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These are the OG 107 reverse satin fatigues on my legs. And these are the OG 107 fatigues. A little bit closer. This is the fabric, reverse satin.
The Trick Up Sateen’s Sleeve
The reverse satin that the military used had one major trick up its sleeve that made it the most comfortable fabric the military ever used, but also the most durable fabric the military ever used and the most wind-resistant fabric the military ever used and the most water-resistant fabric the military ever used at that time. Obviously, we have synthetics and Gore-Tex and sprays and stuff now, but at the time, insane fabric that we don’t talk about enough, IMO.
In order for satin to be that good and to have that trick up its sleeve, though, you have to do one thing to it that changes all of its characteristics. You had to take the original fabric in 1952 when it was made on the loom and go like this. It’s harder to do than I thought. Now, it’s a magical fabric. I just flipped it inside out.
And you might be thinking, “Well, it’s not actually a super fabric, Michael. There’s no way to quantify that data and show that it destroyed every other fabric that it was being compared to at that time.”
And guess what, buddy? Normally, you’d be right. But not in the 1950s. That’s when everything changed. And this really is the butt-kicker in charge of all the other fabrics.
The MIT Nerds Who Changed Everything
And I know it’s so much better because for one of the first times ever, the US military enlisted the help of one of the greatest tactical resources they’d never tapped into before. Nerds. The nerdiest nerds in the United States. Two nerds from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT. Other words, the number one university in the world for 14 years in a row. I’m from Massachusetts, so I take great pride in MIT, but I didn’t go there. Surprised. I didn’t go to Brown either, but I did get the Brown Book Award, which I did think meant I would automatically get into Brown if I applied. Turns out that’s not the case.
Two nerds from MIT got the call from the US government. Stanley Backer and Ernest Ralph Caswell, which those are the two most 1940s names that I’ve ever heard in my life. They did a bunch of fancy lab tests, but also there was a huge simulated combat zone in Fort Lee, Virginia, where they tested all these clothing in the real world. There’s a bunch of soldiers running around the combat course in smocks being like, “Oh yeah, this one’s pretty good.” And from that point on, garments, fabrics, and everything were truly never the same. And it started here.
But the real question is why? Why is it so much better than all the other fabrics? Is it actually better than all the other fabrics? Because this is herringbone twill, the fabric that came before it. And a lot of people today say, “No, this is better. This is more durable.” So, what the heck is going on?
What Are the OG 107 Fatigues, Anyway?
What’s cracking everybody? It’s your boy Mikey. Hope everybody’s doing well today. Bow just like they say in Lord of the Rings till your beard touches the floor to show how grateful you are that people are watching your YouTube video about reverse satin. Uh, anyways, okay.
OG olive green 107 — the shade of that olive green. Reverse satin — the type of fabric. Fatigues — the type of work you’re doing when you’re wearing these pants. They were called fatigues because you were doing fatiguing work in them. The fact that they were fatigues and used for work like that directly obviously influences their design. So, very wide leg or straight leg but pretty darn wide. Has a lot of movement in the crotch and the hip area so you can move around. They’re not tailored really at all. You had dress wear for that.
My favorite detail on fatigues is always these exterior patch pockets. You can get a ton of durability by putting this thick fabric that you use for the rest of the pants as a pocket, but you put it on the outside so it’s more comfortable, easier to repair, and doesn’t mess with the integrity of the pants if something like a hole were to happen. And that simplicity, that is a necessity of military design, is why the OG 107s in military clothing in general usually explodes when it hits the civilian market because it’s simple, it’s very effective, meant to be durable, and meant to be useful. That is why basically every single fashion designer on the planet copies the military and puts a spin on it.
That being said, even though the design of the pants may be simple, the fabric is anything but, and the considerations that go into why you’re using a certain fabric are not simple. Either way, that was supposed to be the transition into satin. We’re now in the weaves section.
The Three Types of Weaves: Plain, Twill, and Satin
There were three main types of weaves: plain, twill, and satin. The army used every single type of weave they possibly could before they got to satin, starting with a plain weave.
Interlacing Points: The Key to Understanding Weaves
The main thing we’re going to focus on that differentiates all of these weaves are interlacings. So with any weave, you have warp yarns like these guys right here. These are preset. They’re under tension when it’s being woven. If you look at this video, they’re already out and they’re stretched out. These are the big daddy strong important yarns. Then we also have the weft. The weft, when you’re weaving, shoots across the warp yarns like this again and again and again. And it can be done a bunch of different ways, but that is how a weave works. I’m just re-adding the warps in.
The important thing that we’re going to break down is an interlace point. So if these are two warp yarns, this weft yarn is not interlacing them right now, but this is. It’s locked in between the two. The amount of those directly correlates to the toughness and comfort of a fabric.
Weave #1: The Plain Weave
And speaking of interlacement points, these guys want as many as possible. They’re huge fans of the plain weave. A plain weave has the maximum amount of interlacement points possible. The weft goes up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down and locks everything firm.
Because of all those points, a plain weave is super stiff, super durable, really abrasion and tear resistant and snag resistant. Everything is just totally locked into place. That’s really useful. But if you’re on the battlefield, you probably want something that you can move with and is not uncomfortable all the time. So the military was like, “What else you got?” and we had twill.
Weave #2: Twill and the Problem with Denim
The most popular usage of twill is on denim. All of the blue yarns that you see on denim are warp yarns. And the reason that you don’t see the weft yarns is because we’re not going up and down, up and down, up and down. It’s not even. We’re going under, under, under, over. So for every three warp yarns exposed, there’s one weft. Twills also introduce an offset. Every row, you shift the pattern by one, and that causes those diagonal lines.
So if you look at the diagonal, you have all the warps. And if you go in that little crevice between the two, that’s your weft. Since all of the yarns aren’t super locked down and we have those floats, we have a lot more flexibility and ease of movement. So, denim is a lot more comfortable than plain weave, but it’s still pretty darn tough. That’s great.
Although, this denim 3×1 weave has a problem. Those diagonal channels really are not good for tear propagation because a tear can just run down those channels and rip a lot easier. Also, denim skews because of the direction of the yarn spun and the way the weave works. The fabric actually twists on your legs, on your arms, however you’re wearing it. Two things that we can fix by modifying our twill.
Weave #3: Herringbone Twill — The Golden Boy of WWII
This is herringbone twill. I think I mentioned that before. The reason — oh, I got — oh, I have my magnifying glass in these giant pockets. The — jeez, what is this? A comedy routine? Goodness.
If you modify the basic twill weave by changing the way you do the offsets, you get a more durable, more stable twill called a broken twill. And this one is a herringbone twill. A herringbone twill is changing the offset every few rows. So, we’re going shift, shift, shift, shift, shift. That’s a diagonal we typically see with denim. And then we go shift, shift, shift, shift, shift. That fixed some problems.
The first thing it did was really stabilize the fabric because it’s not pulling in one direction as strong. The second thing that it did is if something is tearing, it’s harder for that tear to keep going when things switch over. There’s not a channel we can pursue the entire time, which leads to the military really liking it and it being approximately 15% stronger than regular denim. So, this fabric was the golden boy of World War II. Everything is HBT, herringbone twill. A lot of people really love herringbone twill. Okay, HBT.
Snack Break (and the Best Satin Pants I Own)
Now, the big daddy. Before that though, I am going to have a quick snack break and I’m going to put on some overpants. Today’s snack is a peach-tine, which I would assume is a mix of a peach and a tangerine. That is literally unbelievable. It tastes like Trader Joe’s mango tango.
Okie dokie. We’re back. The peach-tine is making my throat a little itchy, but sometimes that happens with fruit. Never has escalated to be that bad.
But these — since we’re talking about satin — are my favorite satin pants that I got. I picked up a bunch of OG 107s from eBay for pretty good prices. And something to note is that the military had a lot of specifications of how the pants should be made, but there were some parts where they said, “As long as it fits these qualifications, do what you want.” So, not all OG 107s are the same, and not all satins are the same, but they’re all pretty darn good quality. I also picked up the most famous modern re-editions, the Orso versions. I can see why they’re so famous.
Why Satin Is the Big Daddy of All Weaves
When we’re looking at a satin that has the longest floats and least interlacing points of all of those other weaves, it is the flowiest, most flexible, drapey, fun, beautiful fabric from the list. It also does have an offset like twill, but the reason it doesn’t have strong diagonal lines or anything like that is because the offset is offset in such a way that none of those interlacing points are lining up. So, it gives you a really, really flat fabric with no real channel to sink your nail in or for anything to snag on.
Oops, I did that thing where you say the exact opposite of what you mean. So, it does snag easier than the other weaves, but with those offset interlacement points, it’s harder for a tear to just run down one of those channels like you see on twill. That’s what I meant to say.
But what’s really interesting is those lack of interlacing points also means there’s a lot more room in the weave that’s not taken up by the up and down, up and down, up and down. So with that, you can pack in way more yarns into the weave itself and make it way, way denser. When you take that density and apply it to a military sense instead of a tuxedo, you get a lot more wind resistance, a lot more water resistance. It’s easy to put chemicals and waxes and things on the surface cuz it’s so smooth. And that density really, really boosts up durability so it’s not way behind the other weaves.
Stanley Backer’s Big Idea: Flip the Fabric
But there is also one more thing from Backer. Well, I don’t know if it was from Backer, but Backer was the guy testing it and saying like, “You should do this.” Stanley Backer, you know him, the mechanical engineer that would later become a professor at MIT in the ’60s. Remember Stanley Backer?
In his paper, he’s kind of — I could hardly understand what he’s talking about in the paper, it’s so dense — but he’s like, “Okay, the fibers are this thick. The yarns are spun like this. This is the optimal way we should do a yarn. And the weave should look like this. And this should be the overall crimp. And if we have this, it’s more breathable or less breathable.” The loom is the marble and the sauce of all these fabrics.
But one thing he kept saying in that paper was, “We’re using all of our fabrics backwards. We need to flip them and we should get a lot better results.” And everybody else was like, “Okay, go on.” And Backer was like, “No, I’m actually going to pass it over to my boy Caswell and we’ll do some real world testing to prove me right.”
The Combat Course at Camp Lee: Real World Testing
So we went over to Caswell. Caswell is the guy that wrote the paper on the findings of the combat course constructed at Camp Lee in Virginia — now I think it’s Fort Lee or something else. Essentially, a bunch of soldiers were there. They were testing denim, herringbone twill, and satin modified uniforms that look like giant smocks. I talked about it over there. They got all the soldiers, put them on this course that had like rubble and everything on it. And they were like, “Okay, guys, just uh — this is war, so just show me what you typically do when you’re fighting.” And the soldiers were like, “Okay, well, for testing the uniforms, sometimes I’ll have to like go down like this, I guess, and you know, pull myself forward.”
And then one soldier was like, “Uh, Mr. Caswell, one time I think someone was shooting at me and I went like this and I like dodged the bullet. And I’m just wondering if that’s important for your research.” Cheers and all the soldiers were like, “There’s no way you did that, Dave.” And then another soldier was like, “Uh, Mr. Caswell, one time I went like this during war and I kicked three bad guys in the head and they all passed out and I saved them. Do you think that’s important for your data, Mr. Caswell? One time I had the bad guy like this and I was like — do you think that’s important to your data, Mr. Caswell? One time when I was running downhill, I spun like this. I dodged the bad guy. Do you think that’s pertinent to your data?” Um, Dr. Caswell, sir, do you mind if we go look at Michael? Because he had that peach-tine and it’s really hurting his stomach.
The Results: Satin Kicked Everybody’s Butt
But the testing was complete. All of the uniforms were collected. They originally were going to test them before they washed them, but they were so caked in dirt and mud they couldn’t.
So they got them all. They documented. They circled the holes, measured the holes, said this one’s more damaged than that one, this one’s not, that one. And satin kicked everybody’s butt because of that thing Backer kept yammering about.
Warp-Faced vs. Weft-Faced: The Science Behind the Win
And that thing is making a warp-faced fabric into a weft-faced fabric. Denim, as we typically know it, is a warp-faced fabric. The warp yarns are on the outside. A plain weave with a messed up collar is a balanced face fabric. Since it’s up and down and everything like that, you have equal parts warp and weft on the outside. And in standard weaving, warp yarns are the money yarns. The yarn under tension, usually a nicer yarn. Sometimes it’s plied. That is the structure of the garment and really the infrastructure of the entire thing. The big tough yarn.
Backer was saying if we take this fabric with the warp on the outside and we flip it so the weft is on the outside, we can use those weft yarns as a shield to the really important warp yarns underneath. And since the satin is so dense, it’s particularly suitable for this, cuz typically the weft isn’t as good, but with this it’s great. And that flip combined with the density of satin is why it kicked every other fabric’s butt.
The Numbers: 80% and 110% More Durable
It was found to be 80% more durable than herringbone twill using the same yarns and fibers, and 110% more durable than denim using the same yarns and fibers, but only under one condition. The satin was only this powerful if it was actively being worn by a human. All right? Actively being worn by any animal or creature that travels forward. Because you can test fabrics in a lab a bunch of different ways — sideways, up and down, do they tear like this, do they tear like that — and that data is useful, but you need to weight it correctly.
And when it’s on a person, they can really only go in this direction, longitudinal, forward, backwards. They’re not doing a lot of this. A lot of abrasion is not happening because of this. So this-way durability is mega important. If all of those fabrics were tested in all directions, it would be a wash. They all basically equaled one another. Satin was just particularly good like this.
Watch This Article
How These Findings Changed Clothing Forever
And those findings and that information changed clothing forever. Not just in the military — the entire planet. And that’s actually the foundation to basically every single outdoor brand. And if you know why I’m saying that, you should continue watching the video.
One of the greatest podcasts of all time in the world of clothing, Articles of Interest, did a seven-part series basically tracking what happened here all the way to modern times. How did these tests affect everything around them? Articles of Interest, the series called Gear. Seven episodes by Avery Truffelman. Freaking fantastic.
All right, anyways, that’s about it. I will see you all very, very soon. Bye.
The Iron Snail is a men’s fashion vlog (and now article series!) starring a young man named Michael and featuring a snail no bigger than a quarter. The two are set on taking over the world of fashion by creating a clothing line to end all clothing lines. Until then, we’re here to tell you EVERYTHING you need to know about the best clothing out there, from the highest quality raw denim jeans to the warmest jackets to the sturdiest boots…the Iron Snail has got you covered.
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