I have likely sewn through a few thousand yards of Alpha Direct fabric and have been wearing it on a seasonal, almost daily frequency for over 5 years. I usually have around five or six garments in the rotation from Oct to May. I’ve used them in most of the conditions one could think of. Spring in Alaska, Sonoran Desert, and miles and miles of NEUS harsh, moist conditions. I’ve worn bare AD hoodies on runs in 70 degree temps. I’ve worn them under various shells for backpacking, worn them as sleep layers, worn them on thousands of bike commuting miles, and sewn thousands of miles of seams at work wearing them. I have washed them in top loaders, front loaders, hot, cold, whatever….I even put them in the drier on occasion.
What’s my point? I have never seen a single sign of Alpha Direct shrinking. I’ve never heard it in feedback from customers either. Yet, I often see accounts on forums of people claiming their AD hoodie shrank. This puzzled me for a while because I can’t imagine that I haven’t covered pretty much every possible scenario that might cause shrinking. So, I would continue to keep an eye out for it. Nothing.
What I have seen is sizing issues. The stretch that Alpha Direct has is mechanical, and a side effect from its design. It is designed to be a lining, sewn to an outer shell. The tufts of fuzz come off of the intersections of a sort of lattice mesh. The spaces between the tufts turn into little insulating air pockets with the shell over the AD layer. This is the primary function of the lattice, and since it is designed to be sewn to shells that are usually not stretchy, the stretch it has is just a side effect. The cottage backpacking industry often uses AD as a modular mid layer, instead of having it sewn to a shell, which is a great way to adjust for many different conditions. I think the problem is in the way that they are often sized when built as a modular layer. It does have some stretch, but you don’t really want to utilize it. You kinda want to still size it like you would a shell. The reason is, that when you stretch AD in one direction, it takes up length in the other direction. What happens is the lattice allows room to pull those yarns straight, but when you pull them, it cinches the yarns in the other direction. So, when an AD hoodie is sized like an elastic base layer so that it is snug against the body and into that stretch, the length shortens. It might not be super apparent right away, but the more it is stretched in the width, the more it’ll contract in the length. I’m convinced that pretty much every case of AD shrinkage is not fibers contracting, but this happening from tight sizing.