The best thing you can normally say about a sweatshirt is that it’s nice and comfortable. And the 100 Year Sweatshirt can do that bit – it’s super stretchy, fleece-lined and breathable. But it’s 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 it’s an upgrade.

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

Stick the 100 Year Sweatshirt under a microscope and you’ll find 4 different layers of technology that start with the material itself. The inside of the fabric is made from an incredibly dense fleece that’s 4x more windproof than a regular fleece, while the outside of the fabric is a blend of modacrylic and aramid fibres for fire resistance. On top of that there are two coatings. One makes the sweatshirt highly abrasion resistant, the other helps it shed rain and snow.

While the sweatshirt is 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 Sweatshirt changes that. It’s soft and elastic. It’s highly breathable and high-wicking, so when you start working hard it lets warm air and sweat escape. And it’s constructed with elastane so you can move in any direction without feeling resistance.

The outside of the entire sweatshirt is embedded with a highly durable coating developed by Polartec called Hardface®. It’s a patented polymer surface treatment that increases the sweatshirt’s lifespan by making it 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 underside of the sweatshirt is a soft engineered fleece, and it’s this inner layer that provides the warmth and comfort you want from any great sweatshirt. It has an extremely compact structure that traps thousands of tiny thermal air pockets and makes it 4x more windproof than regular fleeces. It means you can either wear it just like a regular sweatshirt, or as your insulation layer in colder temperatures.