The best book I know on high tech clothing design is Spacesuit from MIT Press[0]. Great story of how the engineers and designers at a women's underwear company

The best book I know on high tech clothing design is Spacesuit from MIT Press[0]. Great story of how the engineers and designers at a women's underwear company (Playtex) massively outperformed all the "military armor" inspired hard-shell suit designs put forward by the favorites of the ex-military-aviation guys running the space flight program at the time. As someone who has built high-grade muscle and body simulations for the film industry, trying to respond well to the full range of motions and deformations of the human body is definitely a non-trivial engineering challenge. In men's fashion, for example, Italian cut pants look great when you wear them but the front pockets are guaranteed to lose any coins you're wearing when you sit down because the engineering tradeoff swung too far one way and didn't address enough issues the other way (the issue has to do with the way the inner pocket structure is anchored to the seam of the pants, so it never gets out of place but also is forced to tilt the wrong direction dumping its contents if you sit on an overstuffed couch). The spacesuit designers had to get every part of the body right (though as anyone who has watched The Right Stuff[1] knows the original suits weren't actually designed to manage a couple key body functions, which became an issue when launches got delayed). [0] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/spacesuit https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/spacesuit [1] https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/right_stuff/ https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/right_stuff/