From a bent juniper branch in the Norwegian wilderness, to tensioned mesh and 3D-printed foam, the humble backpack evolved from a rudimentary container into a precision-engineered carrying system.

We didn’t start this fire – but we inherited it, and, a century or so ago, began to seriously refine it.

What follows is a series of key checkpoints in that acceleration: how modern designers fused body, material science, and access philosophy – and how each breakthrough set the stage for the next.

1. The External Frame (1908) – Bergans of Norway

The one that sparked it all.

After a hunting trip in the Skrimfjellet mountains, Norwegian bicycle mechanic Ole Ferdinand Bergan came home with a simple fix to a lingering issue. His rucksack chafed, slumped, and pulled unevenly. So he bent a juniper branch to the contour of his back and used it to hold the load away from his body. The relief was immediate.

Back in his workshop in Tønsberg, Bergan replaced the branch with tubular steel, added leather straps, and filed a patent in 1909, registering it in 22 countries.

The Bergans meis became the world’s first commercially produced external-frame backpack. Most importantly, it introduced the fresh idea that load didn’t have to hang directly off the body – it could be lifted, spaced, and stabilized.

That key shift – separating structure from the sack itself – is something nearly every modern pack still rides on.

The design spread fast. Bergans packs equipped Roald Amundsen’s South Pole expedition in 1911, appeared on British Everest expeditions, and were eventually reverse-engineered by Allied forces during World War II. British Commandos called their version the ‘Bergen’ – a name that still carries today.

2. The Padded Hip Belt (1947) – Jack Abert

The moment the deltoids got a load off.

Even after the introduction of external frames, most packs still carried weight the same way: on the shoulders. While the load might sit differently, it still hung from the upper body, causing pain and discomfort over time.

The story of who changed that is messier than it’s usually told.

The underlying logic – that a belt across the hips could transfer load off the shoulders entirely – had actually been explored decades earlier. In 1887, U.S. Army officer Henry Clay Merriam patented a pack featuring hardwood rods that extended from the frame into leather pockets on a half-belt resting across the lower back and hips. The system worked, in principle. But it never scaled: the Army passed, and only a few thousand units reached the New York National Guard and some European armies. The idea sat dormant.

It was Jack Abert, an avid hiker and Boy Scout camp counselor from Phoenix, Arizona, who brought it back – and made it stick. In 1947, Abert designed a contoured aluminium frame that was both strong and light, and deliberately shifted the majority of the load off the shoulders and onto the hips. His reasoning was clear: the hips are built to carry weight because they connect directly to the legs, the body’s primary load-bearing structure. The shoulders don’t.

By 1950, the National Council of the Boy Scouts of America had officially approved the design, and by 1967, Abert had become the largest manufacturer of backpacking frames in the world.

It’s worth noting that the hip belt’s broader popularisation in the outdoor industry is also associated with Lloyd Nelson and Dick Kelty, whose Kelty pack company – founded in California in the early 1950s – helped bring aluminium-frame, hip-transferring packs to a wider civilian hiking market around the same period. Depending on the source, credit shifts between these figures; what’s consistent is the era, and the logic behind it.

Today, the hip belt is so intrinsic to hiking backpack design that it’s almost invisible. Modern hiking packs transfer the vast majority of their load onto the hips. Without it, load-bearing carry wouldn’t just be uncomfortable – it would be fundamentally inefficient.

3. The Internal Frame (1967) – Lowe Alpine

By the mid-1960s, the external frame had reached its limits. It worked well enough on open trails, but struggled in technical terrain – the rigid structure stuck out from the body, snagged on rock, and held the load far enough away that balance became unstable on steep or uneven ground.

In 1967, Colorado alpinist Greg Lowe built a pack called the ‘Expedition’ that rethought that whole relationship. Instead of mounting a frame externally, he integrated lightweight stays into the back panel itself: first with phenolic resin laminate, later with 6061 aluminium flat bar.

The result was huge. The load sat closer to the body, and the pack began to move with the wearer rather than against them. What had previously been a carried system became a worn system. Stable in motion, not just at rest.

By the 1970s, the design had spread beyond mountaineering into mainstream hiking, particularly in the UK, where more technical terrain exposed the limitations of external frames (the brand’s international HQ and development hub eventually landed in Kendal, Cumbria). The influence of Lowe Alpine’s approach was pivotal, his internal frame becoming the template for almost every modern backpack that followed.

This shift didn’t just change pack construction. It unlocked the modern language of suspension – back panels, padding systems, and load balancing geometry all stem from this innovation of the structure inside the carry.

4. The Side-Release Buckle (1970s–80s) – ITW Nexus

The click heard around the world – with such ubiquity that it barely registers anymore.

Enter the plastic side-release buckle: two prongs that snap into a receiver and release with a squeeze. Before this, backpack straps were managed with metal hardware, leather fittings, and lacing systems – heavier, slower, and far less forgiving in wet or high-stress conditions.

Developed and popularized through the 1970s and 1980s by hardware companies including ITW Nexus, the side-release buckle changed the rhythm of adjustment itself. It made connection instant, one-handed, repeatable. And crucially, it made modularity possible: straps, belts, and compression systems could now be tuned on the fly rather than fixed in place.

What followed wasn’t just a change in backpacks. It was a change in how load systems could be configured across entirely different contexts – from military webbing and climbing harnesses, to child safety seats and everyday carry.

Its impact can be seen everywhere: sternum straps, hip belts, compression points, et al. The buckle became the connective tissue of the modern backpack – small, silent, and so effective it’s barely changed for over 50 years.

5. CamelBak Hydration System (1989) – Michael Eidson

In 1989, emergency medical technician Michael Eidson lined up for the Hotter ‘n Hell 100, a storied long haul cycling event in Wichita Falls, Texas.

Eidson had discerned a crucial problem with long rides – every time he reached for a water bottle, he’d get slowed down. Improvising, he filled an IV bag with water, stuffed it into a tube sock, pinned it to the back of his jersey, ran the tube over his shoulder, and held it in place with a clothes peg. Visually absurd? Most definitely. It also worked – flawlessly.

Within months, Eidson had shaped his rudimentary idea into the ThermalBak: the first commercial hydration reservoir system. It took a while to win over the lycra set. Most dismissed it as overly technical, even ‘geeky’. But once the US military adopted CamelBak systems during the Gulf War – with marketing leaning into the blunt tagline ‘Hydrate or Die’ – the idea scaled.

Eidson’s pack didn’t just add a water bladder to a backpack. It removed the pause lag from hydration entirely. Rather than an interruption, it became a continuous maneuver, integrated into motion.

6. Adjustable Torso Harness – Gregory, Osprey, Mystery Ranch

The pack that finally fit every back.

For most of backpack history, fit variety was limited. Packs came in small, medium, and large – rough approximations of a far more complex variable: the human torso. The result was obvious. Too long, and the hip belt floated uselessly. Too short, and it cut into the ribs. Load transfer failed before the walk even began.

Through the 1980s and 1990s, brands like Gregory and Osprey began dismantling this status quo. Their solution was the adjustable torso harness: a sliding shoulder yoke that moved up or down a fixed back panel, allowing the distance between shoulders and hips to be precisely tuned. Simple in concept, difficult in execution. Getting it to hold load under real movement took years of refinement.

Mystery Ranch pushed the idea further. Their Futura Yoke system took the entire upper harness assembly and turned it into a telescoping structure, sliding vertically along the mainframe and locking into position based on exact torso length. But crucially, it didn’t just reposition contact points – it preserved form. The moulded adjuster moved with the yoke, keeping the ergonomic curve of the harness consistent at every setting, rather than defaulting to a single fixed shape.

In practice, this meant fit and load transfer could be solved together. More than just a cosmetic adjustment, it directly changed how force moved through the system, from shoulders into hips and core.

Used across military, fire, hunting, and civilian lines, the system has been adopted by operators who depend on consistent carry under extreme conditions. The universal principle remains: a backpack shouldn’t approximate your body, it should adapt to it.

7. The 3-Zip Panel Loader – Mystery Ranch

For most of backpack history, access followed a rule: enter from the top, dig down, find what you need. Works well enough where time isn’t a constraint. But in motion? Or where time really is of the essence? Not so much.

Mystery Ranch’s 3-Zip panel loader broke the old rule. A Y-shaped zipper ran across three sides of the pack’s front panel, opening the main compartment almost fully. The interior was no longer a layered volume to be searched, but a fully visible system. Gear exposed in place. Nothing needed to be removed to reach anything else.

“The Universal” or U-shaped zipper design would fall into this category too, appearing on the Arc’teryx Khard and early medical packs (but we’ve yet to track down the very first example).

The design was particularly supportive to environments where access time actually mattered. Military personnel under pressure. Wildland firefighters shifting continuously through active terrain. Hunters operating in cold conditions.

Variations of the panel-loader concept have spread across travel packs, camera bags, and technical daypacks – anywhere access speed and organization outweigh the minimal efficiency gains of a traditional top-loader.

8. The Tensioned Mesh / Trampoline Suspension (Early 2000s) – Osprey & Deuter

One of the oldest frustrations in backpack design is also the simplest: heat. A pack pressed directly against the spine traps moisture, turning movement into an inevitable accumulation of sweat, friction, and fatigue.

The solution? Remove contact entirely.

Osprey – founded in 1974 by Mike Pfotenhauer in Santa Cruz, California – pioneered the tensioned mesh back system, often referred to as ‘trampoline suspension’.

Instead of resting on the back, the load was suspended on a peripheral frame, with a taut mesh panel creating an air gap between pack and body. This gap changed everything. Air circulated continuously. Heat had space to escape. Moisture no longer pooled at the point of contact. The pack felt less like it was being worn directly, and more like it was hovering just off the body.

Osprey’s Anti-Gravity (AG) system refined this further by pairing the mesh suspension with a floating hipbelt that moved independently of the pack body, allowing the system to follow the natural motion of the hips rather than resisting it. Deuter’s AirComfort system explored the same principle in parallel.

The result was a clear shift in carry experience: packs that felt lighter not because they weighed less, but because they no longer fought the body at the point of contact.

9. The Ergonomic Shoulder Strap (1980s–1990s)

For most of backpack history, shoulder straps were little more than padded tubes: flat, symmetrical, and designed with minimal consideration for how the human upper body actually moved. Shoulders are curved, arms swing, the torso shifts. The strap, for a long time, ignored all of this.

The shift toward anatomical strap design began to change in the 1980s and 1990s. Brands like Osprey, Deuter, and Gregory started shaping straps to follow the body more closely, introducing S-curves, asymmetry, and adjustments that accounted for torso length and load position. Instead of treating the strap as a connector, it became a shaped interface between body and system.

Bergans had already hinted at this philosophy decades earlier, rooted in its founding principle: ‘the sack should be shaped according to the person’s form’. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, this thinking extended further into gender-specific fits, and school packs designed with full ergonomic consideration.

The effect of all this refinement was as subtle as it was crucial. Anatomical straps distribute load more cleanly across the upper body, reducing pressure points around the neck and shoulder, while allowing natural arm movement under load. In practice, they stopped the harness from interrupting motion and started letting it follow it instead.

It was a small shift in geometry, but it took decades to resolve what the body had been telling pack designers all along.

10. The Roll-Top Closure (Popularized 1990s–2000s)

The roll-top closure – the opening of a bag folded over itself and secured with a buckle – is deceptively simple. In truth, it’s ancient: variations of rolled fabric closures were used for centuries by sailors, traders, and fishermen to keep contents dry in unpredictable weather.

Its reappearance in modern backpack design marked a quiet but important shift in weather protection philosophy. Instead of sealing against water with mechanical complexity, the roll-top removed failure points entirely – no zippers to corrode, no teeth to clog, no seams under tension.

Protection came from geometry rather than hardware: roll the opening down, compress the air, and the seal became tighter with each fold. This also changed volume behaviour. As the top was rolled further, internal capacity decreased, meaning the pack self-adjusted to its load, compacting as it sealed.

This simplicity made it especially effective in environments where reliability mattered more than convenience: water sports, bikepacking, motorcycle travel, and all-weather commuting. Brands like Ortlieb and SealLine helped establish the rolltop as a standard, later echoed across a wide range of outdoor and urban carry systems.

11. The AquaGuard / Waterproof Zipper (1990s) – YKK

YKK, the Japanese fastening company founded by Tadao Yoshida in Tokyo in 1934, produces a significant share of the world’s zippers. For most of its history, water ingress was a fact of life – zippers were precision gaps by design, and gaps meant water.

YKK’s AquaGuard changed that by re-engineering the old vulnerability. A polyurethane coating was laminated to the zipper tape, and the geometry of the teeth was tuned to close more tightly under pressure. The result: a zipper that maintained functionality while significantly reducing vulnerability to leaks. Fresher versions pushed even further, moving toward fully sealed ‘dry’ constructions where the teeth themselves were no longer exposed.

For pack designers, it opened another design path from roll-top systems. Openings were suddenly resilient – pockets, access panels, and full clamshell designs could finally exist in wet conditions without so much as a drip.

12. 3D-Printed and Moulded Back Padding (2020s) – Osprey UNLTD

A pad to fit every back.

For most of backpack history, back padding was a compromise. Foam was cut into a fixed shape, wrapped in fabric, and pressed into service across a vast range of human variations. It worked – broadly – but it never truly fit anyone in particular.

In 2022, Osprey’s UNLTD line introduced 3D-printed lattice back padding. Instead of a solid foam block, the structure was built as an open geometric matrix, allowing zones of varying density to be engineered directly into the pad itself.

The effect was twofold. First, the padding behaved more consistently under load, resisting the ‘bottoming out’ effect of traditional foam. Second, it allowed comfort and support to be distributed with far greater precision – different areas of the back could respond differently within the same structure.

Most notably, it shifted the direction of design altogether. 3D printing opened the possibility of true anatomical specificity – back panels shaped not to averaged size categories, but to individual bodies: this back, this contour, and this load path.

It’s still early in its application to carry systems, but the trajectory is already visible: the pack stops being selected, and starts being matched – not to a rigid category, but to the individual person wearing it.

The Pack That Never Stops Changing.

What makes this arc so compelling isn’t the transformation – it’s the tight cluster of changes that all went down in little over a century.

New thinking, modern necessity, dynamic materials and emerging tech all continue to seed a design lineage that mirrors the broader exponential development of our socio-cultural world.

As innovators keep asking the right questions in pursuit of pack perfection, the design arc stands to remain – just as we’d like it – a discovery without end.

The post The Innovations That Changed Backpack Design Forever appeared first on Carryology.

How do we keep the weather out?

Every waterproof jacket ever made is an attempt to answer that question in our long war against rain. Some of them are marvels of engineering. Some of them are marvels of craft. A few are both. And the story of how we got from one to the other is stranger, more interesting, and more humbling than the hang tags on your shell jacket would have you believe.

The Gut Parka 

(Invented 1000+ years ago)

Before rubber. Before nylon. Before Gore-Tex. Before any of it.

Somewhere on the Aleutian Islands, a person sat down with a sea lion intestine, a bone needle, and thread made from sinew, and began to sew.

The garments they made, called kamleikas by the Aleut and gut parkas by those who encountered them later, were by any honest measure among the most sophisticated pieces of waterproof outerwear ever constructed. Indigenous peoples across Alaska and the Arctic, including the Aleut, Alutiiq, Inupiat, and Yup’ik, had developed a technology so refined that it would not be meaningfully improved upon for centuries.

The process was painstaking. Animal intestines, from sea lion, bear, walrus, and seal, were harvested, cleaned, split into long strips, and dried. The strips were then sewn together in horizontal rows using a blind stitch so tight and precise that no water could penetrate the seam. The resulting fabric was extraordinarily thin, almost translucent, and lighter than anything a European tailor of the same era could have imagined. It moved with the body. It shed water completely. And in the hands of an expert maker, it lasted years.

The kayak anorak, a hooded gut parka designed to be lashed to the cockpit coaming of a baidarka, created a sealed system robust enough for rolling and rough water travel in the North Pacific — the paddler and the boat effectively becoming one waterproof unit. This was not a garment for walking between a carriage and a doorway. It was life support equipment for ocean travel in some of the most hostile waters on earth.

What makes this remarkable is not just the waterproofing. It’s the breathability. Gut fabric, unlike rubber or coated nylon, is a membrane. It blocks liquid water while allowing water vapor to escape. The Aleut and their neighbors had, through centuries of careful observation and craft, arrived at a solution that Western science would not formally rediscover until 1969.

The gut parka is not a footnote in the history of waterproof clothing. It is the opening chapter, and one that most of that history has been too quick to skip.

The Mackintosh 

(1823)

In 1823, a Scottish chemist named Charles Macintosh patented a method of bonding rubber between two layers of fabric. The resulting material was, by the standards of the time, a revelation: genuinely, reliably waterproof. You could stand in the rain and stay dry. This had not previously been something you could buy.

The problems were immediate and considerable.

In cold weather, the rubber stiffened until the coat moved like a suit of armor. In warm weather, it softened into something approaching a swamp. The smell, in either condition, was memorable. Breathability was not a concept that entered into the equation at all. The Mackintosh coat kept rain out with the same indifference to the wearer’s comfort as a bin bag.

People wore them anyway, because the alternative was getting wet, and getting wet could kill you. The Mackintosh was not a pleasant garment. It was a necessary one.

It was also the first waterproof coat that ordinary people in the industrial world could actually buy. That matters. The gut parka was a masterwork of indigenous craft, produced by specialists for a specific environment. The Mackintosh was a mass-produced commodity, available to anyone who could afford it. Democratization has always had trade-offs.

Waxed or Oiled Cotton Jackets

(19th Century)

By the late nineteenth century, sailors and outdoorsmen had arrived at a different solution: waxed and oiled cotton. Barbour, founded in 1894 in South Shields, became the most famous name in a tradition that stretched back to the oilskin coats of working fishermen, heavy, dark, smelling faintly of linseed, and about as supple as a tarpaulin.

These coats worked, after a fashion. They shed water reasonably well in moderate conditions. They were durable. They developed a patina that their wearers came to regard with something approaching affection. But they were heavy. They were stiff. In driving rain, they eventually became saturated.

The waxed cotton coat was not a technical solution. It was a cultural one, a garment that said something about who you were and how you spent your time, that happened to keep you reasonably dry while you were doing it. That distinction matters because it never entirely went away.

Ventile Jackets

(1940s)

World War II did what it always does to materials technology: it accelerated it by decades.

The RAF needed survival suits that could keep downed pilots alive in the North Sea. The answer was Ventile, an extraordinarily tightly woven long-staple cotton developed in Britain in the early 1940s. The principle was elegant: weave the cotton so densely that when the fibers got wet, they swelled and closed the gaps between them, blocking water without any coating or membrane at all. A Ventile suit could keep a pilot alive in cold water for critical extra minutes, and it was, by the standards of the era, remarkably breathable.

Ventile never became a mass-market product. It was expensive to produce, slow to manufacture, and by the time the war ended, nylon was arriving to change the conversation entirely. But it established something important: that the answer to waterproofing didn’t have to be “seal it completely.” You could work with the fabric itself.

Nylon Jackets

(1950s and 60s)

Meanwhile, nylon, lighter, stronger, and cheaper than anything that had come before, was flooding into the outdoor market. By the 1950s and 1960s, climbers and hikers had access to lightweight nylon shells coated with polyurethane: the first jackets that looked, in silhouette, like what we’d recognize as a rain shell today. They were packable. They were light. They were genuinely waterproof.

They were also, inside, like a sauna.

The coatings that kept water out kept everything out. Sweat had nowhere to go. You stayed dry from the rain and soaked from the inside. The coating cracked with age. And serious mountaineers, who needed to move hard in bad weather and survive the consequences, were not impressed.

The problem had been restated, not solved. You could have waterproof, or you could have breathable. Not both.

Gore-Tex Jackets

(1970s)

In 1969, a materials scientist named Bob Gore was trying to stretch PTFE, the polymer better known as Teflon, quickly rather than slowly. The received wisdom was that you stretched it slowly. Gore yanked it. The material didn’t break. Instead, it expanded into a microporous structure: billions of tiny holes, each one seven hundred times larger than a water vapour molecule and seven hundred times smaller than a droplet of liquid water.

He called it expanded PTFE, or ePTFE. We came to call it Gore-Tex.

The logic was almost absurdly simple once you saw it. Water vapour, the sweat trying to escape your body, is a gas. Liquid water, the rain trying to get in, is a liquid. If you could build a membrane with pores sized precisely between those two states, you could let one through while blocking the other. Waterproof and breathable. The thing that had seemed like a contradiction for a century and a half.

W. L. Gore & Associates launched the first commercial Gore-Tex outerwear fabrics in 1976. The early reception was mixed, to put it charitably. Body oils contaminated the membrane, lamination was inconsistent, and some jackets sold as waterproof turned out not to be. Mountaineers, who had been promised miracles before, were skeptical.

But the engineers kept working. Lamination improved. Seam taping, the process of covering every needle hole with a waterproof tape, became standard. By the early 1980s, serious climbing and ski brands were building Gore-Tex shells with storm hoods, pit zips, and fully taped seams: the technical mountain shell, essentially as we know it today.

The gut parka makers of the Aleutian Islands would have recognized the principle immediately. It had taken Western industry two hundred years to get there.

The Peak Was Loud

For a long time, Gore-Tex was simply the answer. If you needed to be outside in serious weather, you wore it. The black diamond label meant something specific: this garment will not fail you when conditions get bad. That promise, reliably kept, built a kind of loyalty that most brands can only dream of.

Then, somewhere around 2020, something shifted.

Gorpcore pushed Gore-Tex shells to the center of fashion. Arc’teryx Beta jackets and Acronym J-series pieces became grail objects. Short-form video loved the money shot: water beading off a sleeve in perfect spheres, rolling away like mercury. The Gore-Tex logo went from specialist credential to style signal.

And then, as fashion always does, it started moved on.

Quiet luxury arrived. Softer silhouettes. Natural fabrics. The visual language began to break off from expedition gear. A lot of people who had bought Gore-Tex as a fashion piece discovered its actual character: it needs layering, it needs DWR maintenance, it crinkles when you move, and it is significantly overbuilt for a walk to a coffee shop.

Gore-Tex was drifting back to what it had always actually been: a specialist tool.

The Reckoning of Gore-Tex

Gore-Tex works. In a laboratory, it works beautifully. Stretch a piece of ePTFE membrane across a pressurized tube of water at 40 PSI and it holds. Not a drop gets through. Leave it over a cup of absorbent beads in a humid room for eight hours and yes, it breathes. The physics is real. The membrane does exactly what it claims.

The problem is that you don’t wear your jacket in a laboratory.

To understand why, you need to understand one thing: Gore-Tex doesn’t push water out. It doesn’t suck air in. It is passive. It just sits there, full of tiny holes, and waits for nature to do the work. Specifically, it waits for a difference in humidity between the inside of your jacket and the outside.

Think of it like this. Imagine you have a room full of people on one side of a door, and an empty room on the other side. Open the door and people will naturally drift toward the empty room. That’s how Gore-Tex breathes. The sweat building up inside your jacket is the crowded room. The cold, dry air outside is the empty one. Open the door, and moisture moves through.

Now imagine both rooms are equally packed. Nobody moves anywhere.

That’s what happens when it rains.

When the air outside your jacket is already saturated with moisture, there’s nowhere for your sweat to go. The humidity differential that drives breathability simply disappears. The membrane is still there, still full of its billions of tiny holes, still technically capable of breathing. But without the pressure difference to push vapour through, it doesn’t. You stay wet from the inside, even as the jacket keeps the rain out from the outside.

There’s a second problem, and it’s sneakier.

Even on a day when the conditions are right, the moment the outer fabric of your jacket gets truly soaked, a thin layer of liquid water forms against the membrane. Your sweat vapour travels through the membrane, hits that cold wet layer, and turns back into liquid. It condenses and runs back in. The jacket is functioning perfectly. You are still damp on the inside.

The industry’s fix for this is DWR, a Durable Water Repellent coating applied to the outer fabric. DWR makes water bead up and roll off rather than soak in, which keeps that outer layer dry, which keeps the membrane clear, which lets the breathability work. When DWR is fresh, the system functions as advertised. But DWR wears off. It washes out. It needs to be reapplied. And once you notice that the thing keeping you dry is actually the coating on the outside rather than the membrane underneath, a reasonable question presents itself: if the outer layer is doing the waterproofing, what exactly am I paying for?

None of this makes Gore-Tex a fraud. It makes it a conditional technology. It performs genuinely well in cold, dry air when your body is working hard, which is exactly the condition it was designed for: a climber moving fast in alpine weather. In those circumstances, the humidity differential is large, the DWR is doing its job, and the membrane earns its reputation.

But most people are not alpine climbers. Most people are walking to work in a drizzle, or standing at a trailhead in steady rain, or trying to stay comfortable on a bike commute. In those conditions, the gap between what Gore-Tex promises and what it delivers is real, and it is not small. The honest version of the marketing line would read something like: waterproof and breathable, when it’s cold outside, when you’re working hard, and when the jacket is well-maintained. That’s a harder sell. It’s also the truth.

The Gatekeeping of Gore

What compounded the reckoning was the business model behind the badge. During the years when Gore’s original ePTFE patents were in force, any manufacturer wanting to use the membrane had to use Gore-approved machinery, buy Gore’s seam tape, put Gore-Tex in the product name, and hang the black diamond tag on every garment. The patent expired in 1998. For the last quarter-century, anyone can make ePTFE. But by then, the brand had become the category. Consumers had been trained to see the black diamond as the hallmark of outdoor quality, and manufacturers found themselves in an uncomfortable position: they knew their own membranes were competitive, sometimes better, but without the Gore-Tex label, their flagship products wouldn’t sell at flagship prices. Some brands ended up licensing Gore-Tex for their premium lines while their own in-house membranes performed comparably in real-world testing. The name had become the product, regardless of what the product actually was.

The PFAS Problem

Then came the PFAS problem. Gore-Tex’s ePTFE membrane is a fluoropolymer, and the DWR coatings applied to most waterproof shells have historically relied on PFAS, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances sometimes called “forever chemicals” for their persistence in the environment and in human bodies. Regulators in Europe began moving toward bans. The industry that had built its identity around loving the outdoors found itself reckoning with what it was leaving behind in it.

Gore’s answer is ePE, expanded polyethylene, a next-generation membrane that reduces fluoropolymer use. But the transition is complicated: PFAS appear elsewhere in supply chains, breathability trade-offs are real in early versions, and the full picture isn’t yet clear. There is also a certain poetry in the situation. Modern Gore-Tex, in moving to polyethylene and polyurethane membranes, has arrived at the same materials that smaller manufacturers spent decades developing specifically to work around Gore’s original PTFE patent. The category leader is catching up to its own competition.

The Alternatives

Gore’s patents expiring in 1998 didn’t immediately produce a flourishing competitive market. The brand’s grip was too strong for that. But it did produce a generation of membrane engineers who were free to experiment, and some of what they built is worth understanding properly.

The honest answer about Gore-Tex alternatives is this: most of them share the same fundamental physics problem. They are all membranes. They all rely on a humidity differential to breathe. They all struggle when the outside world is as wet as the inside of your jacket. The laws of thermodynamics do not make exceptions for brand loyalty or price point.

But within those shared constraints, the differences are real, and in some cases they matter.

eVent

eVent (now owned by Eschler Textiles) takes a different structural approach to the same ePTFE material. Where Gore-Tex laminates the membrane between fabric layers and relies on DWR on the outer face to keep the membrane surface dry, eVent uses a process called Direct Venting: the membrane fibers are treated so that the pores remain open even when the outer fabric is wet. In theory, this means eVent breathes more consistently in real rain conditions, because it isn’t waiting for the outer face to bead. Independent testing has generally supported this. The trade-off is durability: the open-pore structure is more vulnerable to contamination from body oils and detergents over time, and eVent garments require more careful washing. It is a genuine engineering trade-off, not a marketing one.

Neoshell

Neoshell, developed by Polartec, represents a more radical departure. Rather than a microporous membrane, Neoshell uses a mechanically breathable structure, a highly elastic, air-permeable laminate that moves air through physical stretch and compression as you move. The breathability is impressive, and the handfeel is dramatically softer and more supple than any ePTFE product. The catch is waterproofing: Neoshell is highly water-resistant rather than fully waterproof, and in sustained heavy rain it will eventually wet through. For high-output activities in variable conditions, trail running, ski touring, fast alpine climbing, it is arguably the most comfortable option available. For standing in a Scottish gale for six hours, it is not the right tool.

Dermizax

Dermizax, made by Toray, uses a non-porous polyurethane membrane rather than a microporous structure. Instead of pores, it relies on the molecular affinity of polyurethane for water vapour: moisture is absorbed on one side and released on the other through a chemical process rather than a physical one. The result is a membrane that is genuinely waterproof (no pores means nothing can physically penetrate it) and breathes well in high-output conditions. It also has a notably softer, quieter handfeel than ePTFE products, less crinkle, more drape. Dermizax NX, the current generation, is used by a number of premium ski and outdoor brands and has a strong reputation for durability. It is not a household name. It probably should be.

Futurelight

Futurelight, The North Face’s proprietary membrane launched in 2019, uses a nanospinning process to create an ePTFE-like structure with high air permeability. Early reviews were enthusiastic, particularly on breathability. Subsequent real-world experience has been more mixed, with some users reporting durability concerns and delamination in older garments. It remains a work in progress, which is perhaps the honest state of most membrane technology.

Pertex Shield

Pertex Shield occupies a different part of the market entirely: lighter, less bombproof, and significantly cheaper than the premium options. A 2.5-layer construction that prioritizes packability and weight over absolute performance, it is entirely adequate for urban use, travel, and moderate mountain conditions. It is not designed for serious alpine use, and it doesn’t pretend to be.

So is there a shining light? 

The answer depends on what you’re asking.

For raw breathability in wet conditions, eVent has the most credible claim. Its direct-venting architecture genuinely addresses the humidity-differential problem more effectively than Gore-Tex’s standard approach. For comfort and handfeel in high-output use, Neoshell is in a category of its own, provided you accept its waterproofing limitations. For quiet, durable, softly draping performance across skiing and mountain travel, Dermizax NX deserves far more attention than it gets.

What none of them can do is fully escape the underlying physics. When the world outside is as wet as the world inside, breathability is constrained. That is not a failure of engineering. It is a fact of thermodynamics. The right tool for the right conditions has always been the honest answer. We have simply spent fifty years and considerable marketing budget pretending otherwise.

The Future Is Plural

There is no single next Gore-Tex. Instead, there is a spread of different answers for different questions, which is, if you think about it, exactly where the story started.

For the people who actually need it, Gore-Tex and its peers are not going anywhere. If you are standing in horizontal rain on a Scottish ridge or belaying a pitch in the Alaska Range, the calculus has not changed. You need a membrane, taped seams, and a hood that actually works. The technical shell is not in crisis. It is just no longer pretending to be something it isn’t.

For the people who want performance without the aesthetic, the alternatives have never been better. Non-Gore membranes tuned for comfort and drape. Two-layer shells that are lighter, quieter, and cheaper. Softshells with high water resistance that prioritize movement over absolute waterproofness. The idea that “good enough” waterproofing with genuinely better comfort might be the right answer for most people, most of the time, is finally getting the hearing it deserves.

For the people who want their jacket to look like clothing, the old answers are new again. Ventile is being rediscovered by niche outdoor brands and fashion labels who want performance that looks matte and moves like fabric. Waxed cotton is leaning into its patina, its smell, its frank acknowledgment that it is a material with a history. Burberry gabardine, Loro Piana’s Storm System, densely woven wools with hidden membranes: the idea that a waterproof jacket should look like a waterproof jacket rather than a piece of technical equipment is finding its audience.

And then there are the hybrids, the jackets that are starting to ask whether the whole category needs rethinking. Waterproof membrane on the shoulders and hood, wool or softshell everywhere else. Denim with hidden stretch and water resistance. Shells designed to layer cleanly over knitwear rather than replace it. More a system of pieces that work together and look, individually, like clothes.

What the Gut Parka Knew

Look at the full arc of this story and something becomes clear.

The Aleut makers who sewed sea lion intestines into hooded anoraks were not working toward Gore-Tex. They were working toward the same thing Gore-Tex was working toward: a membrane that blocked liquid water while letting vapour through, light enough to wear, durable enough to trust your life to. They got there first, and in some respects, better than anything that followed for the next several centuries.

The history of the waterproof jacket is not a straight line from primitive to sophisticated. It is a series of different answers to the same question, each shaped by the materials available, the problems being solved, and the culture doing the solving. Rubber. Oil. Cotton so tightly woven it seals itself. A polymer stretched until it became a membrane. And before all of them: an intestine, a needle, and a knowledge of the sea that took generations to accumulate.

The perfect waterproof jacket still doesn’t exist. It probably never will, because “perfect” depends entirely on what you’re doing, where you’re doing it, and what you’re willing to carry, spend, and leave behind.

But the search has produced some extraordinary things. And it is far from over.

The Aleut gut parka tradition is documented by the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center. Ventile fabric is still produced by Talbot Weaving in the UK. eVent, Neoshell, Dermizax, and Pertex Shield are available across a range of brands at varying price points.

The post The Strange and Wonderful Evolution of the Waterproof Jacket appeared first on Carryology.

You’re face-to-face with your climbing partner, trying to think clearly, trying to work out whether you can save yourself, save the team, save anyone. But all that comes out is: “Everyone alive?” Your teammate’s breath is on your face: “I’m suffering”, she whispers. Then it lands: neither of you can move. Voices erupt and suddenly, mercifully, hands are on you. Then ice axes. Digging. Fast. Bodies are being pulled out one by one. You mutter something in Japanese. The Sherpa rescuing you probably doesn’t understand the words, but somehow he gets your meaning. “All members safe,” he replies in English. You’re carried into a Sherpa tent. Voices shout instructions over each other in the brutal -20°C weather outside. Who’s in the worst shape? Who needs aid? And then you realize — that person is you.

This was the first all-women team to climb Everest. 15 Japanese mountaineers, five years of meticulous planning, saving, and giving every last ounce of time and energy they had — smashed by an avalanche as they slept at camp 2. Because she was the farthest from the avalanche when it hit, climbing leader Junko Tabei ended up at the bottom of a pile of tents, equipment, and human bodies. The campsite was wreckage, but by some miracle it was true. Everyone was alive.

1975 — the year Junko’s team embarked on Everest — was a time of political and technological growth in Japan. And yet, only 30 years since the vote for women had passed, gender roles were still sorely apparent. Long before the outdoor industry made technical systems a sales pitch, Junko Tabei was building her own path to the highest places on earth by simply not taking no for an answer. She knew that climbing wasn’t a sport that cares if you’re a man or a woman. Not when you’re up there on the mountain. “What elated me most [about climbing] was the fact that if I kept walking, no matter how fast, or slow, I would arrive at a place I had never been before.”

Born in the Fukushima area Miharu in 1939, Tabei loved their small Japanese hometown that came alive with colour in springtime. Her family ran a humble printing business and her childhood was a playground of rope swings on blossoming hillside trees, running around near the trailhead of Fudo-Yama mountain. One of seven children and the youngest girl, she was considered a small and weak child, never growing beyond the adult height of five feet. Because of this, she ventured toward music as a kid, considering the possibility of becoming a singer. But a school trip and hike up Nasudake peak in Nikko National Park changed Tabei’s path forever: the view from the top and the nature that sprawled before her was a feeling she wanted to keep.

University in Tokyo in the late 50s saw Tabei shack up in a girls-only dorm hosting six to a room. Notoriously strict on visitors, bedtime, speaking, and eating, Tabei later attributed this level of discipline to helping her on the mountains, yet at the time it made her depressed and withdrawn. After the death of her sister to leukemia, and the early death of her father to a work accident, Tabei developed a thick skin and rebellious nature, redeemed only by hiking through forest mountains near Miharu and Tokyo. Her father had always encouraged her to care about her health. “Hiking is good for you,” he would tell her. She stayed at school but spent her weekends climbing in nature and letting thoughts of her father drift through her mind.

Tabei beat 200 applicants to earn a job straight out of university as an editor with academic giant The Physical Society of Japan. She was treated like an equal and happily accepted pay that covered rent and food, scrounging any leftover funds to acquire a pair of second-hand overboots that made her feel ‘like a real mountaineer’. She joined local climbing groups with male counterparts, ignoring the rumour mill and eventually becoming comfortable sleeping alongside men in tents. She learned language like ‘piton’ and ‘carabiner’ and began to understand there were different ways up a mountain. That you could challenge yourself with more difficult faces.

For years, she climbed with different groups, each a stepping stone to tougher climbs and different conditions. Fellow climber Yoko-o-san taught her how to move her body correctly. Lean out. Use your feet. Finally, he assured her she was ready to lead, and in 1969 Tabei started the Women’s Mountaineering Club Joshi-Tohan. In their lead-up to Everest, their team had snatched time away from their families wherever they could get it, applied for grants and funding, and when their allowances fell short (and they always fell short), they improvised. They created gear from anything that could lower costs – waterproof car covers became outer layers of gloves, sleeping bags were hand-sewn, and pants were put together from old house curtains. At a time when technical outdoor gear was just beginning (GORE-TEX didn’t hit the market until 1976), Tabei and her teammates weren’t just making gear because they had limited resources. They were making gear because it didn’t exist yet. You want to survive in the wild? You better make sure you’re ready.

That ill-fated day at base camp 2 on Everest, a team of Sherpas had by luck seen the avalanche coming and without so much as pulling on their shoes, had run to the aid of the women. Food and equipment were strewn and buried, ruined in the destruction. Radioing with their comrades below, doctors and team members advised Junko to retreat to base camp immediately. “The most badly injured is Tabei-san. She appears to have no broken bones but her contusions are critical and she needs to be helicoptered down.” Still in shock, Tabei frantically wondered how this was possible. Her answer? Not a chance. She yelled to anyone that would listen: “I won’t go down! Don’t call a helicopter!” Against doctor’s orders, she refused to give up on the mission, and once she’d put her foot down, every team member around her agreed: “If Junko stays, we stay.”

It took days to recover what they could of the supplies. Meanwhile, Tabei was carried between safer resting camps, unable to walk on her own. But by day five she was strong enough to meet her team leader and discuss the possibility of continuing. After almost a week of precious lost time, they got the green light. The climb would continue. Pushed to the brink of exhaustion from living so long above 5000 meters, the team were running on fumes. Huddled together, they waited nervously as the summit crew was announced. Tabei let out a breath. She would be among the few to climb to the top.

As the team pushed higher and people peeled off with altitude sickness and fatigue, it became clear only enough supplies remained for one person to ascend to the peak. Tabei looked at her teammate Watanabe – a mother from Kawagoe, just like herself. “Let Watanaba-san climb”, she said. Watanabe took the radio. “Tabei-san has better experience at high altitudes. Reaching the summit is more certain with her climbing.” It was decided. Tabei would be the one to climb the summit. She would conquer the savage peak of Everest, her legs so tired she — in her own words — dragged herself to the top. But finally, at 12.30pm on May 16 1975, Junko Tabei became the first woman to conquer Mount Everest. Or as she preferred – the 36th person. “It was surreal to be at such a high altitude, knowing there was no room for mistakes. A fall would mean death. My hair stood on end beneath my helmet, my scalp shook, and goose bumps crawled up my back.” That same week another climber, Pan Duo, was making her way up the Tibetan side of Everest with a Chinese team. She would scale the summit just 11 days later and become the second woman to reach Everest’s peak.

When Tabei returned to Japan the homecoming parties lined the streets, thousands of people cheering for her at Tokyo airport. It started a flurry of media and Tabei later met Duo on a press tour, the pair becoming lifelong friends. What intrigued Tabei on that tour wasn’t just the feat, but the why of the other women. Duo’s reason for climbing was “For the Republic of China”. Polish mountaineer Wanda Rutkiewicz’s was “For women’s liberation”. Tabei had never climbed for a flag, or a movement. She climbed because she wanted it stubbornly, badly, right down to the bone — and so did her team.

Whether she wanted to or not, Tabei’s achievements paved the way for female climbers all over the world. The odds weren’t just stacked against the women’s team when it came to the elements; they were against them everywhere. On their epic mission to climb Annapurna III in the mid ‘70s — a prelude to their Everest expedition — Tabei had waited nervously with her team as they approached entry to Chomrong. Before 1970 this Nepali village — the gateway to the Annapurna base camp — was forbidden to women. It would be devastating if, after all the blood, sweat, tears, and cash that went into their climb prep, they were refused based on their gender. They were relieved to find they were greeted with the same namastes as the men. Perhaps times were changing.

Squabbles had erupted between team members during their biggest climbs. Ego. Loyalty. Skill. Doubt. And of course, who would be chosen to take it all the way to the top. These climbs had pushed them to the limit physically – but there was often conflict between them when it came to practical decision-making against traditional Japanese stoicism. Petty disputes often put a dampener on successful missions — a lifelong weight for Tabei, as each team member discovered what the mountain truly demanded of them.

In 1992 Tabei became the first woman to conquer The Seven Summits — Denali (North America), Mount Elbrus (Europe), Kilimanjaro (Africa), Vinson Massif (Antarctica), Aconcagua (South America), and Puncak Jaya (Oceania). She was the 19th person in the world to do it and by 2005, she’d conquered 44 all-female mountaineering expeditions around the world. Her personal mission? Climb the highest peak in every country in the world. By the time she died at the age of 77, she had finished more than 70.

Unlike many of her climbing companions, Tabei lived a long life. Even after a cancer diagnosis in 2012 she continued to climb, leading young groups on expeditions and advocating for high-altitude rubbish clean-ups. She died in 2016, but her legend lived on: an asteroid was named after her — 6897 Tabei — and in 2019, a mountain range on Pluto was named Tabei Montes in her honor. In 2025 a film on Tabei called Climbing for Life opened the 38th Tokyo International Film Festival. It marked the 50th anniversary of her climb to Everest’s summit. Every time she climbed, Junko Tabei carried a quieter truth into the mountains: that innovation and a strong will are as important as money, prestige, or perfect gear. Function is crucial up there in the snow, but when things get brutal? Resolve might just be the sharpest tool you’ve got.

This feature was written by Melbourne-based writer and performer, Esther Rivers.

The post The Life of Junko Tabei | From Everest to Pluto appeared first on Carryology.

EDC

Saddleback/Love 41 New Big Wallet

Sometimes, less is more. But other times, you simply want…more. Somewhere to organize pocket items in an all-in-one carry option. A place to store all your cards at home. A rugged piece for travel use. And that’s where the Saddleback/Love 41 New Big Wallet shines. This is not a compact, front-pocket-friendly wallet for minimalists. But it is a robust, handsome piece for people who want to carry a little extra in luxurious leather style. The wallet is a redesigned take on a 2008 piece, now featuring smooth edges thanks to one main piece of leather with folded edges. An inner and outer layer of leather has been removed and the bulky credit card pockets have been slimmed down, making the wallet 25% lighter than the original. It also includes Chapstick and pen holders in the middle, a riveted coin pouch, and a butterfly closure. Multiple card slots and storage for cash, receipts, and a passport or notebook make this a handy folio-style wallet for larger setups.

Urban

Filson Trapper Creek 28L Backpack

Heritage charm and everyday functionality come together in Filson’s Trapper Creek 28L backpack. Crafted with 10.5-oz. waxed cotton, the pack is durable and water-resistant so you can confidently carry it on daily commutes and weekend adventures alike. The drop-down front panel opening provides handy access, with an interior sleeve available for either a laptop or hydration bladder. You’ll also find external water bottle pockets and a quick-access top pocket for small essentials, while daisy chain webbing on the shoulder straps and front offer additional options for securing extra gear.

SPC/LST Zenith_01W

With summer on the horizon, it’s time to reach for lighter, more breathable wardrobe pieces. And that’s exactly what Californian brand SPC/LST offers with the Zenith_01W. Inspired by 1950s relaxed camp collar shirts but very much built for modern functionality, the shirt features a microperforated construction that regulates airflow and reduces cling, while still retaining a smart structure. The T400 polyester offers durability and stretch, with a seersucker texture that helps lift the fabric off the skin for enhanced breathability. Tailored for warm weather, this is a versatile piece for both everyday and travel collections.

FREITAG Easy Riders Collection

FREITAG are known for their thoughtful use of upcyled truck tarps to create burly, unique bags for versatile daily use. And now they’re tricking out your cycle setup with three new bags aimed at cyclists. The Easy Riders collection features a handlebar bag, a bike frame bag, and a saddle bag, all crafted with upcycled truck tarps. And a nifty twist? They all convert to crossbody use for off-bike excursions too. Velcro straps provide easy bike attachment, while removable shoulder straps offer convenient carry when you leave the wheels behind. The F140 FRAN handlebar bag, F141 BERYL frame bag, and F142 HEINZ saddle bag are tough, water-resistant, and available in a choice of unique colorways to suit your personal style.

WaterField Designs Versus Gaming Sling

WaterField Designs gives gamers a multifunctional carry companion with the new Versus Gaming Sling. Handcrafted in San Francisco with a choice of ballistic nylon or waxed canvas exteriors, the sling features dual compartments that separate a primary console from a second device, accessories, or EDC items. The rear compartment is fully padded to protect the main console, while the front compartment includes various pockets to organize a second handheld device or other gear. There’s also an exterior zippered pocket for quick-access items and a Fidlock magnetic strap buckle for easy on/off wear. And for added functionality, the strap can be removed to convert the bag into a standalone gaming case.

Outdoor

Rayon Vert × SEALSON Hydrobelt

A slick collaboration between Italian outdoor brand Rayon Vert and Taiwan-based SEALSON, the Rayon Vert × SEALSON Hydrobelt keeps you hands-free and hydrated during active outdoor use, from hiking to running, cycling, and more. Three pockets provide adaptable storage for items such as a water bottle, phone, keys, and other small essentials, with external elastic cords accommodating gear such as folding trekking poles or an outer layer. Two gel strips along the length of the hydration belt help prevent slipping while you’re on the move, so the load stays comfy and secure as you tackle the trail ahead.

Haglöfs L.I.M Horizon Collection

The outdoor enthusiasts at Haglöfs created the new L.I.M Horizon Collection to encourage you to do more with less. Built around lightweight performance, this shoe collection is all about stripping back unnecessary elements to create four lightweight, all-terrain models designed with versatile functionality in mind. Tough, water-resistant ripstop uppers and trusty Vibram soles keep adventures on solid footing, with Gore-Tex weather protection helping you embrace more inclement conditions. The collection features the L.I.M Horizon GTX Low for waterproof, fast-paced performance, the L.I.M Horizon Low for lightweight breathability across quick hikes and everyday use, the L.I.M Horizon Hike GTX Mid for adaptable waterproof excursions on and off the trail, and the L.I.M Horizon Hike Light Mid for lightweight breathability in warm and dry environments.

Snow Peak Micro Hozuki

Illumination is a key element of many carry setups and the Snow Peak Micro Hozuki is an easy addition to both urban and outdoor setups. A pint-sized take on their most popular light, the Micro Hozuki attaches conveniently to a keychain or tent zipper or slips inside a pocket, ready for EDC, travel, and outdoor use. It comes in three colorways, includes a handy hook, has an IPX5 waterproof rating, and offers 27 lumens on the high mode.

Travel

Danner x Osprey Travel Collaboration

Your bag and your footwear are arguably the two most important pieces that influence how flexible you can be on your travels. And with their new collaboration, Danner and Osprey aim to maximize this flexibility so you can move from the airport to outdoor trails and city streets alike with ease. The limited-edition collection includes refined takes on the Osprey Farpoint/Fairview Travel Pack and the Danner N45 MAX hiker. Features include premium trims, enhanced hardware, and a custom Boot Bin shoe compartment on the backpacks, as well as special colorways and NanoFly performance fabric (high-tenacity nylon reinforced with UHMWPE ripstop) across the shoes and bags. The Farpoint 40 provides a men’s/unisex fit, while the Fairview 40 offers a women-specific fit. Additionally, the N45 Max comes in size options for both men and women.

Carl Friedrik Aluminium Carry-on

Looking to travel in style without sacrificing functionality? Carl Friedrik have rolled out their suave Aluminium collection, crafted with a durable aluminium alloy that makes this their hardest-wearing collection to date. Nodding to earlier eras where travel was as much about artful style as it was practicality, the collection pairs an anodized aluminium shell with vegetable-tanned leather detailing, creating eye-catching aesthetics and travel-ready toughness in one. Additional features include TSA-approved combination locks, Hinomoto 360-degree spinner wheels, and steel-reinforced corners, wheels, and hinges for impact resistance. The first release is the Carry-on 38L cabin suitcase, with additional pieces set for release in late 2026.

Carl Friedrik Large Carry-on

In addition to its aluminium release, Carl Friedrik has been busy expanding its Hybrid collection with a larger cabin case. The Large Carry-on offers a 49L capacity, around 20% larger than the standard Carry-on. The suitcase is aimed at travelers looking to embrace one-bag travel, finding the sweet spot between spacious volume that foregoes the need for a personal item, while still accommodating carry-on use. Backed by a lifetime guarantee, it’s built with an impact-resistant Makrolon polycarbonate shell and an aluminium lock frame, and paired with either Chocolate or Cognac vegetable-tanned leather detailing.

Topo Designs Global Pro Travel Roller Bag

Topo Designs deliver smooth travels with their Global Pro Travel Roller Bag, dishing up an assortment of useful features in a tough piece primed for various travel needs. The 35L roller bag is built with dual ripstop fabric and a molded recycled PC plastic back panel and includes spinner wheels for easy maneuverability. A customizable interior webbing cinch system and external pockets keep gear organized, with weatherproof YKK zippers for access. Designed to suit carry-on use for most airlines, this is a durable and practical travel buddy for adventures near and far.

Photography

Mission Workshop Camera Core System

Mission Workshop leans into the power of modularity with their Camera Core System, an adaptable approach to carrying photography and everyday gear. The system revolves around the Capsule Pro, a camera insert with an impact-absorbing foam core, a Velcro-compatible lining, and customizable foam dividers to adapt to different loads. The weather-resistant camera insert has multiple grab handles and can be used as a standalone piece. Alternatively, it also fits inside the Mission Workshop Meridian and Control Packs or a Pelican 1510 case. For a smaller option, there’s the Capsule Pro Compact, which also functions as a standalone piece or can be paired with Mission Workshop’s Meridian, Control, Sanction, Fitzroy, Vandal, and Arkiv packs. Plus, there’s also the LandSpeeder Tripod Module, a modular option that pairs with the Meridian Backpack and accommodates a variety of tripod sizes. The Camera Core System is available to pre-order now at a 15% discount, with discounts also available when purchasing the Meridian + Capsule Pro or Control + Capsule Pro.

The post April’s Top New Gear Picks | Upgrade Your Carry Setup appeared first on Carryology.

A sling bag.

Today, we fix that.

Introducing the Bellroy x Carryology Essentials Sling — the first bag to join the CE family, and honestly, one we’ve been dreaming about for a while.

< Score the Bellroy x Carryology Essentials Sling >

The Essentials Program

If you’ve been following the CE program, you know the drill. Every release is a deliberate choice — a leading piece of gear in its category, taken to the design table and reimagined. No compromises.

For our first bag, we wanted a sling. A complete all-rounder. A piece that covers the bases for daily urban carry and stretches out into the outdoors and travel. 

For this project, we decided to work towards a hybrid. A mashup of two of Bellroy’s most-loved slings — the Venture and the Lite — with a couple of nods to the much-loved Chimera, too. 

We placed heavier, more technical body fabric where you need durability. Lighter, flexible Dura Lite Nylon where you need give. Upgraded hardware throughout. A smarter pocket layout. And a strap that’s overbuilt in all the right ways. 

4 liters of thoughtfully packed carry. This is the Essentials Sling.

Minimal and Sleek

Like every CE product before it, aesthetics were non-negotiable. The Essentials Sling had to look the part — clean, technical, timeless. 

Two subdued colorways (Black and Fog) with a clean exterior with smooth lines and a silhouette that suits any fit or environment. The kind of bag that works equally well jumping on the subway, exploring a new city, or riding shotgun next to a bigger travel pack.

And yes — there’s a little pop of orange in there. You knew it was coming.

Best of Both Worlds

Here’s the thing about the Venture and the Lite. They each do something really well. The Venture brings rugged performance and structure. The Lite brings compressibility and a nimble, go-anywhere feel. For years, we’ve wanted them to collide in the best way. 

This is the result. 

The Essentials Sling uses Bellroy’s Baida Nylon for the main body — the same technical recycled fabric you’ll find on the Apex backpack, developed at a specialist mill in South Korea. It’s tough, it’s water-resistant, and it looks incredible. Where the bag needs to flex and compress, Dura Lite Nylon steps in, forming an auto-compression gusset that lets the bag breathe and adapt to whatever you’re carrying that day.

Rugged performance where you need it. Lite flex where you want it. Best of both worlds.

Strap In

A sling is only as good as its strap. 

We’ve all used slings with thin, flimsy webbing that digs into your shoulder after ten minutes. Not here. The Essentials Sling runs a 38mm seatbelt-style webbing strap — wide, comfortable, and adjustable from 750 to 1250mm so it sits right whether you’re wearing it cross-body or switching shoulders.

And the hardware? We went with the Woojin Magic Lock magnetic clasp. It’s extra-strong, satisfying to click in and out, and features a pull-tab release mechanism that makes taking the bag on and off a genuinely fun interaction. No fumbling. No fuss. Just snap, and you’re off.

Extra Details

Start on the outside. The back panel and base are padded. A quiet acknowledgment that real carry happens in the real world, where bags get set down on hard floors, knocked against armrests, and generally treated as the tools they are. And sometimes those hard things inside jut out and make carrying a chore (unless you’ve got that extra buffer).

The zippers are coated YKK — water-resistant and clean-looking, with none of the visual noise of exposed metal teeth. There’s a reflective Carryology logo on the front — tonal enough to be subtle, visible enough to matter when the light drops — and a bike light loop for your two-wheeled commute.

Step inside and the contrast hits immediately. Where the exterior is all-black and composed, the interior lining is bright — a deliberate choice, and a functional one. It’s the same hi-vis logic we apply to every CE product: when you’re digging through a bag at the bottom of a bag drop, on a dim train, or in any of the low-light scenarios that daily carry inevitably involves, a dark interior is your enemy. 

On the strap, a webbing pull tab with a pop of orange stitching to draw your eye when you’re searching for that quick release.

Pockets Please

Organization is where this sling really earns its CE badge.

Up front, a dedicated organizer pocket with interior slip pockets and a built-in key clip — your daily essentials, always where you left them. Inside the main compartment, you’ll find slip pockets, side stretch-mesh pockets for bulkier items, and a soft-lined interior pouch that keeps your phone or sunglasses scratch-free. Because nobody wants a scratched lens.

But the pocket we’re most excited about? The rear.

Sitting close to your body, the discreet rear zip pocket is the secure zone — flat, padded, with a lock-in-place slider that stays put (you might remember this from the Chimera, right?). Perfect for your passport, your cards, or anything you want close and protected. It’s the kind of thoughtful detail that separates a good sling from a great one.

Auxikko

You know we had to bring it back.

Inside, a custom leather patch embossed with the Carryology Auxikko pattern — the same signature detail you’ll find across the CE collection. That fusion of the ancient Japanese Kikkō pattern and the modern engineering concept of auxetics. Tradition and innovation. Science and art.

All-Round Performance

The Essentials Sling was designed to flex from daily use to outdoors and travel, from day-to-day exploring, jumping on and off public transit, to navigating a new city and carving through traffic on wheels. 

A padded back panel and padded base protect your contents from the bumps and knocks. Coated YKK zippers add water resistance across all entry points. Reflective branding keeps you visible when the light drops. And a bike light loop on the front means it’s ready for your two-wheeled commute too.

This is a bag that thinks about how you actually move through the world.

Bellroy x Carryology Essentials Sling Features:

• A Carryology Essentials edition, celebrating best-in-class design
• Made with Baida Nylon, and Dura Lite Nylon where flex is needed
• Auto-compression system with Dura Lite Nylon gusset for flexibility
• 38mm seatbelt-style webbing strap, adjustable for carry comfort
• Extra-strong Woojin Magic Lock magnetic clasp with pull mechanism
• Discreet rear zip pocket with a flat lock-in-place slider
• Main zipper opens from each end for ultra-wide access
• Organized front pocket with slip pockets and built-in key clip
• Internally: slip pockets, side stretch-mesh pockets, and a soft-lined phone/sunglasses pouch
• Padded back and base protect contents from bumps and shocks
• Coated YKK zippers for extra water resistance
• Reflective branding and bike light loop on the front
• Contrasting lining and stitching for visual interest
• Custom Auxikko pattern embossed leather interior patch
• Dimensions: 200 x 300 x 100mm / 4L / 360g
• Backed by a 6-year warranty

[AVAILABLE NOW — Bellroy x Carryology Essentials Sling]

Shipping worldwide. And like all CE products, this one will be restocked — so if it sells out, hit that NOTIFY ME button and we’ll make sure you’re first in line.

Carry on.

The post Bellroy x Carryology Essentials Sling appeared first on Carryology.

A different kind of thinking

To understand what Alasdair MacLaine has built, you need to understand where he came from: Dyson. A brand famous for its meticulous approach to design and engineering. At Dyson, intuition is a starting point, not an answer. You map every way a product might fail before it exists. You reduce variables systematically so you know exactly what you’re testing. You run Taguchi matrices — a statistical method for designing experiments that finds the optimal combination of variables with the fewest possible tests — and you apply ‘FMEA (Failure Mode and Effects Analysis) thinking’ , which Alasdair explains means sitting down before a product launches and asking, methodically: what could go wrong here, how likely is it, and how bad would it be if it did? Then you design against those answers.

It’s a culture of systematic iteration that produced 5,127 vacuum prototypes before James Dyson was satisfied. You don’t guess at Dyson. You test to failure, and then you understand exactly why something failed before you decide how to stop it failing again.

The specific moment that matters came while MacLaine was working on the Airwrap which uses the Coanda effect, directing air using precisely designed fins to remove the need for a brush which is prone to tangling. One of the processes explored to test the invention was electro-discharge machining: a process where electrical sparks erode material with extraordinary precision, cutting geometries that conventional tooling can’t reach. No contact, no cutting force, no distortion. EDM wire cutting, borrowed from aerospace and precision engineering, was the answer. It worked.

“I was kind of fascinated by the process and that’s obviously stayed dormant as anything I’ve used for over 10 years,” MacLaine tells me over the phone.

He carried all of that out of the door with him. Then he founded Wingback — first as a leather goods brand, then almost accidentally as a stationery brand, and now a steadily evolving carry brand with something genuinely new to say.

What’s actually broken

Most people haven’t thought critically about the buckle on their bag. It’s just there. It works. But look more carefully at what’s actually happening across the hardware landscape and a pattern emerges — and once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Injection-moulded plastic is the workhorse of the category. Cheap, light, and functional enough for the vast majority of applications, it’s what you’ll find on everything from a $30 daypack to gear that costs considerably more. But the failure mode is inherent to the design. The mechanism works by applying clamping force through a fixed geometry — and that geometry has limits. Apply enough load and you get slippage. Apply more and you get breakage. The material is doing the job, but it’s fighting its own nature to do it.

Metal hardware is a genuine step up. COBRA®, developed by AustriAlpin by way of parachuting rigs, became the gold standard for a reason — bomb-proof, tested to extraordinary load ratings, earned its place in everything from military kit to premium technical luggage. Fidlock brought magnetics into the conversation and made the everyday click-in feel genuinely satisfying. Both are real innovations. Both moved the category forward.

But here’s what’s curious: most are still built on the same fundamental logic as the plastic buckle. Multiple components. Springs. Assembly points. Each joint is a potential failure point. Each spring is a moving part that will eventually fatigue. The materials are dramatically better. The underlying architecture — the idea that a closure mechanism is something you build from parts — hasn’t really changed.

The gap MacLaine had been eyeing for years was something different. Not just stronger. Not just more expensive. “It doesn’t feel like there’s a slightly more subtly designed, yet premium offering available.” Something with a fundamentally different relationship between form and function — where the mechanism isn’t achieved through complexity but through material intelligence.

The question nobody was asking: what if the mechanism itself was wrong?

The shower thought

Here’s something most people don’t know about titanium: it remembers itself. Unlike most metals, which harden and eventually crack under repeated flexing, titanium in the right geometry can bend and return to its original form thousands of times without fatigue. Engineers call this elastic memory, and it’s the property that makes titanium the material of choice for everything from surgical instruments to aerospace components that need to flex under load without failing.

The ‘living hinge’ principle takes that property and turns it into function. Instead of building flexibility into a mechanism by adding components — a spring, a pivot, a hinge pin — you engineer it directly into the geometry of a single piece of material. Cut the right pattern of slots into a titanium bar and it will flex where you want it to flex, and lock where you want it to lock. No assembly. No moving parts. The intelligence is in the shape, not the construction.

MacLaine had been thinking about living hinges for years. He’d been thinking about EDM wire cutting for over a decade. And then, one morning, the two ideas found each other.

“When I started working on living hinges and the idea of a single piece for functional hardware, the two worlds kind of connected and it was just like — a shower thought — that’s it, that’s how you do it!”

Then came the work. The geometry problem — how many slots, how wide, how much deflection. The 3D printer running overnight. The Taguchi matrices reducing 42 test prints to 8. The FMEA thinking applied to hardware that had never been stress-tested this way before. “The concept was proven quite quickly because there are examples of flexible titanium used for its flexible properties out in the world already. It was more a question of how do you apply it to this application — it’s all about the geometry and then the details.”

The result is SOLIDSTATE: a closure mechanism with no springs, no moving parts, no assembly. Each component EDM wire-cut from a single solid block of titanium. And the self-locking behaviour under load — the functional breakthrough at the heart of it — is the exact opposite of how plastic hardware fails. “Under more load you apply, the harder it locks itself.” The mechanism works with load rather than against it. It is, as MacLaine puts it, about as simple as it’s possible to get.

The bag as proof

The Everyday Pack V2 is where all of this thinking becomes something you can carry on your back. The product spec — 21L, full clamshell, eleven pockets, floating laptop sleeve, modular sternum strap system — tells you it’s been well thought out.

The interior lining is UltraGrid rip-stop reinforced with U-PE yarn rated at fifteen times stronger than steel by weight. “It’s actually the inside that gets most of the wear day-to-day and it’s the linings on a lot of bags that are overlooked because people don’t see it that much. But we’ve actually realised that that’s the one you should pay attention to.” 

MacLaine admits there was temptation to push the technical spec further — Kevlar webbing, reinforced binding, a more aggressive material story. But he decided against it. “You’re just getting technical for the sake of being technical at that point.” 

The lifetime guarantee underpins all of it. “One of the things that we lost as a society from between the late ’70s and now is how to design for longevity.”

Where this goes

Wingback started as a leather goods brand. Then a stationery brand. Now a carry brand — and by the looks of SOLIDSTATE, potentially a hardware brand too. MacLaine follows the work, and the work keeps leading somewhere genuinely interesting.

At the end of the call MacLaine ends with: “I want to leave the opportunity open for SOLIDSTATE to become its own Fidlock or AustriAlpin alternative.” And we can certainly see the opportunity here, can you? 

The Everyday Pack V2 ships October 2026.

SOLIDSTATE is just getting started.

The post How a Former Dyson Engineer Reinvented the Buckle appeared first on Carryology.

The process is called cut and sew. And in its basic form, it is the same process that clothed the industrial revolution.

Fabric is woven flat. Patterns are cut out. The pieces are shipped to a factory, where workers stitch them together, one seam at a time. The finished garment is packed, warehoused, and shipped — often across multiple continents — to a shelf stocked months in advance based on somebody’s best guess about what you might want to buy.

It is a system built for a world of cheap labour, long lead times, and acceptable waste. And the waste is enormous. Not just the 15 to 20 percent of fabric left on the cutting room floor — but the garments made before anyone wanted them, that sat in warehouses, got discounted, got liquidated, got burned. The fashion industry accounts for up to 10% of global carbon emissions annually. A significant chunk of that isn’t from what we wear. It’s from how speculatively it gets made.

For two hundred years, nobody has fundamentally changed that. Sustainable materials get value-engineered out. Ethical supply chains get undercut by cheaper ones. The machine keeps running because stopping it, even briefly, is expensive.

But a small startup in the Bay Area thinks it has built something that doesn’t ask the industry to stop. Just to swap out the machine.

But, you see, something similar has come before…

The Machine That Almost Changed Everything

The technology to do better has existed for decades.

In 1995, Japanese company Shima Seiki introduced the WHOLEGARMENT® knitting machine — capable of knitting an entire garment in three dimensions in a single pass, with no panels, no seams, no skilled linking required. It built the garment in the round, shaping it as it went, with nothing left on the floor. In 2012, Nike used the same principle for the Flyknit upper, claiming to reduce manufacturing waste by 60% compared to conventional construction. A handful of luxury knitwear brands quietly adopted the technology for premium lines.

And then the broader industry moved on. The speculative, high-volume, low-margin model that drives most fashion has very little incentive to invest in a slower, more considered way of making things. The machine existed. The will to use it at scale did not.

The problem has been understood for thirty years. The solution has been sitting in Japanese factories for thirty years. What’s changed is who’s now trying to apply the same logic to the far larger, far more wasteful world of woven garments — the jeans, chinos, and trousers that make up the bulk of what the industry actually produces.

Meet Vega

Unspun is a Bay Area startup that has spent years building a machine called Vega. It takes thousands of individual yarns and weaves them directly into a finished, seamless three-dimensional textile. No cutting. No sewing. No eleven-step supply chain. Yarn goes in, trousers come out — in under ten minutes.

That’s the number worth sitting with. The conventional denim supply chain, from cotton field to finished jean, takes months and crosses the globe multiple times. Vega produces a finished woven trouser in under ten minutes, in a single location, from a single input.

Co-founder Beth Esponnette describes it simply: like a basket-making machine, but for clothes. Thousands of warp threads are routed into Vega’s weaving core, and the machine builds the garment in three dimensions directly from yarn — shaping it as it goes, rather than cutting shape from flat cloth after the fact. The result is a single continuous textile object, not an assembly of parts that have been cut, bundled, shipped, and stitched back together.

The structural difference is real. No leg seams makes the trouser stronger and lighter. Labels woven directly into the fabric means no itchy tag, no thread to unravel. And because the shape is built in from the start, the fit potential is significant. Unspun began its life as a custom-fit jeans company, using 3D body scans to produce made-to-measure denim. Vega is the manufacturing infrastructure that could eventually make that kind of personalisation available at scale.

The Numbers

Unspun commissioned a Life Cycle Assessment comparing a Vega-made cotton trouser to a conventionally manufactured equivalent:

53% lower global warming potential

49% lower primary energy demand

39% lower blue water consumption

Those gains don’t come from switching to organic cotton or recycled polyester. They come from collapsing the supply chain itself. No cutting waste. No overstock. No intercontinental shipping of half-finished goods.

Esponnette is clear that overproduction is the bigger villain. Brands have to guess well in advance what will sell, place enormous orders, and live with the consequences when they guess wrong. Vega attacks both problems at once: on-demand production means no overstock; no cutting means no offcut waste. You make what’s been ordered, when it’s been ordered, close to where it will be worn.

The circularity potential is also genuinely novel. Because Vega weaves rather than sews, the process is theoretically reversible. A worn-out garment could be unwoven, its yarns recovered and rewoven into something new — not downcycled into insulation or carpet, but actually rewoven. A closed loop, not just a less leaky version of the linear one. That’s what Unspun means by their name.

The People Betting On It

Unspun has raised more than $50 million in VC funding. They’ve partnered with Walmart on a pilot to produce men’s chinos, with an ambition of 350 machines deployed across US microsites by 2030. They’ve shown Vega-woven pieces on the runway at New York Fashion Week through a collaboration with Eckhaus Latta, covered by Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Highsnobiety. They’ve partnered with Decathlon and REI, and been named one of America’s and the World’s Top Greentech Companies.

Then, in March 2026, they hired Arne Arens as CEO.

Arens was Global Brand President of The North Face. Then CEO of Boardriders, the parent company of Quiksilver and Billabong. He spent his career at the highest levels of outdoor and action sports. He watched fashion’s sustainability push from the inside, and watched it retreat.

His diagnosis is worth sitting with: “Part of that is that people have never really been able to figure out how to do sustainability cost-competitively. Season after season we tried to move to 100% recycled nylon and polyester and cotton. But when we looked at the margin breakdown, we realized we’d have to price everything up by $5 to $10, and unfortunately consumers are just not ready to pay for that.”

The green premium problem. The thing that has quietly killed every well-intentioned sustainability initiative in fashion for a decade. Consumers say they care. Then they buy the cheaper thing.

Arens is betting that Vega solves this not by asking consumers to pay more, but by making sustainable manufacturing the economically rational choice. Produce locally, on-demand, with near-zero waste, in days rather than months, and you don’t need a green premium. The economics work without one.

It’s Not Just Happening in the Bay Area

Unspun isn’t the only signal that something is shifting. Vermont-based merino wool brand Ibex is making their Nautilus Fisherman Sweater on a whole-garment knitting machine — the same Shima Seiki technology the industry largely ignored for thirty years, now producing a seamless knitwear piece made to order, with no panels, no seams, and no cut waste. Different product category, same underlying logic: build the garment in three dimensions from the start, make it when it’s sold, eliminate the waste the old process takes for granted.

The Question That Remains

Proof-of-concept is not the same as scale.

The Walmart pilot is exactly that — a pilot. Three hundred and fifty machines by 2030 is an ambition, not a guarantee. Ibex is making beautiful sweaters for a premium price point, which is not a mass-market proposition. And it’s worth remembering that Shima Seiki’s WHOLEGARMENT® machine was a proof-of-concept the industry admired and largely declined to adopt.

The question isn’t whether this technology works. It demonstrably does. The question is whether the economics can undercut the incumbent model at volume — without the green premium that Arens knows consumers won’t pay.

His bet is that they can. That Vega’s combination of speed, locality, and near-zero waste makes the numbers work without asking anyone to pay extra for their conscience. That the machine is the argument, not the marketing. And that hiring someone who has run some of the biggest brands in outdoor and action sports sends a signal the industry can’t easily ignore: this time, the people behind the technology understand the commercial reality they’re walking into.

If he’s right, the implications extend well beyond fashion. Every woven textile product — bags, packs, technical apparel, soft goods of every kind — is made by some version of the same process that Vega is replacing. Every one carries the same embedded waste. And if the technology continues to evolve, every one just might be a candidate for the same disruption.

Unspun’s Vega 3D woven collection is available at unspun.io.

Ibex’s Nautilus Fisherman Sweater is available at ibex.com.

The post How a Startup Is Collapsing a 200-Year-Old Supply Chain appeared first on Carryology.

Think about it — it has been through a lot. Early origins, a massive 80s boom, an international faux pas era that shall not be forgotten, a full identity crisis, an ongoing name debate (fanny pack? bum bag? hip pack?), and then that pivotal shift from waist carry to diagonal chest carry that changed everything.

That’s one seriously eventful journey for a single bag category. And there’s no other category that’s trended higher in the last five years.

So let’s rewind and give the sling the deep dive it deserves.

The post The Rise, Fall & Return of the Sling Bag appeared first on Carryology.

Weaves are the unsung heroes of the carry world. We obsess over denier counts, DWR coatings, and YKK zippers. But the weave — the fundamental architecture of the fabric itself — quietly does more work than almost anything else on your bag. It helps determine how your pack handles abrasion, how it drapes, and yes, how it looks slung over your shoulder at the airport.

So let’s slow down and actually meet these weaves, one at a time.

Plain Weave: The One That Started Everything

Born: Somewhere around 6,000 BCE. Probably in the Fertile Crescent. Nobody sent a press release.

Somewhere in what is now Turkey or Iraq, early civilizations were already using woven reeds and grasses to construct baskets, mats, and vessels — functional objects that preceded even the earliest cloth. The leap from weaving plant fibers into containers to weaving spun threads into fabric was less a single invention than a slow, inevitable logic: if you can cross one material over another to make something rigid, you can cross finer materials to make something flexible. Plain weave was the answer that emerged from that process, and it was so fundamentally correct that nobody has ever really improved on its core idea.

Plain weave is the OG. The one-up-one-down. The checkerboard. Warp threads run vertically, weft threads run horizontally, and they alternate over-under-over-under in the most democratic, egalitarian pattern imaginable. Every thread gets equal time on top. No thread is more important than another. It’s basically the Switzerland of weaves.

The name “tabby weave” — one of its many aliases — traces back through medieval Latin and French to a district of Baghdad called Attabiya, where a particularly fine silk-and-cotton version was manufactured during the Islamic Golden Age. The word eventually gave us tabby, as in the cat. Yes, your tabby cat is named after a weave. You’re welcome.

Why it’s great for bags: Plain weave is strong, stable, and cheap to produce. The tight interlacing means threads can’t slide around, which gives the fabric excellent dimensional stability — it holds its shape under load. Canvas, the workhorse material of everything from army ducks to waxed-cotton heritage bags, is a plain weave. Muslin, taffeta, organza — all plain weave. It’s the foundation upon which much of human civilization was literally built.

The catch: All those interlacings that make it strong also make it stiff. Plain weave fabrics don’t drape particularly well, and they’re more prone to wrinkling than their diagonal-ribbed cousins. They also show abrasion more readily on the surface — that flat, smooth face catches every scuff. For a bag that’s going to be dragged across airport floors and shoved under bus seats, plain weave alone can feel a little… exposed.

In the wild: Waxed canvas bags (think Filson, Frost River, Tanner Goods), cotton duck, many budget nylon bag fabrics.

Twill Weave: The Diagonal That Changed Everything

Born: Ancient. Possibly 3,000 BCE or earlier. Found in Bronze Age Europe, ancient India, and Han Dynasty China simultaneously.

It’s 1853, and a young man named Levi Strauss has just arrived in San Francisco with a bolt of canvas. He’s planning to make tents. The Gold Rush miners, it turns out, don’t need more tents — they need pants that won’t disintegrate. A tailor named Jacob Davis suggests a denim fabric from Nîmes, France — a sturdy 3/1 warp-faced twill that the French called “serge de Nîmes.” Levi doesn’t know it yet, but that diagonal rib is about to become the most recognizable fabric pattern on the planet.

Twill is the second of the three fundamental weave structures, and it’s the one that makes textile nerds genuinely emotional. Instead of the simple over-one-under-one of plain weave, twill threads pass over two or more warp threads before going under, with each row offset by one thread. The result is that unmistakable diagonal rib — the wale — running across the face of the fabric.

The fraction tells the story: a 2/2 twill means “two up, two down.” A 3/1 twill — the structure of denim — means three warp threads over, one under. The higher the float, the more pronounced the diagonal, the softer the hand, the better the drape.

Twill was being woven in Bronze Age Europe (archaeologists have found diamond twill fragments in Swiss lake dwellings dating to around 1000 BCE), in ancient India, and across Asia. It’s one of those ideas that humanity kept independently rediscovering because it just works.

Why it’s great for bags: Where plain weave is rigid and flat, twill is supple and forgiving. The longer floats mean yarns can pack more tightly together, creating a denser, more abrasion-resistant surface. Stains and dirt are less visible on twill’s textured face — a practical feature that the medieval peasantry appreciated just as much as the modern commuter does. Twill also recovers from creasing better than plain weave, which matters when your bag is stuffed under an airplane seat for six hours.

The diagonal structure also gives twill excellent strength-to-weight characteristics. High-count twills — where threads are packed very tightly — can be genuinely water-resistant without any coating at all, simply because the weave is so dense.

The catch: Twill requires more complex loom setups (at minimum three harnesses) and more yarn than plain weave, which means it costs more to produce. The diagonal structure also means the fabric has a “technical face” and a “technical back” — it’s directional, which adds complexity in cutting and sewing. And while twill resists abrasion well, it can snag more readily than plain weave because of those longer thread floats.

In the wild: Denim (3/1 twill), gabardine, chino, herringbone, many woven nylon bag fabrics, and the beloved waxed twill used by heritage brands like Barbour and Filson.

Oxford Weave: The Gentleman Basketweave

Born: Scotland, 19th century. Named after a university it had no formal connection to (which is very on-brand for the 1800s).

Somewhere in a Scottish textile mill in the 1830s, a weaver is experimenting with a variation of the plain weave. Instead of crossing single threads over single threads, he bundles two weft threads together and weaves them as one over a single warp thread. The resulting fabric is softer, more breathable, and has a subtle lustre that plain weave lacks. He names it after Oxford. He names another variation after Cambridge. He names one after Harvard and one after Yale. Only Oxford survives into common usage today.

Oxford cloth is a basketweave variant — a plain weave in which two or more threads are bundled and woven as one. The classic Oxford structure pairs two weft threads against a single, finer warp thread, creating a fabric with a characteristic soft texture, slight sheen, and excellent breathability. It emerged in the 18th century and expanded in popularity with the Industrial Revolution.

You know Oxford cloth best as the fabric of the OCBD shirt — the Oxford Cloth Button-Down, cornerstone of Ivy League style and the unofficial uniform of every creative director who wants to look casual but also like they’ve thought about it. But Oxford has quietly found its way into the bag world too, particularly in the form of polyester Oxford — a heavier, more technical interpretation of the weave that’s become ubiquitous in budget and mid-range bags.

Why it’s great for bags: Polyester Oxford (typically 600D or 900D) is one of the most cost-effective durable fabrics in the bag world. The basketweave structure gives it good abrasion resistance, decent tear strength, and a satisfying heft that communicates quality even at entry-level price points. It’s also easy to apply coatings to, making it a natural candidate for PU-coated water-resistant bag fabrics. The slight texture of the weave also hides minor scuffs and dirt better than a smooth plain weave.

The catch: Polyester Oxford is not the most exciting fabric in the world. It’s the sensible sedan of bag textiles — reliable, affordable, a little anonymous. Higher-denier Oxford fabrics can be quite heavy, and the basketweave structure, while good at resisting abrasion, doesn’t have the tear-propagation resistance of ripstop or the elegant density of a high-count twill. It also tends to look and feel… budget. Which, to be fair, it often is.

In the wild: The vast majority of affordable daypack and laptop bag fabrics. If you’ve ever bought a bag under $80, you’ve almost certainly owned Oxford cloth.

Satin Weave: The Beautiful Disaster

Born: Tang Dynasty China, roughly 7th–10th century CE. Arrived in Europe via the Silk Road in the 12th century. Named after a city that no longer exists by that name.

The word “satin” comes from Quanzhou, a port city on China’s southeastern coast that Arab merchants called “Zayton” during the Yuan Dynasty. They referred to the lustrous silk fabric imported from there as “zaituni.” By the time it reached medieval Europe via Arab traders, the word had softened into “satin” — and the fabric had become the exclusive preserve of kings, cardinals, and anyone else who could afford to be that impractical.

Satin is the third of the three fundamental weave structures, and it is, frankly, the drama queen of the family. In a satin weave, warp threads “float” over four or more weft threads before passing under just one. Those long floats mean the surface is almost entirely composed of parallel threads running in the same direction — and because light hits them all at the same angle, it reflects uniformly, producing that characteristic glossy sheen.⁷

Chinese weavers were producing satin in the Tang and Song dynasties, using silk to create fabrics of extraordinary lustre. The six-end warp satin weave was likely derived from an earlier six-end warp twill — a reminder that weave innovation is often evolutionary rather than revolutionary. When satin arrived in 12th-century Europe, it was so expensive and so beautiful that it was reserved for royalty and the upper clergy.

Why it’s relevant to bags: Satin weave is not commonly used as a primary bag fabric — its long floats make it prone to snagging, and it’s not particularly abrasion-resistant. But satin-weave fabrics appear in bag linings (that smooth, slippery interior that lets your laptop slide in and out effortlessly), in some high-end fashion bags, and — crucially — in technical applications. Carbon fiber and fiberglass composites are often woven in satin patterns (4HS, 5HS, 8HS) because the long floats allow the fabric to conform to complex curved shapes without wrinkling. Some ultralight structural bag panels use satin-weave Dyneema composites for exactly this reason.

The catch: Satin snags. Badly. Those beautiful long floats that create the lustre are also loops of thread waiting to catch on anything with a rough edge. Satin-weave fabrics are also less stable than plain or twill weaves — the threads can shift under stress. For most bag applications, satin is a supporting actor, not the lead.

In the wild: Bag linings, fashion bags, some technical composite panels, and the interior of every fancy suit jacket you’ve ever tried on.

Jacquard: The Weave That Invented the Computer

Born: Lyon, France, 1804. Named after a silk weaver’s son who survived the French Revolution, nearly drowned in the Rhône, and accidentally kickstarted the information age (I’ll explain).

It’s 1801, and Joseph Marie Jacquard is standing in front of Napoleon Bonaparte, demonstrating a loom. Napoleon is not, as a rule, a man who gets excited about textiles. But what Jacquard has built isn’t really a loom — or rather, it’s not only a loom. It’s a programmable machine. A device that reads a sequence of punched cards and translates holes in pasteboard into physical movement, lifting individual warp threads in any combination, in any order, to produce patterns of unlimited complexity. Napoleon is reportedly impressed. The silk weavers of Lyon are not. They riot. They smash Jacquard’s machines in the street. They understand, correctly, that everything is about to change.

They were right. Just not only about weaving.

Here’s the thing about Jacquard that separates it from every other entry in this primer: it isn’t a weave structure in the way that plain, twill, or satin are weave structures. It’s more accurate to call it a method — a system of loom control that allows any combination of warp threads to be raised or lowered independently on every single pass of the weft. Where a plain weave loom needs two harnesses and a twill needs three or more, a Jacquard head can control thousands of individual warp ends simultaneously. The result is that Jacquard isn’t limited to repeating geometric patterns. It can weave pictures. Portraits. Landscapes. Brand logos. Anything a designer can render as a grid of pixels, a Jacquard loom can render in thread.

The punched cards that controlled Jacquard’s original machine — each hole corresponding to a raised warp thread, each solid section to a lowered one — were, in the most literal sense, binary code. A hole is a one. No hole is a zero. Charles Babbage owned a silk-woven portrait of Jacquard himself, produced on a Jacquard loom using 24,000 punched cards, and it inspired his design for the Analytical Engine. Ada Lovelace wrote what is widely considered the first computer program for that machine. The lineage from Jacquard’s pasteboard cards to the laptop in your bag is not metaphorical. It is direct.

Why it matters for bags: In the carry world, Jacquard shows up in two distinct ways, and it’s worth distinguishing between them.

The first is structural Jacquard — fabrics where the pattern is woven directly into the cloth rather than printed or embroidered on top of it. A woven logo on a bag panel, a geometric pattern on a webbing strap, a branded label with raised lettering — these are almost certainly Jacquard-woven. The pattern is integral to the fabric itself, which means it won’t crack, peel, or fade the way a printed or heat-transferred graphic will. This is why serious brands use woven Jacquard labels rather than printed ones: it’s a durability statement as much as an aesthetic one.

The second is Jacquard fabric — heavier, more complex woven textiles used as primary bag materials. Brocade, damask, and matelassé are all Jacquard-woven fabrics, and while they’re more common in fashion and luggage than in technical carry, they represent the high end of the woven-textile spectrum. A well-made Jacquard fabric can be extraordinarily dense and abrasion-resistant, with the pattern adding structural complexity that a plain-woven equivalent simply can’t match. Some heritage and fashion-adjacent bag makers — think tapestry-style totes, structured luggage, and high-end briefcases — use Jacquard fabrics specifically because the woven-in pattern adds a layer of material integrity that surface treatments can’t replicate.

The catch: Jacquard is expensive. The looms are complex, slow to set up, and require significant investment to retool for new patterns. Threading a Jacquard loom is so labour-intensive that many are never re-threaded at all — subsequent warps are tied in thread by thread, sometimes with the help of a knotting robot. Modern computer-controlled Jacquard machines have reduced some of this friction, but the fundamental economics haven’t changed: you’re paying for complexity, and that cost ends up in the price of the bag. Jacquard fabrics are also heavier than their plain-weave equivalents at the same thread count, and the woven-in patterns can create areas of differential thickness that complicate cutting and sewing.

There’s also a subtler issue. Because Jacquard’s defining characteristic is its ability to produce complex patterns, it’s often used decoratively — and decorative use has a way of cheapening a material’s reputation. A lot of polyester Jacquard in the market is genuinely low-quality stuff, produced quickly on high-speed looms with loose construction and synthetic yarns chosen for cost rather than performance. The word “Jacquard” on a hangtag tells you about the manufacturing method, not the material quality. A silk brocade woven on a Jacquard loom and a $12 tote bag with a woven geometric pattern are both technically Jacquard. Context, as always, is everything.

In the wild: Woven brand labels on virtually every serious bag on the market. Tapestry totes. Structured fashion luggage. Damask-lined interiors. Heritage briefcases. And, if you look closely, the strap on your favorite pack probably has a woven logo somewhere — which means Jacquard has been on your shoulder this whole time, and you never noticed.

The post Warp & Weft: A Primer on Weaves  appeared first on Carryology.

But you showed up. And you remembered.

The response to our early zines was overwhelming. Those printed passion projects, hauled to trade shows, clearly meant something to a lot of you. So we went digging through the archives.

And now they’re yours — free to download.

Consider it a gift to mark to where we came from, and a thank you to everyone who’s been part of this journey.

[Download the free zines below ]

Issue One

Issue Three

Issue Four

Issue Five

Issue Six

The post Opening the Archives | Carryology Zines appeared first on Carryology.