tech-tiles; A handful of inspired designers says the future of fashion is in smart, scientific fabrics.

Byline: Jane Herman

My first request to visit the Fabrite factory in Woodridge, New Jersey, where designers Flora Gill and Alexa Adams had the high-tech double-bonded silk georgette they're working with this fall developed, was firmly denied. Too much of what's made inside its 175,000-square-foot warehouse is top secret, they said, commissioned by the government for use in the military and by NASA. For proprietary reasons, most of the laminating, vinylizing, and weatherproofing techniques innovated there are confidential, too. They're sorry, but an exception can't be made, even for Vogue. That is, unless I concede to inquire only about the fabric created for Gill and Adams, which is stretchy, sporty, and woven throughout the duo's debut collection under their new label, Ohne Titel ("Without Title" in German). I'm told there's to be no picture-taking, either, and after I agree to these terms, access is granted.

Inside the factory, a massive space where Boeing B-29 engines were assembled during World War II, general manager Frank Olejarz explains that the Ohne Titel exclusive Fabrite produces is made, simply put, by laminating two pieces of silk together with a strong dry adhesive on a monster-size machine that heats, rolls, and presses the pretty matter into submission (it's not rocket science, though presumably similar machines make fabrics that are designed to go into outer space). It took Gill, Adams, and the pros at Fabrite two months to get their georgette just right. What's fascinating is that it stretches horizontally but not vertically, and feels nothing like any silk I know. It acts like a very thin neoprene, but it's breathable, and it drapes; Gill and Adams make suits with it.

"Fabric is your most intimate environment," says Adams, whose interest in sport-smart fashion can be traced to her years at Helmut Lang and Karl Lagerfeld, where she worked with Gill. "We wanted to create something with a techie hand, without it feeling cold."

Using a custom-made technical textile to make clothing that appears deceptively untechnical seems a logical step from the science-fiction fashion that we saw last spring. Rather than dressing space invaders again, designers like Gill and Adams have returned garments to their natural state, disguising techno-innovation as fabrics. If the future, as we've stereotyped it, resembles robots and cyborgs, and some designers (Hussein Chalayan and Balenciaga's Nicolas Ghesquiere) did that last season, what comes next? The future of future fashion has yet to be decided, but the fabric of our lives already seems a far cry from cotton.

At Prada, mohair suits are treated with a "special" lacquer-like spray so that they take on a shiny quilted quality. It's odd-ish, yes, and to the touch it's a bit sticky, though not displeasingly so. Undercover's Jun Takahashi experimented with 3M Gene-Thermo NEO, a ...