The Lab-Engineered, Water-Resistant Dress Pants of the Future

Nice clothes usually aren’t built to do much more than look good. They’re inconvenient to clean, hard to take care of, rarely very comfortable, and one stray drop of ketchup can ruin them forever. If you sweat a lot, they’re not exactly built to cover up that mess, either.

Professional attire should be as comfortable, machine-washable, and sweat-camouflaging as your favorite Zubaz pants, right? That’s what the Ministry of Supply thinks, and they’re using space-age materials and manufacturing techniques to make it happen. The nine-person, Boston-based team creates office wear with technology and testing procedures that are normally reserved for performance sportswear.

In their labs, they use thermal tests to study how clothes interact with body heat and use skin-movement analysis tools to help eliminate blisters. Their clothes are made with futuristic tech, too. For example, the company’s Atmos T-shirt is knitted with a 3-D printer-like machine; the different textures and venting patches on the shirt are part of a continuous piece of fabric rather than sewn-in panels.

The company also makes a button-down dress shirt called the Apollo that uses a NASA-engineered form of polyester that pulls heat away from the body when it’s warm and keeps it locked in when it’s cold. They make socks with heat vents and carbonized coffee grounds woven into them, because coffee grounds are effective odor-absorbers. (The socks don’t smell like coffee. I checked.)

Ministry of Supply’s latest product comes in the form of the Aviator chino pants, which look like normal dress pants from afar but show their high-tech secrets once you get up close. They’re sort of stretchy — the material feels more elastic than cotton but not as stretchy as spandex — and they have a practically invisible ventilation system throughout the crotch.

The coolest thing about them is that they have a slick-coated fabric that won’t get wet in the rain. The pants also feel like they’re ketchup-proof; if you spill anything on them, it will probably just wipe right off with a napkin. They’re machine-washable in cold water.

At $118 per pair, they’re pricey for a pair of pants, but they’re probably a lot more durable and easy to take care of than the higher-end business wear you’ll find in the same price range. They’re available in a light khaki, charcoal gray, and navy blue.