Project Overview

The 100 Year Pants: Built to withstand fire, nature, water, and the rest of this century.

Organisation

Vollebak

Project Context

Our 100 Year Pants are made from a material so tough it was originally built to enable the military to walk through fire. And yet these will be some of the most comfortable pants you’ve ever worn. Soft, stretchy, windproof, water repellent and breathable, they’re engineered for adventure. With stainless steel detailing, ankle protection that even crampons won’t get through, giant zipped leg vents that can be opened to your knee, 5 pockets – 4 of them zipped – and a seat tested to last for over a century, we’ve designed out all the usual failure points, and built the pants you might just spend the rest of your life in.

Project Innovation

Swiss-engineered material developed for the military
It wasn’t enough for us to build a pair of pants that could simply last for 100 years. We wanted to build a pair comfortable enough to spend the rest of your life in. So we worked with a new, military-grade fireproof fabric engineered in Switzerland that’s built to help soldiers handle the most extreme scenarios, but without having to dress like firefighters. The result is a crazily strong and amazingly comfortable pair of pants that you can wear in any terrain and emerge unscathed.

The material is made from three layers sandwiched together
If you looked at a cross section of the pants you'd think you’re just looking at one layer of fabric. But just as you’d find with any high-performance jacket, it’s actually three separate layers sandwiched together and performing three distinct roles. The outer layer is a stretchy, windproof soft shell. The middle layer is a fireproof coating. And the bottom layer next to your skin is a soft, knitted fireproof fibre that feels like cotton.

On the outside they feel like sweat pants
Even on its own the outer layer of the pants would make the toughest pair of pants you'd ever worn. Highly durable and abrasion resistant, it’s also water repellent, stretchy and windproof. Yet despite this it’s still super soft and feels nothing like any fire-resistant fabric that’s ever been made before. And that’s because it’s the two layers beneath that turn it from a tough pair of pants to ones that can go through fire.

The middle layer acts like an airbag in a fire
Any contact with fire triggers the fireproof middle layer of the pants. This layer instantly expands to 1000x its size to create a protective barrier between you and the flames. It might sound like an airbag, but it looks more like tiny plants growing at high speed as the protective layer increases in volume and expands to about 6mm in height. This video shows the expansion process. Even if you hold a flame on these pants they can’t catch on fire, and flames simply can’t spread on them.

The pants feel like cotton next to your skin
It’s the inner layer of the pants that keeps them together in an emergency. Built from an aramid fibre that can’t burn or melt, it’s there to protect the structural integrity of the pants in a fire. These kinds of fibres are typically built for practicality rather than comfort, but we’ve knitted them into a soft and ultra thin layer that feels more like cotton on your skin.

Fireproofing the pants makes them more breathable
While it’s completely counter intuitive, having a protective layer in the middle of the fabric makes the pants more breathable. Because it’s created from a fireproof coating rather than material, it acts like a gap or firebreak between the inner and outer layers of fabric, and it’s this invisible gap that lets air pass through the pants and makes them more breathable.

It will take more than 100 years to break the fabric
The Martindale abrasion resistance test is the way clothing is normally tested to see how quickly it will break down. A mechanical thumb rubs the surface of the fabric repeatedly until the fibres start to break. The test goes up to 100,000 revolutions which is the equivalent of a lifetime of wear and tear. A normal polyester fabric can survive around 25,000 revolutions. These pants easily passed 100,000 cycles of wear, and even then the fabric had to be checked with a magnifying glass to see if any fibres had broken. None had.

The pants stretch in every direction
Despite being insanely tough, the pants stretch in every direction and there’s no move you can pull where they’d restrict you. Apart from the reinforced ankles, the entire pants are made from the same high tech fabric with four way stretch. And every seam has been engineered to follow the way your legs move whether you’re climbing a mountain, setting up camp, or descending into a volcano for fun.

The pants are water repellent
The surface of the 100 Year Pants is water repellent and fast drying, so a rain shower will just roll off them. If you’re out in heavy rain for a prolonged time, the three-layered construction of the fabric means that water will take much longer to get through than your average pair of pants.

The watch pocket can hold 550lbs and start a fire
The 100 Year Pants come with a watch pocket just under the waistband. It’s fitted with a black nylon paracord loop that can hold 550lbs of weight without breaking – so you can clip anything you want onto it, from a flashlight to a compass. If you cut open the paracord you’ll find threads of kindling inside it, so if you’re out in nature, need to start a fire and have nothing else to hand, this will help you do it.

Design Challenge

How we built a pair of pants to last 100 years
Designing and building a pair of pants that can last for 100 years is an exercise in no expense spared craftsmanship. And it’s as much about what you can’t see as what you can. It starts with bespoke materials created in the most cutting-edge fabric mill in Switzerland, before being followed by hundreds of separate construction processes – from hand testing every stainless steel press stud, to stitching every critical seam twice with a heavy duty thread, to reinforcing the lining of the pockets.