a background in industrial product design and won a prize for redesigning a hair drier of all things. She's a keen hockey player and hopes to combine her interest in design and sports with a role designing team sportswear for the likes of Nike. Finally Esther is driven by a desire to produce eco-friendly clothing for photographers.

Like I said, it's a motley crew, but one that the Derby Team, led by Claudia Huxtable, who's worked with some of the biggest brands in sports clothing design, hopes to mould into effective designers of genuinely functional sports clothing.

Juie Greengrass is award-winning head designer with Montane. She tells us what she gained from her MA at Derby. I've always had an interest in making things, interesting details and making something for a purpose. I studied art A level and then did an Art Foundation course (Horsham) which led onto my Degree in Fashion Design (University of Northumbria). The degree was good for teaching about general clothing: how to design it, and make it from scratch and fancy fabrics. I got involved with performance fabrics for my final degree project and worked with Pertex and Cloverbrook to produce clothing that was protective, but you could wear it every day - but being a fashion course it was a bit out there. I was however keen to learn more about technical fabrics and what they could do and how they worked, and being a bit disillusioned with the fashion industry wanted to research further. I heard about the MA in Performance Sportswear Design @ Derby and got my place. I joined the course in its 2nd year and industry links at that stage were few, but Jo George in the year above me had completed a placement at Patagonia, someone else had a placement with Saracen and it was starting to gather momentum. Some of the fabric companies were interested in helping out at this stage - Pertex again being one of them and we got to tour the factories to see how it all worked. It's different to other MA courses in that it is not just purely research. We learnt about fabrics from molecules and polymers up, marketing - how to sell your product and research the market and use it, making garments for performance - things have a different cut when designed for activity than an everyday outfit. You also got to integrate with other people (Richard Dannah, now at Rab, Alex Dedman now with Sprayway et al.) keen to learn and buzzing with ideas on how a new technical fabric could be used and we all used to bounce ideas around. Whilst there we worked on 'live' projects with companies - Coats Viyella, G-Shock etc. I also got the opportunity to put my skills into practise working for Polaris on placement, their designer had just left so although I was supposed to be their assistant for a couple of months, I ended up the designer and pattern maker, I also did a fleece project with Rox, and worked with design consultancy Guy Mathiot Design (now Design IQ), and I worked with a licensee of Rockport in Stockholm. Post MA I got a proper job with Paramo, where I stayed for two and a half years working mainly on the travel range. I then moved to Montane, where I have been for nearly four years and manage design, development and production and also my assistant Al, who also did the MA at Derby. The MA was a sound grounding in sportswear design. I found that it taught me how to analyse a sport in depth (I also like to get hands on and give it a go if it's something that I've never done before) and work out what was necessary before you even start to think about all the nice touches (colour, detailing etc). This is how I still work - looking at what the wearer will need for their activity and then designing around the function. The added point is that I now have to only put on the necessary details or make multifunctional details, and keep weight in mind the whole time, whilst still designing within the realms of commerciality. I don't think that I'd be where I am today without the MA, because without the knowledge that I gained on the course on the hows and whys of fabrics etc., companies wouldn't have even looked at my CV as I would have been of no benefit to them (they would have had to teach me about everything.) It's a real head start.

The Course

So how do they go about it? Well, the broad brushstrokes are that the students spend around 12 of the 18 months studying at Derby, with the other six months on placement with a real life company. That means they can gain experience of a real working environment and put the lessons they learn in the classroom into action.

Chalres Ross - enthusiasm personified...

Derby students do real work on placement too. One massively successful Derby project was the revolutionary Speedo swimming suit that you may recall from a few years back. Another was Larry O's red-tabs on Karrimor pack shoulder straps that, at a stroke, took the guesswork out of harness adjustment.

Back in the classroom, the focus is on practical designs rather than the fanciful fripperies of high fashion design shows. Students learn about human biology - how the body works, particularly in sporting terms - about the latest textiles and fibres like Gore-Tex, eVENT and so on, and how they can best be used.

Then it's down to real basics with lessons in pattern cutting culminating in producing the sort of sample garments that are part and parcel of the real life design process where clothing designers knock up prototypes before the finished articles are produced - usually - in factories in the Far East. Finally, the whole thing is topped off with a healthy dose of realism thanks to modules on commercial reality, sports culture, aesthetics and design communication.

Cross Pollenation

The mix of people from different backgrounds is valuable too. Sometimes cross pollenation of ideas means that lessons in fabric of design learned in one sport can be applied effectively to another. Students are taught too, to learn from the modifications sports people make to their own clothing. Sailors, for example, were sewing beer towels to their trousers for extra padding, suggesting that additional cushioning would be a desirable thing in specialist sailing clothing.

At the end of a day spent with the Derby course of 2005, I came away impressed with the enthusiasm of both the students and the staff and convinced that the future of British sports clothing design is in good hands. It's ironic that designers have perhaps the greatest influence of all over the clothing that you and I wear on the hill and how it performs, yet are almost invisible, even within the industry as they slave away in quiet back rooms. Next time you think 'what a good bit of kit then' spare a thought for the person who designed it. There's a very good chance that they learned the basics in Derby.

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For more details of the MA in Performance Sportswear Design at Derby University see the web site.