Tag Archives: womenswear collection

Ministry’s new women’s shirt: a technical marvel

It seems there’s another entry into the textile business, a women’s dress shirt made of a technical textile. A Sept. 13, 2016 article by Elizabeth Segran for Fast Company describes this ‘miracle’ piece of apparel,

There are few items of clothing professional women love more than a well-draped silk shirt. They’re the equivalent of men’s well-tailored Oxford shirts: classic, elegant, and versatile enough to look appropriate in almost any business context. But they’re also difficult to maintain: Silk wrinkles easily, doesn’t absorb perspiration, and needs to be dry cleaned.

Boston-based fashion brand Ministry (formerly Ministry of Supply) has heard our lament. …

Ministry gathered …  feedback and spent two years creating a high-performance women’s work shirt as part of its debut womenswear collection, launching today [Sept. 13, 2016]. Until now, the five-year-old company has been focused on creating menswear made with cutting-edge new textiles, but cofounder Gihan Amarasiriwardena explains that when they were developing the womenswear collection, they didn’t just remake their men’s garments in women’s sizes.

Here’s an image of the shirt in black,

[downloaded from http://ministry.co/collections/womens]

[downloaded from http://ministry.co/collections/womens]

Segran’s article mostly extolls its benefits but there is a little technical information,

Their brand-new, aptly named Easier Than Silk Shirt looks and feels like silk, but is actually made from a Japanese technical fabric (i.e., a textile engineered to perform functions, like protecting the wearer from extremely high temperatures). It drapes nicely, wicks moisture, is wrinkle-resistant, and can be thrown in a regular washer and dryer. I tested the shirt on a typical Monday. This meant getting dressed at 7 a.m., taking my baby to a health checkup—where she proceeded to drool on me—wiping myself off for a lunch interview, then heading to a coffee shop to write for several hours before going to a book launch party. By the time I got home that evening and looked in the mirror, the shirt was somehow crease-free and there were no moisture blotches in sight.

When Ministry claims to “engineer a shirt,” it does not mean this in a metaphorical sense. The by [sic] three MIT students, Amarasiriwardena, Aman Advani, and Kit Hickey; the former two were trained as engineers. Every aspect of Ministry’s design process incorporates scientific thinking, from introducing NASA temperature-regulating textile technology into dress shirts to using equipment to test each garment before it hits the market. The Ministry headquarters in Boston is full of machines, including one that pulls at fabric to see how well it is able to recover from being stretched, and computer systems that offer 3D modeling of the human form.

I wonder if Teijin (first mentioned here in a July 19, 2010 posting about their now defunct ‘morphotex’ [based on the nanostructures on a Morpho butterfly’s wing] fabric) is the Japanese company producing Ministry’s technical textile. Ministry’s company website is less focused on the technology than on the retail aspect of their business so if the technical information is there, it’s not immediately obvious.