100 Year Sweatpants

Our 100 Year Sweatpants have always been tough. But these sweatpants are the softest and lightest version we’ve ever made. They’re super stretchy, fleece-lined, breathable, and they come with five pockets to store all your valuables. But they’re also windproof, water repellent, fire resistant, abrasion resistant, snag resistant, and can withstand temperatures 4x hotter than the sun. So it’s fair to say they’re an upgrade.

Making sweatpants that can do this isn’t easy. In numbers, we’ve spent the last 3 years in R&D working on the 100 Year Sweatpants, and the material alone takes 20 weeks to make. And that’s because it combines 4 different layers of material technology.

While the sweatpants are designed to cope with some of the most extreme threats the next century might send your way, on a practical level you’ll find the thick fleece lining makes it ultra-soft on the inside, while the high-strength polymer coating makes it incredibly hard-wearing on the outside.

Most high strength, fireproof materials will do a good of keeping you alive, but a bad job of making you comfortable. So the 100 Year Sweatpants change that. They’re soft and elastic. They’re highly breathable and high-wicking, so when you start working hard it lets warm air and sweat escape. And the pants are constructed with elastane so you can move in any direction without feeling resistance.

The pants are equipped with 5 pockets – 3 of them zipped. You’ll find two open pockets at either side of the pants, and inside the right pocket there’s a second hidden pocket. It’s fitted with a water resistant zipper so you can securely store valuables inside it, and it’s big enough to fit a phone.

The pants are built with an elasticated waistband for comfort. The waist tightens securely with a heavy-duty, metal tipped and rubberised rope that’s anchored down with a high-strength stitch at the back.

The outside of the entire sweatpants is embedded with a highly durable coating developed by Polartec called Hardface®. It’s a patented polymer surface treatment that increases the sweatpants’ lifespan by making them extremely resistant to abrasion and snagging. The high strength polymers are fused directly into the fibres, so the coating can’t be rubbed off or washed out. It feels completely smooth to the touch, and you only know it’s there by the subtle tessellating pattern that’s visible across the surface of the material.

The outer surface of the sweatpants is also coated with a water repellent treatment to help it shed light rain and snow. The type of coating we use is what’s known as a C0, meaning it’s completely free of any toxic fluorocarbons. This same technology helps the sweatpants to dry out quickly when they get wet.

As well as being synonymous with outdoor gear, for the last decade Polartec have been developing flame resistant fabrics for the US military after their uniforms began melting in the intense heat of IED detonations. They work with military partners to develop combat-ready layering systems that protect soldiers from sudden heat sources in hostile territories. Our aim was to let anyone benefit from this technology.