Hip Scarves. Image by Marie Verdeil.

Last year my partner stumbled upon a fascinating piece of clothing in a second-hand shop in Donostia, Basque Country. It looks like a miniskirt but is a (unisex) piece of underwear that increases thermal comfort in winter.

The clothing piece comes by different names: hip warmer, hip hugger, hip scarf, waist scarf, back warmer, belly warmer, tummy band, core warmer, warming belt, thermal brace — the list goes on. It is known as a “Haramaki” or “belly wrap” in Japan.

My hip warmers come in different sizes and are made from 69% wool, 22% cotton, and 9% elastodiene. Judging by the packaging design, they date from the 1970s or early 1980s.

Thermal comfort

The hip scarf can significantly improve thermal comfort for two reasons. First, it insulates the body’s core, a condition to be comfortable in winter. If the core temperature falls, your body reduces the blood flow to the extremities by vasoconstriction. In extreme cases, this can save your life (at the expense of some fingers or toes), but in daily life, it results in cold hands and feet. The hip warmer keeps your core warm, which increases blood circulation and distributes warmth throughout the body.

Second, the hip warmer covers a part of your body that is otherwise easily exposed to the cold because of movements and body postures. Some modern clothes cover the body from neck to ankles (long dresses, ski suits, baby clothes), but most clothing nowadays consists of an upper part (shirt, sweater, blouse) and an underpart (pants, skirt). Consequently, bending over or stretching out can leave the hips, the belly, and the lower back exposed to the cold. Even if this happens only briefly, the warm air between skin and clothes will escape to the surroundings. The hip scarf prevents this.

Some activities make the hip warmer extra handy. For example, it works great for cyclists to prevent naked lower backs, and it insulates the belly of breastfeeding moms.

Hip Scarves. Image by Marie Verdeil.

The advantages of “fragmented” clothing

Hip warmers are related to both arm and leg warmers (or wrist and ankle warmers), which are also examples of “fragmented” clothing — garments that seem to be “incomplete.” I invented the term because I could not find a collective name for these pieces of clothing. The leaflet in the box of my hip scarf also shows knee and elbow warmers for sale.

It may seem odd to wear incomplete pieces of clothing. Why wear elbow, arm, and belly warmers when you can wear an extra layer of “normal” clothes, such as a thick sweater? However, these clothes offer an advantage: they can be put on and taken off quickly without stripping down. Whether or not we feel comfortable depends on many factors, and these are prone to change. The environment (temperature, air movement, humidity), our metabolism (the level of physical activity), and the objects that we are exposed to and in contact with (cold floor, hot cup of tea).

Fragmented clothes allow for adjusting clothing insulation quickly. Putting on or taking off the hip warmer takes no more than 5 seconds: you can step into it and pull it up. That allows for micro-management of the body’s thermal balance. It may be a bit harder when you have wide hips because you need to pull the hip scarf over your head.

In contrast, a layer of thermal underwear can land you in serious trouble when the thermal environment changes. I am speaking out of experience here. My wool thermal underclothing keeps me comfortable in surprisingly low air temperatures. However, when I need to enter a heated indoor space in winter, it becomes a curse rather than a blessing. My body will overheat quickly, and there’s only one way to solve it: strip down to the underpants.

On the move

Fragmented clothes are handy while being on the move. A small package can make a big difference. For example, when I cycle to the city, I usually leave in the afternoon when the sun shines. I would quickly overheat with winter clothes. However, I come back after sunset, when it is much colder. In between, I may be in a heated shop but just as well on a frosty bar terrace.

Carrying a hip warmer and a pair of arm warmers, I now need to take fewer clothes. By insulating those body parts most exposed to the cold — on the bike the wind blows right into my jacket sleeves — I need less insulation overall. I don’t have leg or ankle warmers (yet), but they would protect another part of the body exposed to cold on a bicycle.

How to wear a hip scarf

You can wear a hip scarf in different ways. You can tuck it into your shirt and pants or skirt so that it remains largely invisible to the outside world, or you can show it off, wearing it above anything else except for your jacket. The second method is the most practical because you can remove the hip warmer quickly. However, these are not the 1980s, so you need a certain level of indifference for fashion. Intermediate solutions are also possible. I sometimes wear the hip scarf under my shirt but over my pants, which looks like I have an extra shirt underneath.

Until recently, the Japanese regarded the “belly warmer” — or “Haramaki” — as out-of-date underwear worn by old men. Traditionally, it was considered a functional piece of clothing, usually hidden under clothes and considered slightly embarrassing. However, in recent years it has become a fashionable item largely thanks to Japanese game designer Itoi Shigesato, who launched a Nintendo-themed collection. His creations invite you to show off. There is talk of a revival of the Haramaki. Indeed they are now also sold under that name in other countries.

Image: Ultra Warm Merino Haramaki, Nukunuku.

Haramaki from Japanese brand Hobonichi.

Haramaki and leg warmers from Japanese brand Hobonichi.

Dr. Gibaud’s Thermal Brace is still for sale and now available in several colors.

Pain relief & sports

Dr. Gibaud, the company that made my hip warmers, keeps selling the same product. However, it doesn’t promote it as a fashion article. Dr. Gibaud now promotes hip warmers as a pain relief method. For example, keeping your lower back warm can prevent or relieve the symptoms of lower back pain. A belly warmer can also relieve bladder, kidney, rheumatic and menstrual pains. Nowadays, people often use heat pads to relieve those pains, but hip warmers (and hot water bottles) can do similar things for much less money and waste.

Fragmented clothes are also handy during sports and other physical activities. They keep you warm during and after exercise, which decreases the chance of damage to muscles and ligaments. Leg warmers originated as athletic wear for keeping dancers warm. They only became a fashion hype in the early 1980s through movies like Flashdance and Fame. Finally, hip scarves should not be confused with corsets (which make you look thinner) or support braces (which correct a posture).

Thanks to Adriana Parra.

Related articles: 

• Insulation: first the body, then the home.
• The revenge of the hot water bottle.
• Heating people, not spaces: restoring the old way of warming

Low-tech Magazine featured Jonas Görgen’s mist shower in an earlier article. He did a second graduation project at the Design Academy Eindhoven that is worth mentioning: the clothesline that goes around the corner:

Revive the ol’ clothesline! This pulley system can move objects around the corner of a building. Following (or avoiding) the sun can help with making the most of the momentary weather conditions.

Modern buildings often trap the inhabitants into unsustainable practices such as using a tumble dryer or a large refrigerator. Making practical use of outside spaces of buildings is commonplace around the globe, from clotheslines spanning across streets in Italy to roofs crowded with jugs full of fermenting Kimchi in Korea.

It is not merely about resourcefulness, as these practices become part of the identity of a place.

In a reaction, he writes that “I wanted to think of a possibility to break out of the lifestyle that is dictated by the building in which you live”.

Source: Jonas Görgen.

“It’s winter in northern Europe, and there’s no electricity. How can you dry your laundry? One of the best places of all is a laundry room in the servants’ quarters of a mansion house. A generous ceiling height means you can have frames for wet clothes and household linen in the warmest, dryest part of the room. The estate handyman would make them, and by the later 19th century he would probably add ropes and a pulley to raise and lower the rack. No need to climb on a chair to hang laundry.”

Read more: Drying clothes near the ceiling, HomeThingsPast.

The use of facial recognition software for commercial purposes is becoming more common, but, as Amazon scans faces in its physical shop and Facebook searches photos of users to add tags to, those concerned about their privacy are fighting back.

Berlin-based artist and technologist Adam Harvey aims to overwhelm and confuse these systems by presenting them with thousands of false hits so they can’t tell which faces are real.

The Hyperface project involves printing patterns on to clothing or textiles, which then appear to have eyes, mouths and other features that a computer can interpret as a face.

Read more: Anti-surveillance clothing aims to hide wearers from facial recognition

The sari in its modern day avatar is a single rectangular piece of unstitched cloth: 1.15 – 1.25 m wide and 5 to 8.1 m long. The draping style of sari varies with geographical area and the activity of the female, while there are more than a hundred known styles of draping. A unique feature of sari is that it changes the insulation level significantly just by adjusting the drapes, and there are many ways to drape the upper body and lower body. The drape of the ensemble depends on several factors including weather, occassion, and activity of the person and it alters the microclimate around various body parts.

The steps of sari draping in “nivi” style. Source: Saris: An Illustrated Guide to the Indian Art of Draping (PDF), C. Boulanger, 1997.

For this study we used the most popular “nivi” style of draping along with its four subvariations using two 5.75 m long saris. We draped a female manikin in two different saris. These are (1) a heavy weight poly-cotton handloom sari, and (2) a lightweight pure silk sari made in the Indian states of Karnataka and Tamilnadu respectively. All together, we tested nine combinations of ensemble/drapes commonly observed in office buildings in both winter and summer.

Unlike the western outfits, the sari was found to be a unique ensemble offering a range of clothing insulation, rather than a single value for a given set of garments of the ensemble depending on the drape. We noted the clothing insulation varying by about 35% due to the changes in drape on the upper body alone. The winter ensembles had a clothing insulation of 1.11 to 1.39 clo, while the summer and monsoon ensembles provided 0.62 to 0.96 clo as clothing insulation.

Quoted from: Versatile Indian sari: Clothing insulation with different drapes of typical sari ensembles, Madhavi Indraganti et al, Proceedings of 8th Windsor Conference: Counting the Cost of Comfort in a Changing World, Cumberland Lodge, Windsor, UK, 10-13 April 2014. London: Network for Comfort and Energy Use in Buildings. Many thanks to Elizabeth Shove.

Related posts:

• Insulation: First the body, then the house.
• Furoshiki: Zero-waste shopping in Japan.
• Caribou skin clothing beats high-tech expedition clothing
• Adapting to climate by being a nomad within your own house

Click to enlarge. More pictures here.

Modern bags might have outshone Furoshiki, but recent years have seen its comeback as a green alternative to shopping bags, thanks to the ‘Mottainai Furoshiki’ initiative by Yuriko Koike, Japan’s Minister of the Environment, in 2006. “It’s a shame for something to go to waste without having made use of its potential in full,” said Koike. Like what beauty label LUSH has followed to produce, the modern Furoshiki Koike upheld was made of recycled PET bottles that, as the Minister put it, “can wrap almost anything in it regardless of size or shape with a little ingenuity by simply folding it in a right way.”

The above graph demonstrating different wrapping techniques went viral on the internet. A wave of shops emerged to sell fancy furoshiki. The Minister’s statement holds some truism because a furoshiki does wrap up almost anything of all shapes and fragility – from vegetables to bottles, from wine glasses to eggs, from a baby to a dog. Besides its diversity, Furoshiki is a great alternative to adopt also because of its portability, leaving almost no room for excuses like ‘I forgot to bring my own bag’. Most of the time very decorative because Japanese treat it as an artistic craft, a furoshiki makes a great scarf, headband or pocket square.

Light and small, it comfortably fits in your pocket or day bag, whilst some furoshiki clothes are big enough to a bag whose form you can change every other day. A personal experiment proves that it helps encourage shoppers to opt for less- or un-packaged options. To avoid unnecessary packaging I visit local grocery stores for unpackaged tomatoes and to the plastic bag addicts’ surprise, it is very easy and light to transport. Just think about how one piece of cloth has the potential to replace all shopping bags. Does it not make it one of the smartest solution to shopping bags and excessive packaging?

This is a guest post by Ren Wan, a writer and sustainability advocate who is based in Hong Kong. She runs JupYeah, an online swapping platform, is a managing editor for WestEast Magazine, and blogs at Loccomama.

“There were no significant differences in changes over time between the military and expedition clothing ensembles with either the perception of comfort data or the skin temperature data; therefore, these data are grouped together. Findings indicate that the overall skin temperature, as well as the cheek, thigh, toe, and torso temperatures, remained significantly higher when wearing the caribou skin ensemble compared to changes observed when wearing the military or expedition clothing ensembles.”

Comparison of traditional and manufactured cold weather ensembles (PDF), Jill Oakes, in Climate Research, February 23, 1995. The paper might be a bit outdated, but it is interesting to read. Picture: Inuit woman’s winter suit, pre-1927 at Liverpool Museums. More about caribou skin clothing at Gates of the Arctic. Thanks to Jon Freise.

Related: Insulation: first the body, then the home.

“A highly unusual bicycle, designed to help recycle unwanted woollen clothes, unravels any clothing item back into its pre-knitted form. It has been selected as one of the best student design projects of 2012 by the British National Centre for Craft and Design.”

“The un-knitting machine is based on pedal power and built around an old bicycle frame. The un-knitter sits on a chair pedalling and wool passes through steam coming out of a kettle before being collected on a spindle. The machine was designed by Imogen Hedges, a student at Kingston University.” Read more. Via Treehugger.

Related:

• Pedal powered wool carding machine
• Rocking chair knits winter hats
• Pedal powered electronic waste recycling machine
• When low-tech goes IKEA
• Pedal powered farms and factories: the forgotten future of the stationary bicycle
• The short history of early pedal powered machines

“A bioregional supply chain known as a Fibershed aims to bring a thriving local alternative to conventional textile manufacturing systems and to support communities in reviving, sustaining, and networking their raw material base with skilled design and artisanal textile talent.”

“The Fibershed project began in 2010 with a one-year challenge to create an experimental wardrobe from fibers, dye plants, and local labor all sourced from within 150 miles of the project headquarters. As the wardrobe was constructed over the one-year period, so, too, was the network of artisans and farmers responsible for its creation.”

“The garments were primarily hand-constructed. The rural region proved to be rich in raw materials: word-class alpaca, the finest merino wools, color-grown cottons, and the softest angora. The design talent from the urban sector was abundant in skills, experience, and passion. Many of the essential elements necessary to engage a bioregional supply were in place: the animals, plants and people. However, the necessary machinery to produce conventional clothing was nowhere to be found. The group relied on time-honored skills that artisans throughout time have relied upon to make cloth: spinning wheels, knitting needles, and floor looms.”

“We at Fibershed hope our model can serve as a guide for other communities interested in increasing their resiliency and self-sufficiency. We also hope it offers inspiration that sustainable, local solutions for almost any product or service can be successfully developed by those willing to dream big and put in the sweat work to make it a reality.”

Read more: Fibershed – local fibers, local dyes, local labor. Via Energy Bulletin.