Functional clothing— Definition and classification

Functional clothing represents the evolutionary segment of the technical textiles market, representing an area where clothing crosses the conventional boundaries and integrates with the domains of medicine, biotechnology, nanotechnology, physics and computing among others, to meet the multifaceted and complex requirements of the user. Functional clothing by definition is user-requirement specific and designed or engineered to meet the performance requirements of the user under extreme conditions. A variety of functional clothing products are available in the market as protective clothing, medical clothing or sports clothing, even though little information is available regarding the principles employed in their production. Functional clothing in fact has never really been systematically defined or classified, unlike technical textiles. In this paper, a functionality-based classification has been proposed with six classes, comprehensively covering most logical types of functional clothing that are in use or are under development. Each distinct class would have similar principles governing the design of products covered under it, even though the final products may find application in a variety of fields, e.g. protective functional clothing may find an application as protective military armour, as sports armour or as protective surgical gowns for the doctors. Principles that characterize each class and differentiate it from the others have been highlighted. As newer technologies are being developed, new and innovative products and possibly new classes will keep on emerging in this field to meet the requirements of consumers.