What are the requirements of a modern-day suit?

Suits form an integral part of our everyday lives.
Indeed, suits have the power to influence a business person’s thoughts and performance—if business is a battlefield, then suits are the armor.
The fit, the stretch, the sewing method—just as an athlete is attentive when choosing his or her racewear, so a business person takes care when choosing his or her suit.
It is for this reason that, in recent years, not only the design of a suit but its functionality has come to be highly valued.

Customers demand many things of their suits. As a maker of suits, it is essential that AOKI embraces the challenge of combining two seeming contradictory qualities: “style” and “comfort.”

Collaborative research with a unique institution

Suits are required to be both stylish and comfortable, but comfort is experienced differently by different wearers.
Accordingly, we set out to study comfort from a scientific perspective. Our goal was to establish an objective way of measuring comfort, enabling us to deliver exceptional comfort to every customer. It was here that we joined forces with Shinshu University.
There are 788 universities in Japan, but Shinshu University is the only one that has a Faculty of Textile Science and Technology (correct as of FY2021, according to the April 2021 issue of “This Month’s Perspective,” published by the Obunsha Educational Information Center).

In 2003, AOKI commenced joint research into the comfort of suits with the Shinshu University Faculty of Textile Science and Technology. In so doing, we became the only suit-manufacturer to partner with the faculty in an industry-academia collaboration.
Together the faculty’s Department of Advanced Textile and Kansei Engineering, we continue to study the science of suit comfort.
We evaluate the impact that raw materials, threads, fabrics, dyes, sewing methods, and textile products have on human perceptions of comfort.

The three elements of comfort

As a result of this joint research, AOKI became the first organization in the world to quantify suit comfort.
This is just one of the successes of our industry-academia collaboration.

“Ease of Movement,” “Texture,” and “Internal Climate (internal temperature and humidity levels).”
These three elements determine how comfortable a person perceives clothing to be.
Accordingly, at AOKI we started actively researching “Ease of Movement”—a quality that is critical in every part of a suit, but in the jacket in particular. We carefully identified how the suit created stress on different points of the body.
This was unprecedented research—as such, there were no prior experiments we could reference.
Everything was new to us; we proceeded with caution, and with care.
It took us four years to establish our system of quantifying comfort, but we finally succeeded in creating a new “measure” for suit manufacturing.

Identifying the keys to comfort

The success of our system for quantifying comfort can be seen in every aspect of our suits, but our attention to detail is perhaps most evident in the arm holes.

As part of our research, we took countless measurements of how human muscles moved—with a particular focus on the easily repeatable motion of “horizontal adduction.” We placed compression sensors on the body, and analyzed where on the body of the jacket, and to what degree, the movement of the arm created pressure.
The arm holes link the jacket sleeves and jacket body, and are key to its comfort. Repeating and analyzing this same movement countless times was therefore an essential part of our research.

Fit the suit to the body

In our research, we used jackets made with lattice-patterned fabrics. When the arms are raised, or bent, or thrust forward, this lattice pattern makes it easier to identify which parts of the jacket are affected; it serves as a sort of scale, revealing the degree of stress placed on each part of the jacket. It aided us in our pursuit of the ultimate comfort—a suit that does not restrict its wearer’s movements.
Every aspect of our research was geared toward ensuring that the ease of movement of our jackets directly improved the wearer’s comfort.
In this way, we ascertained that the design of the arm holes had a significant impact on the comfort of the suit.

It is possible to quantify the comfort of a suit.
And the results of our industry-academia collaboration are also reflected in other aspects of our suits—including pattern-making—and helping us deliver superior suits to our customers.

“It is possible to combine style and comfort”
Suits are designed to be worn for extended periods of time; for this very reason, at AOKI we are continually seeking ways to improve the comfort of our suits from diverse perspectives.

For the joy of wearing suits.