NEED TO KNOW
COMPLEXITY
01 Being a bike jacket is a complex job. It needs to keep out the cold without making you overheat, and it should prevent rain from getting in but not stop sweat evaporating out. It’s a tricky proposition, even with the advent of today’s advanced fabrics. Suffice to say, coming up with a suitable solution means a winter bike jacket is as high-tech as any other cycling clothing item. Scratch beneath the surface and you quickly find yourself in a world of hydrophilic polyurethane coatings and ePTFE membranes with billions of micropores per square inch.
But why do they need to be so complex when all they’re doing is being a barrier between you and the elements? The answer to that is you, or more specifically, the heat and sweat you generate while riding. Cold and wet weather can not only make you miserable, it can affect your performance. But so can getting too hot and soaking in sweat, which means a cycling jacket and the fabrics it’s made from need to work like an elaborate one-way system. They need to be porous and gas permeable from the inside out but non-porous and impermeable from the outside in.
Preventing overheating and rain, allowing sweat to evaporate… a jacket is high-tech clothing
BREATHABILITY
Waterproofing and water-resistant treatments have often been the enemy of breathability in a cycling jacket, but that’s improved recently and bike jackets are no longer the glorified bin bags of old.
