fashion

you are not a cyberpunk you life in hastings nebraska

Do you want to look like a cyborg ninja or do you just want high performance forward thinking clothes? The hype beast street ninjas aren't usually doing real techware, the cheap fast fashion cyberninja stuff isn't well made. To be "real" techwear you've got to go beyond just looking like a ninja and actually have well made clothes using advanced technical fabrics and construction techniques. The good ninja stuff comes from Stone Island or ACRNYM or weird little indy fashionhouses.

If your goal is to be cool when people are hot, dry when people are wet, and comfortable when everyone is miserable, the practical side of things, you can look at most fancy outdoor companies, but also less pricey places. Uniqlo is always recommended as a place to look for basics. If you're in the us you can find good quality and relatively affordable stuff at REI. There are also online retailers like Steep and Cheap that sell last years stuff.

I get much of my "techwear" from Duluth Trading. They're not the usual techwear aesthetic, but they've got cool stuff going with their workwear - dwr treatments, four way stretch highly abrasion resistant fabrics, the famous crouch gusset, and pants laid out to actually be used as workwear.

Regardless, from what I understand many people will save up to get one really cool Stone Island or other fancy piece and use that to anchor their look, while using less expensive and prestigious basics to fill in. Get an iconic jacket or pants, then finish out with basics from uniqlo or whatever.

Make sure to haunt trade, exchange, and re-sell websites. Sometimes people will have cool stuff at good prices. It's not like tech clothes every wear out when most techwear people are office workers equipped with pants that can function as a space suit in a pinch.

Fun side story, cw animal products

I was thinking about how techwear is an aesthetic, but to be techwear the clothes actually have to be technical. Technical fabrics, inventive high utility designs and mods. But that doesn't necessarily mean new. I've heard stories that a couple of modern high performance wicking fabrics were only possible because material science guys went up to Alaska to talk to Alaska Natives about how their cold weather kit actually works. That's part of where the idea for wicking materials that pull water away from the body while maintaining an insulating air layer even when the material is wet came from; the designers were mimicking the properties of marine mammal fur to get the same effects Alaska Natives had (and are) been making use of. Reminds me that Europeans never really figured out how to make reliably waterproof kit until they started working with quantities of rubber, while Alaska Natives had very light weight waterproof kit made from marine mammal gut the whole time. Technology is about making efficient use of what you have access to, and expanding on those capabilities, rather than a map game tech tree.

Look up functional clothing brands first. They don’t call themselves “techwear” nor are they traditional techwear brands. Keywords like “threeway stretch pants” will yield results from companies that make pants for military, outdoors activities, construction, etc. The aesthetics will vary but will often be the same as ‘techwear’, but IMO usually the pants are more aesthetically pleasing whereas tops tend to vary and stray from techwear.

• Truwerk
• 511
• Didriksons
• POC Sports
• G-STAR RAW (high quality and matches the aesthetics, but IME the materials aren’t “technical”/functional)

If you want to mix aesthetics while retaining functionality, look up Japanese construction clothes or fashion brands that make clothes in similar styles. These will be more baggy than the western techwear.

But more “techwear” specific brands will be expensive usually. Here are the commonly suggested brands

• Acronym - https://acrnm.com/
• Enfin Levé - https://enfinleve.com/
• Nemen - https://www.nemen.it/
• Arc’Teryx - https://arcteryx.com/
• Veilance - https://arcteryx.com/us/en/veilance
• Orbit Gear - https://www.orbitgear.net/
• Nike ACG - https://www.nike.com/acg
• Riot Division - https://riotdivision.tech/
• Guerrilla Group - https://www.guerrilla-group.co/
• ROSEN X - https://rosen-store.com/collections/rosen-x

I also like ACW/A Cold Wall clothes.

Garmin makes really good watches

I always bought chinese fakes of these. Shipping was quite expensive, but I found that the quality was identical to the legitimate pieces. I really liked the Nike and Acronym stuff. I bought 2 fake pairs of these for $20 and they're easily the most comfortable and durable pieces of clothing I wear. The grey ones also double as lingerie, so that's cool. I also used to have a pair of Nike x Acronym

Yeah, look for materials. That's all it's about, you can fix everything else if it pops up but having a shitty fabric isn't something you can fix. Strongly suggest getting familiar with Superbuy and other such services, makes high fashion much cheaper.

Hack.xxx