A while back we asked you for your ideas for the perfect midlayer. Obviously “perfect” is a rather subjective thing, and there was quite a lot of contradiction in the ideas. But we extracted a few common threads (so to speak) and passed them on to UK clothing company Freestyle. Freestyle beavered away with fabrics and scissors and sewing machines to come up with this prototype.
In clothing, complexity equals cost so this midlayer is a fairly simple garment. It’s made from Gore Windstopper fleece, so it’s suitably warm and has enough ability to keep out wind and a bit of wet that you won’t need to be reaching for a shell at the first sign of inclemency. Freestyle have gone for a three-quarter length waterproof zip, cunningly offset to make room for a map pocket on the chest. Lycra cuffs fit over big gloves and let you push the sleeves up if it gets a bit warm, there’s a slightly dropped tail and an elasticated waist drawcord.
So now it’s over to you. Take a look and suggest any changes. We’ll start you off – the map pocket isn’t currently deep enough to take a map, we think some thumb loops might be useful and we suspect that most people would like at least some reflective stuff somewhere. Remember that it all costs money, though – as it stands the midlayer would retail for somewhere around £80 so don’t go mad…
Post your thoughts in the forum – we’ll try and answer any queries in there. You’ve got a couple of weeks before we feed the feedback back to Freestyle.
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