Water-resistant Naked Suits fit work-play image
BERKELEY, Ca. — In his tightly tailored wool suit on a sunny summer afternoon in Berkeley, Ming Chang looks like any other upwardly mobile young professional.
That is, until he grabs a glass of water and, before anyone can stop him, pours it all over himself.
The water beads and rolls off. The suit looks untouched, completely dry.
People walking by pause and clap. A man at another table asks if he can stroke the suit.
"Awesome, right?" Chang smiles and does it again.
Launched in June after more than a year of development between childhood friends Chang and Albert Shyy, Naked Suits is a line of high-end water-resistant menswear. These so-called performance suits are Gore-Tex-inspired formal wear that’s slim enough to be hip while tough enough to be useful.
"For months," Chang, 28, begins, "we’d been staying up all night trying to figure out how to make suits less . . ."
". . . oppressive, conformist, miserable," Shyy, also 28, finishes.
Yet the suit has a valuable place in society, he says. "It’s what we wear to convey a formality. It gives you confidence."
"Men used to wear suits for everything — baseball games, the train, dates," says Neysa Young, design professor at California College of the Arts. "Then the tech industry gave Northern California a permanent casual-Friday look.
"But with more durable suits, ones that can handle a bike ride and some rain, we’re seeing the suit coming back."
The Naked Suit is tough. They have tested it biking to work, snowboarding, dashing between bars in the rain.
In many ways, says Young, this undermines formal wear’s traditional purpose — delicate clothing meant to show that one doesn’t have to be in the fields labouring, designed to impart notes of power and status.
Emerging one recent morning from their office under Berkeley’s Bancroft Hotel, Chang and Shyy sip iced tea at Caffe Strada, a little nervous (this is their first interview). Passers-by, young men in sweatpants and jeans, eye the formal wear with curiosity and possibly jealousy. On the crowded corner, Chang and Shyy are the only people in suits.
That, they argue, is a problem.
"Our generation needs to reclaim the suit," says Shyy, who lists Naked Suit’s inspirations as everything from iPhones to Patagonia underwear. "We’re using technology everywhere. It’s time to apply it to our formal wear."
Growing up together in Gainesville, Fla., they moved to Berkeley for school, where Chang studied computer science and Shyy business.
As undergrads, they were less than stylish and never caught in suits. "There was definitely some hoodie action, some jeans and V-necks," Shyy said.
Later, Chang became an Apple engineer and Shyy a managerial consultant, and both quickly learned the misery of an ill-fitting suit, or of a suit in the hot sun or a suit in rain — really, the misery of a suit — and how now-ubiquitous fabric technology (like Gore-Tex) is never applied to formal wear. Suspecting they were on to something, they quit their jobs in 2010 and began their startup: Naked Suits.
After 10 months testing various fabric weaves — hemp, bamboo, cotton — that might lighten and toughen the traditional wool suit, Chang and Shyy ditched the cubicle for a weekend in Vegas.
At the Bellagio, they were dealt a sweet hand and, in the way people meet over great hands in Vegas, found themselves chatting with a wealthy Shanghai fabric developer, William Ma of Jiangsu Brilliant Textile Co.
They talked about the dearth of good performance suits, their vision and frustrated efforts; he told them of a fabric he’d been developing.
By the end of the night, a deal was struck. The developer would supply the fabric, and Chang and Shyy would design the suits and market them.
Today, Chang and Shyy, who both speak Mandarin, split their time between their suppliers in Shanghai and offices in Berkeley.
How top secret is this fabric? "Very," says Shyy. "I can say it’s vegan."
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