Donrad Duncan is pondering an apricot. “Look at the way water breaks on it into beads and runs off,” he says. “That’s an example of how nature provides ideas that we try to emulate. It requires a lot of research and development.”

Duncan, however, is no scientist but the designer of little-known Italian clothing company Ma.Strum – a somewhat cryptic shortening of ‘Mastering the Rhythm of Life’. Nor is soft fruit his only inspiration.

The aerospace and automotive industries also throw up ideas, such as those informing his latest concern – how to make clothing ever lighter, for which he has toyed with swapping brass fixtures with those in new alloys, or weaving fabrics in hollow- core yarn. “The military tends to have some good ideas too, though not always ones you can get to see that easily,” he adds.

Take a prototype fabric, designed for tent interiors, that emits light. “Most industries apply the latest technologies wherever they can, but much less so in the clothing business,” says Duncan, who designed advanced gear for Victorinox before co- founding Ma.Strum last year, launching in the UK, Germany, the Benelux countries and Japan, and now the US and Canada. “The object of clothing design needs to be much more about benefiting the user – and I say ‘user’ rather than ‘customer’. So I spend a lot of time thinking about fabrics, and almost never about fashion.”

Quite why this company is winning such attention lies in the surname of Duncan’s colleague, Lorenzo Osti. He is the son of Massimo Osti – possibly the most influential menswear designer most people have never heard of. Osti, who died in 2005, created CP Company in the 70s, then Stone Island, Left Hand and Production, all of which pioneered both menswear’s use of hi-tech fabrics and construction, as well as a ‘form follows function’ aesthetic that shapes much menswear today.

It was Osti who developed four-colour process printing on fabric; pioneered garment dyeing; created brushed wool and rubber wool, and fabrics that change colour with temperature; blended wool and nylon jersey, polyester and copper fibres, nylon canvas and stainless steel (making it virtually uncuttable); and even offered 80% protection from magnetic fields. Collaborations with Philips saw garments with a phone, mp3 player and microphone all integrated. His archive of 50,000 fabrics and 5,000 garments – which Lorenzo Osti has spent the past few years organising and digitising – is one of the world’s most comprehensive. A book celebrating his work will be published next year.

“But through that organising process, there was more and more pressure from buyers for the Massimo Osti Studio to begin making clothing again in the same spirit of the archive – rich in research and with the emphasis on fabric technology,” says Lorenzo Osti. “You can imagine that following on from my father’s work is a heavy load. But there are markets out there with an almost crazy devotion to it.”

The new collection features mostly outerwear, including jackets in carbon- coated textured nylon that ages and moulds to the body like leather, hoodies and cardigans – because ‘users’ will accept the prices charged for a coat – with technology being applied to shirts and trousers for next year’s autumn/winter collection. Not that, even with the Osti pedigree, progress is easy. More commercial products have to be made and sold in order to fund the R&D costs of more progressive garments in the pipeline. Timing is crucial too. As Osti notes, there are products the company could make now, but they would be so ahead of the curve, the result would be a €2,000 jacket. “We often have an idea, but have to wait for further development of the fabric to make it more affordable,” he says.

Not that Ma.Strum is seeking huge sales – theirs is a niche product, albeit one with a loyal, almost fanatical following. But a niche that is growing, in large part because the company is focusing on what Osti calls the space “between technical clothing as worn to climb a mountain, and the kind of natural-fibre clothing that most people prefer but which means you get wet when it rains. The trick is to develop clothing that is highly technical but doesn’t look it – a blazer that looks like a blazer but that works in the way a standard blazer doesn’t. That’s what we need to do so we can bring these products to market without them being regarded as niche.” One step towards this is the company’s recent development of a new cotton, chemically treated before being tightly woven, that offers full waterproofing and breathability but that feels and looks like the natural alternative.

Ma.Strum is already a leader in what it does. But if it can crack the development of highly functional textiles that look like natural ones, it will have taken another leap forward in clothing as product design – and another step to pulling in value-conscious customers. “The wider problem for the industry is simply that not many clothing companies are driven by the designer, so much as by finance, and few are willing to make the investment in research,” says Duncan. “It’s just not the focus for most clothing companies. We want the clothes to touch their users in an emotional way as fashion does, but for different reasons. Chiefly because the clothes work.

“OK, so you can’t force things,” he adds. “Fire-retardant pants? How often are you really going to need those? But pants that are genuinely water-repellent? And which feel and look good too? Who wouldn’t want that kind of benefit? Applied with passion, technology can provide that for clothing.”