A thermal physiological and comfortable filling, ideal for clothing… and much more
The generic termPadding,at times calledFilling,refers to those products that owing to the materials used and/or their manufacturing deliver excellent results inside a number of clothing items, accessories or blankets and quilts to protect from the cold and ensure high levels of comfort. They also characterise the finished product, giving it specific features (softness, style, fashion trend).How many types of Padding or Filling are there?
We can divide the various types of PaddingorFillingavailable on the market according to the materials used and, depending on these, to their specific features:- Synthetic fibre padding: This type of filling is the result of the use and/or re-use of raw synthetic materials derived directly or indirectly from petroleum. They have the undeniable advantage of having low costs. In recent years, they have been identified as being primarily responsible for the presence of pollution from microplastics in water basins.
- Goose down padding: Thispaddinghas undeniable thermal insulation qualities. It is able to trap air and has high resilience properties. There are still many questions about the methods used for producing the feathers (as regards their quality, provenance and the conditions that the animals are subjected to) and their sanitisation processes.
- Natural fibre padding: This very wide range of paddingincludes natural fibres of different origin and features: wool, cotton, hemp and cashmere.
Why is it essential to choose a Padding more suitable to our needs?
The function of a clothing item, accessory, quilt or duvetis to guarantee top comfort to end users. For this reason, padding is of key importance. Let us just think about how our body behaves at certain times of the day and how our clothing interacts with it: a quick walk on a cold and wet afternoon, waiting for an important appointment or picking up the kids from school, the anxiety of an appointment or the frenzied search for a parking space. How often do we feel as if the heat that our body producesis “trapped” inside our coat or jacket giving us an annoying feeling of excessive perspiration and humidity? How many times, when we suddenly go outdoors or when we are in a particularly cold and/or windy area, even if we feel warm, do we have unnatural chills accompanied by what we call “cold sweat”?The passage from Padding to Thermal Padding and Thermal Physiological Comfort
The word ‘padding’ has too often been associated with the concept of heat and/or thermal protection for purely commercial purposes. The concept of thermal padding and/or warm padding needs to be critically examined with a modern approach, based on the changing requests for increasingly higher levels of performance onfabrics, padding and clothing items. The objective analysis of a series of measurable variables has led to defining a new way of conceiving padding as Thermal-regulating padding by studying the related level of Thermal physiological comfortassociated with it.
