Feeling underdressed for winter, now it has finally arrived? Fear not: Uniqlo, Japan's perennially perky answer to Gap, has a new line of revolutionary undergarments promising both practicality and fashionability. "Look cool, feel warm," the ads say.
The HeatTech thermals come in rainbow colours, instead of the usual pastel and Elastoplast variants, and Uniqlo has already shifted 20m worldwide. I tested the kit - a pair of long johns and two layers of long-sleeved tops - on a brisk stroll to the high street on an ever so cold day at the weekend, and I have to report that it works rather splendidly.
How exactly? Well, here comes the science bit. When it's cold outside, HeatTech's specially developed woven hollow fibre threads capture, say the Uniqlo innovators, "little pillows of toasty warm air". The insulating rayon mix absorbs the moisture generated by the body and converts it into heat. In other words you are generating, as well as insulating, warmth.
Better still, "Milk protein, containing natural amino acids, has been mixed with the fibres to ensure the fabric is smooth and soft." Milk protein?
As a hardened out-doorsman, I have encountered clobber made of recycled aluminium cans and waxed-paper drinks cartons, but milk is a new one on me. This is clothing that promises a sort of lactating process as you walk, wet-nursing your body, creating something akin to a hot toddy cocktail in the pits and a warm Bailey's-tinged cheese in the nether regions. And that is, frankly, a bit of a turn-on.
To me there is something undeniably fetishistic about outdoor gear: all those lightweight outer layers crinkling with Alpine kinkiness, repelling rain as if the wearer was basted in goose fat. Now there's the agreeably surgical sensation of long johns - Uniqlo's nice orange ones included - compressing tightly against legs that remain tragically un-hosed under normal urban conditions. For God's sake, somebody throw a cold bucket of water over me, quick.
