The rain is drenching Darryl "Curtains" Jackson, coming down in heavy sheets from an overhead machine programmed to dump water droplets at a relentless rate of 3.25 inches an hour. "This is a nice, steady rain," he remarks, watching as the artificial drops fall from the ceiling and drain efficiently into the grated floor below.
Curtains, Converse’s apparel director, stands in the middle of a rain tower—a silvery, enclosed testing box housed within the biophysics lab at the Maryland campus of Gore, the manufacturer of waterproof and breathable Gore-Tex fabrics. The tower is meticulously engineered to simulate nasty weather of all kinds, including slanted downpours, harsh winds, and insistent drizzles, allowing the company to rigorously test the real-world efficacy of the materials it manufactures.
Even in this completely fabricated deluge, Curtains does not need an umbrella. He wears a hooded black zip-up jacket paired with striking orange and green high-top sneakers. These items form part of the Urban Utility collection, a brand-new line of weatherproof men’s shoes and outerwear produced through a high-profile partnership between Converse and Gore. Urban Utility represents Converse’s very first foray into truly technical products, and Curtains is putting them directly through the wringer. Ten minutes into the intense rain test, the jacket and shoes are holding up exceptionally well, and Curtains remains completely dry. "I feel like I’m walking on dry land," he says.
The new line marks a significant strategic departure for Converse. The Nike-owned brand, which only recently released its very first collection of basic apparel last year, is still relatively new to the clothing market. At the same time, traditional Converse shoes have never been particularly known for their rugged durability. A simple drizzly day can easily make the company’s trademark Chuck Taylor canvas sneakers feel like damp paper towels. For a certain loyal type of consumer, the shoe’s lightweight flimsiness is actually part of its enduring charm—after all, the more weathered a pair of Chucks looks, the better they often appear. Urban Utility, however, takes the exact opposite approach, engineered specifically to keep the elements out entirely.
Kicking Back
Though modern consumers associate Converse almost exclusively with casual canvas footwear, the company actually possesses a hidden history of manufacturing utility shoes that is rarely spoken about today. When Marquis Mills Converse originally founded the company back in 1908, its initial catalog produced only galoshes and heavy rubber work boots. Decades later, during the upheaval of World War II, Converse shifted production to create durable footwear for soldiers heading overseas. More recently, the heritage brand has occasionally experimented with weather resistance, collaborating with companies like Hunter to make waterproof Chuck Taylors and designing targeted lines of water-repellent sneakers under its Counter Climate banner.
With the introduction of the Gore-Tex collaboration, however, Converse is attempting to build a much more intentionally high-performance collection of goods than ever before. The resulting shoes and jackets successfully merge Converse’s casual cultural DNA on the outside with Gore’s heavy-duty technical science on the inside. Adhered securely to the upper portion of the line’s three new pairs of shoes is a remarkably thin layer of Gore’s eponymous material. "You’ll never see the Gore-Tex unless you want to," notes Doug Crawford, an account manager at Gore who closely oversaw the collaboration with Converse.
A few hours before Curtains found himself standing inside the artificial rain room, he, Crawford, and a handful of other Gore employees toured a different suburban office building nearby, where the company conducts the vast majority of its footwear-related research and development. "This is typically the amount of sweat a human foot gives off over the course of a day," explains Jonathan Swegle, a footwear engineer at Gore, gently shaking a small vial filled with a clear liquid. "It’s a lot of moisture."
Gore-Tex is specifically designed to transfer foot sweat into water vapor, allowing that moisture to pass seamlessly through the thin lining material and dramatically reducing the notorious swamp-foot effect common in heavy boots. Simultaneously, the microscopic pores of Gore-Tex are engineered to be extraordinarily small—roughly 9 billion per square inch—meaning that external water droplets from rain or puddles cannot penetrate the shoe from the outside. If the technology functions as intended, it should keep the wearer’s foot warm and dry on a cold, rainy autumn day, while remaining remarkably cool when temperatures rise.
Stretch Goals
The foundational material itself has a fascinating origin story. Bob Gore first developed the revolutionary substance back in the late 1960s when he abruptly yanked a heated rod of polytetrafluoroethylene—a polymer best known globally for its widespread use in non-stick Teflon cookware—simply to see what physical reaction it would have. When stretched rapidly under heat, solid PTFE expands by more than 800 percent, creating an extraordinarily thin, micro-porous material composed of more than 70 percent air. Gore quickly learned that he could manipulate and tweak this bio-inert plastic to suit a vast array of industrial and commercial applications, ranging from critical medical implants to durable electrical cables. Its most mainstream cultural application, however, came from fashioning the substance into a paper-thin membrane that could be laminated into garments or used as an internal lining to create breathable, water-resistant fabrics.
To ensure that the materials utilized in Converse’s new jacket and shoes are genuinely waterproof, Gore has established an extensive, multi-layered testing protocol inside its labyrinthine office park. The main testing laboratory is brightly lit and filled with heavy industrial machines designed to constantly stretch, rub, and poke at Gore’s fabrics. "We have 650 different tests we can perform," says Lynn Owens, a testing manager at Gore. She explains that while not every single material undergoes every single test, each batch is methodically abused based on how it is intended to perform out in the real world.
Consumer products like the new Converse line do not necessarily require the exact same rigorous approval process mandated for extreme military-grade gear. Standard consumer testing typically involves an abrasion test where the material is rubbed continuously between two heavy weights to determine precisely how long it takes to wear down the fabric. Furthermore, most materials spend dozens, if not hundreds, of hours churning inside one of Gore’s 200 modified Kenmore washing machines, which have been mechanically altered to run continuously without stopping. "This is the roughest environment they’ll ever see," Crawford says of the punishing wash test. Following the laundry simulation, most consumer products take a routine pass through the biophysics lab’s rain chamber, as well as a specialized climate room where rows of blazing overhead bulbs simulate harsh sunlight while industrial fans push temperatures through dramatic swings from 58 degrees below zero up to 122 degrees Fahrenheit.
Street Smarts
While such exhaustive testing might initially seem like overkill for a sneaker brand, Converse and Gore both stand to gain a tremendous amount from a successful commercial entrance into the lucrative market middle ground where rugged outdoor gear intersects seamlessly with high-fashion city clothes. Part of that ultimate success depends heavily on raw functional performance, but an equally vital component depends on cultural cachet and the elusive cool-factor. This exact realization is precisely why Converse deliberately chose to collaborate with prominent Milan-based streetwear store Slam Jam and Kanye West-approved artist Cali Dewitt to help design several standout pieces within the collection.
Urban Utility marks Converse’s very first calculated attempt to capture a meaningful piece of the growing, financially frenzied global streetwear trend. Gore, for its part, is no stranger to this specific cultural space. The company recently participated in a high-profile, highly sought-after collaboration between outdoor staple The North Face and cult-favorite brand Supreme to produce a collection of high-demand, water-slicking gear. Pieces originating from that particular partnership now routinely command resale prices upwards of $1,100 on secondary marketplaces like eBay.
Back at Gore’s footwear headquarters, Curtains explains that Converse has historically been known for being exceptionally accessible, both in terms of financial pricing and cultural reach. The Urban Utility collection, however, is intentionally designed to edge the brand into a slightly more elevated, premium realm. Converse is hoping that the strong, trusted association with Gore-Tex will successfully compel its young, trend-conscious customers to drop $400 on an Urban Utility jacket, and north of $150 on technical weather boots.
Those higher price points are unlikely to shock anyone accustomed to buying apparel from modern streetwear giants like Supreme, which frequently uses deliberate product exclusivity and aggressive pricing as a primary marketing tool. However, that high-end strategy has hardly been part of Converse’s traditional playbook until now. As the brand takes this bold leap, the question remains whether it can effectively compete within the rarefied air of the modern streetwear world. Curtains briefly ponders the question before answering with total confidence.
"Absolutely," he says. "Think about the coolest outfit in the history of time—a black leather jacket, a white t-shirt, blue Levi’s, and Converse."
