'Iconic suit'

The aim of the suit project was to create a product that would be a demonstration
model of what the future could look like. To create an iconic product that would be
the most sustainable suit available on the High Street, but still be a suit that was
stylish and attractive to the customers, as well as profitable for M&S. The iconic suit
was our equivalent to the concept car as used by the automotive industry to
demonstrate their visions of the future. However as the innovation champion for the
project, developing solutions for the sustainable suit was not straightforward. Here's
Bradley Stephen, the garment technologist for the project, talking about the complex
construction and components in an M&S suit.

You've got your outer fabric and obviously your linings, which are the two main
visible parts. And within the jacket you have fusibles. Key areas like your armholes,
your lapels, your chest, the vents, the hems, are all fused with layers of what we call
interlining. And then within the chest piece, you have traditionally three to four layers
over your chest area to give a nice smooth finish. For each component of the suit,
we had to work hard to find solutions that met our requirements for sustainability as
well as the performance to the high standards the M&S brand demanded. So here
we have the iconic suit. As you can see, it looks like any other normal suit at Marks &
Spencer.

But the subtle difference, is that we've tried to develop this and innovate this by
introducing really strong sustainability elements to the product. The outer fabric here,
is made from organic wool sourced from Australia. The lining fabric is made from
recycled polyester that used to be old plastic bottles, drinks bottles. And the
componentry that's used in the suit has also been developed to be more sustainable.

As you can see from this mock-up, the internal components of the suit are really
quite complicated. What we had to do within the project, was develop sustainability
solutions to all of those product components. The other thing that we did with the
suit, was to make sure that we could find a way to communicate with the consumer
about the product. And what we did, for the very first time within Marks & Spencer,
was putting together a QR code that allowed the consumers to scan and find out
more details about the sustainability credentials of the product.

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