Customer Reviews

Extreme Textiles: Designing for High Performance

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Innovative textiles offer some of the most intriguing design options today, but few design or textile coverages discuss extreme textiles in such depth and detail. Matilda McQuaid's Extreme Textiles: Designing For High Performance surveys engineered fabrics and their radical uses, from cardiac constraint socks to airbags and transportation textiles. Even buildings use these extreme textiles in construction, and Extreme Textiles surveys all these uses in a blend of startling full-page illustrations and discussions of fiber properties, performance standards, and unique uses. Whether it's architecture or art, students at the college level will find Extreme Textiles both accessible and detailed.

There has been tremendous progress made in materials science in the last twenty years or so. And a surprising amount of that work has been in materials used in fabrics. Fabrics, including rigid items like fiberglass or carbon fiber items, have been designed to handle a wide variety of tasks that previously either couldn't be done (the bouncing satellite on Mars), or were much more expensive, or were performed less adequately (sporting equipment).

This book is a review of these advances. Ms. McQuaid is at the National Design Museum where she oversees a collection of more than thirty thousand textiles produced over 23 centuries. She has written much of the book, but has gotten contributions from a series of other textile experts from London, Canada, and of course the United States. The book is profusely illustrated to serve as an idea book of the types of items that can be manufactured with the new fabrics.

This book is AWESOME!!
I love it, it is very educational!
I used it to write a presentation on Techno Textiles, and I got so much info out of it!

I have it on my shelf and it is a wonderful addition to the wear tech realm of books. This was an early one, which, no doubt, inspired generations to write the new crop of books of fashion technology now, finally, emerging as an industry. Beautifully edited photographs, illustrating wide ranges of examples of what textiles can do in clothing and myriad product and architectural structures offering the potential to expand the definition of worn.

I'm a materials engineer so this probably appealed more to me than most folks. :-)