You may have noticed that some of our pieces, both summer and winter, display compositions that mix materials. Linen with cotton, cotton with hemp, cotton with linen AND ramie, the possibilities are endless and available throughout our collection. More than just a trend, mixing fabrics to design clothing is a technique used to create a new type of textile with unique properties.
Mixed materials have been developed to meet specific needs, such as improving the texture of the garment, reducing its production cost but also producing more durable pieces, from natural fibers. Lots of advantages for few disadvantages, we explain the why and the how.
Why do we mix materials?
Let's get back to the essentials. Creating a fabric requires several steps. First of all, the collection of a fiber, then its transformation into yarn before finishing with the actual manufacturing. Cotton, for example, comes from the cotton flower which grows mainly in India, China or Brazil, before being transformed into t-shirts. Although many clothes are single-material, such as 100% cotton or 100% linen, there are now new fabrics, made almost to measure, which mix different fibers.
This technique aims to compensate for certain negative properties of a fabric or to combine the different advantages of several fabrics together. There are very common combinations, such as the combination of cotton and polyester or other more original and unexpected ones, particularly in the world of luxury or haute couture. Brands today compete in inventiveness to renew the appearance of our silhouettes.
The result ? Clothing with a touch and a visual rendering that is often optimized or new. Adding cashmere to wool will immediately make a sweater softer, just as mixing cotton with a more technical material will be the right recipe for producing sportswear pieces.
Recycle the material
The technique of mixing materials also raises some questions in terms of sustainability. Taking into account the end of life of clothing is an integral part of a more responsible approach to fashion. Regarding used clothing, the ideal, rather than throwing them away, is obviously to drop them off in a sorting center, in order to have them recycled.
So that the material from a used garment can be used to make a new piece, it must be “defibrated”, that is to say extracted to recreate a new spool of thread. In theory, only single-material textiles can then be recycled, since most manufacturers cannot (yet) separate the threads of the same fabric. We say “again”, because more and more machines are capable of defibrating textiles with mixed materials.
To recycle bi-material clothing, without having to throw it away, it is also possible to favor circularity. At the brand level, it involves using fabric scraps to create new clothes - as we do with our boxer shorts made from fabric scraps. On our scale, we can also give another life to a t-shirt by transforming it into a cloth, for example. We then speak of “revaluation”. But that's another subject.
The spring-summer collection at Hast: unique materials for the season
This season, we have imagined pieces that mix different fibers - all natural. For our latest white and blue striped shirt , we added a little linen to the cotton to make this piece more breathable and lightweight.
Similarly, we designed our mustard overshirt in a 55% linen and 45% cotton combination. Sébastien, stylist at Hast, explains to us: “Mixing linen and cotton allows you to better control the wrinkled side of linen. Cotton brings softness, a different feel and taste to clothing.”
Also, for the pleated pants , we chose a blend of hemp and cotton. Hemp, a very light fabric, is perfect for summer and brings fluidity to this strong piece. Hemp is also one of the most ecological natural materials on the textile market, because it consumes very little water for its production. Very resistant, it is a fabric that increases the durability of a piece.
Mixing materials to increase the quality of a garment: this is how we imagined the new summer pieces . A bit like a good vanilla-strawberry ice cream cone.
