Hasta La Ideas

We’ve been fans of Outlier since they first launched, and as designers, cyclists and 21st-Century urbanites, we’re duly impressed with Abe and Tyler’s continued commitment to innovation in apparel and accessories. (I have no shame admitting that I’ve been living in my Three-Way Shorts this summer.) The Brooklyn-based brand has built an ever-growing cult following over the years—for the uninitiated, co-founder Abe Burmeister’s PSFK talk is a good place to start—and we’re pleased to present an inside look at their rigorous design process.

What does a 21st century pair of jeans look like?

That was the key question we asked ourselves as we started designing the Outlier Dungarees. Jeans are an amazing style of pant, and there’s a reason they are wildly popular over a century after their invention. But we were pretty certain that they could be made better, considering that they’d barely evolved since 1873 when the first pair was patented. Jeans are durable, comfortable and good-looking, but they also tend to be heavy and restrictive, with a tendency to feel hot in the summer yet cold in the winter. Since they’re made of cotton, they handle moisture rather poorly: when they get wet they stay wet. The more we thought about jeans, the more we knew we had a design challenge on our hands.

IDENTIFYING THE PROBLEM

As is often the case, the greatest strength of an item is also its key weakness. With jeans, there is an interesting contradiction between the fact that they are both comfortable and durable. The problem is that they are not exactly comfortable and durable at the same time. A new unwashed pair of jeans is damn durable, but it’s not comfortable at all. Only through significant wear, or through special garment treatments, does it reach the point where it gets comfortable. Ironically, it’s at that point that it has lost a significant amount of durability. While there is something admirable in the idea of needing to live with and break in your clothing, we wanted to make a pant that was both comfortable and durable from the very get-go.

Another key factor for us was the way jeans wear when cycling. Outlier is not a bike company in any way shape or form, but our first product, the OG Pants, were designed as ‘ride to work’ pants. Jeans are particularly ill-suited to cycling: they’re prone to what’s known as ‘crotch blowout,’ a combination of symptoms that all stem from the fact that jeans simply are not designed to handle the repetitive motions of bike riding. We already had a bit of expertise with these issues, and more importantly we firmly believe that cycling is a key means of transportation in the 21st-Century city, so we wanted to ensure the pants we created could handle that pressure.

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