A garment worn across a range of temperatures, on a body that's working, is managing heat and moisture at the same time, and the two are really one problem: a body sheds most of its heat by evaporating sweat, so cloth that holds moisture holds warmth along with it. Once that starts the fabric turns warm and damp, it begins to cling, and the system breaks down. Materials that lie flat against the skin can accelerate this. Cloth in full contact has no air between it and the skin, and air is what carries heat and vapor away. So the vapor has nowhere to go, it condenses in the fibers, and the fabric wets out. Wet cloth sticks to wet skin, which is the clinging, and it conducts heat about twenty five times better than the air it replaced, so the garment that was holding warmth in starts drawing it off. The performance apparel world solved this decades ago with the concept of loft. Structure that creates separation between the skin and the fabric creates space for air flow that allows the system to breathe.
Turn a Penna scrub top inside out and you'll see our version of this principle; a diamond pattern built into the fabric face that meets your skin, so the cloth touches you only at the diamonds and everything in between is open channel for air and moisture to move through. The result is a beautifully functional fabric that lets heat and moisture out instead of holding them against you, doesn't cling when you sweat, and still holds warmth when a room turns cold. We call this DiamondFlow and our first execution, DiamondFlow Knit, is the foundation for our first collection.
The first collection
The collection's scrub top and straight pant are cut from DiamondFlow Knit, in men's and
women's. The under-scrubs worn beneath them are a jersey rather than a DiamondFlow fabric, because a layer that sits directly on skin under another garment is a different job. New products will keep building on DiamondFlow as it improves. That's the order we work in...material first, then design, then everything else.