CLESSTE Turns a Work Short Into a Weatherproof City Piece With +phenix

The Tokyo label’s latest WINDSTOPPER release lands July 22, folding a ski brand’s wind science into a knee length worker sil.

CLESSTE has spent the better part of two years building out a working relationship with +phenix, and the CITY DOUBLE KNEE WORKER HALF PANTS is the newest entry in a collection that now runs past forty separate pieces. Jackets, coveralls, shirts, and half a dozen pant silhouettes have already passed through the two brands’ WINDSTOPPER line, and this drop takes a shape CLESSTE has not used in that fabric before: a knee length work short built around a hammer loop and a drawcord hem rather than the fuller cargo or military profiles the collaboration has leaned on so far.

The brand describes its own identity as one built around consuming less and creating more, seasonless pieces meant to outlast a single trend cycle. That framing matters here because the WINDSTOPPER line is not a seasonal capsule in the usual sense. CLESSTE has kept releasing new silhouettes inside it on a rolling basis since the collaboration began, treating it more like an ongoing house category than a one-off drop, which is part of why a single search through the brand’s site turns up dozens of past colorways still listed even after they have sold out.

+phenix expands its urban outdoor approach with technical outerwear inspired by its performance mountain heritage.

Looking at the release calendar alone tells part of the story. Earlier in the year, CLESSTE and +phenix put out a CITY MILITARY HALF PANTS in a shorter, more overpants inspired cut, followed by a CITY MEGA POCKET BALLOON CARGO HALF PANTS built around exaggerated pocket volume, and a DOUBLE KNEE CURVED WORKER PANTS that shared this release’s worker pants naming but ran full length with a curved leg line rather than a drawcord hem. The CITY DOUBLE KNEE WORKER HALF PANTS sits somewhere between those references, close enough to the curved worker pants in its workwear vocabulary to read as a companion piece, but cut down to half length and finished with the balloon hem detail that has become something of a recurring signature across CLESSTE’s more recent WINDSTOPPER output. Anyone who has followed the line closely will recognize the pattern: a full length silhouette gets released first, then a shortened half pants version follows a few weeks or months later, refined slightly rather than simply cropped.

huh

The technical core of the piece is WINDSTOPPER® PRODUCTS BY GORE-TEX LABS, a membrane that traces back to GORE-TEX’s original 1976 debut before evolving through a 2018 update known as GORE-TEX Infinium and settling into its current name in 2023. CLESSTE’s product notes lean on three specific properties: wind resistance, moisture permeability, and water repellency, the same trio that has defined the material across its various rebrands. In practical terms, that means a shell that blocks cold air from cutting through the fabric while still letting sweat vapor escape through membrane pores small enough to stop water but not vapor, finished with a durable water repellent coating on most pieces in the line.

None of that is unusual for a technical outdoor label. What is slightly unusual is applying it to a knee length short with a drawcord hem and a relaxed city silhouette, a category more associated with warm weather ease than storm protection. That tension between technical fabric and casual cut is roughly the entire premise of the CLESSTE and +phenix partnership, and this release leans into it more directly than most of what has come before it.

 

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It is worth noting what the fabric does not claim, too. CLESSTE’s own product documentation points out that the seams on this piece are not taped, meaning the waterproofing benefit runs through the membrane itself rather than through fully sealed construction. That is a fairly standard trade-off for a piece positioned as a city short rather than a dedicated rain shell, and it lines up with how the rest of the WINDSTOPPER by GORE-TEX Labs line has been built across CLESSTE’s catalog: strong performance against wind and light moisture, without chasing the fully sealed waterproofing you would expect from a technical mountaineering shell.

transition

CLESSTE built the piece off a classic work short pattern, then reworked the proportions from its own point of view. A hammer loop and a set of multiple utility pockets carry over the workwear vocabulary directly, unaltered enough that the reference is obvious at a glance. Everything around those details has been updated: the overall volume runs wider and looser than a traditional work short, giving the piece a rougher, more oversized read while keeping enough structure that it does not collapse into pure sweatpant territory.

The drawcord placed at the hem does the most work in terms of styling range. Left loose, the leg opening sits in a wide, straight cut. Cinched down, the same short pulls into a rounder, balloon shaped silhouette, which means the piece can shift character depending on how it is tied that day rather than locking into one fixed shape. CLESSTE frames this as functionality and design working together rather than either one dominating, and the drawcord detail is really the mechanism that lets both claims hold at once.

Three colorways make up the initial release: black, asphalt gray, and camel beige, each priced identically and each carrying the SKU family associated with this WINDSTOPPER release. The shell and lining both run 100 percent polyester, and the pieces are made in China, consistent with the rest of the WINDSTOPPER by GORE-TEX Labs line.

The black colorway keeps closest to the piece’s workwear origins, playing the hammer loop and pocket flaps down against a flat, uniform surface with little to distract from the silhouette itself. Asphalt gray runs slightly lighter in tone and reads more clearly as a technical outdoor piece under daylight, closer in spirit to the mountaineering side of +phenix’s catalog than the ski heritage side. Camel beige is the outlier of the three, warmer and more clearly workwear coded in a way that pulls the piece toward vintage utility references rather than anything overtly technical, despite carrying the exact same WINDSTOPPER construction underneath. CLESSTE has used a similar three way split across most of its recent WINDSTOPPER releases, giving customers a genuinely different visual read from the same pattern rather than treating the additional colorways as afterthoughts.

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CLESSTE lists the piece in a single free size, built to move across a fairly wide range of body types rather than splitting into multiple cuts. The waist adjusts from 78 to 102 centimeters through the elastic and drawcord combination, with a 32 centimeter rise, a 35 centimeter inseam, a 35.5 centimeter thigh measurement, and a 35 centimeter hem width. The reference model shown on CLESSTE’s product photography stands 185 centimeters and wears the single available size, giving a rough sense of how the proportions read on a taller frame, though the waist range suggests the brand designed it to flex well beyond that one reference point.

Those measurements put the piece closer to a relaxed, below the knee cut than a true short, which tracks with the “half pants” naming CLESSTE uses across its catalog for anything landing in that mid length zone. It also explains why the brand can describe the same piece as reading both rugged and city appropriate at once: the length keeps it out of pure summer short territory while the wide leg keeps it from reading like a traditional cropped trouser either.

The single size approach is worth pausing on, since it is not universal across CLESSTE’s catalog. Some of the brand’s more fitted trouser sil, particularly in its selvedge denim lines, run across two distinct sizes with separate measurements for waist, rise, and leg opening. The WINDSTOPPER pieces, by contrast, have consistently shipped as a single adjustable size across nearly every silhouette in the collaboration, relying on the elastic waistband and drawcord combination to cover a wider range of builds rather than cutting multiple patterns. That approach keeps production simpler on a technical fabric that is presumably more complex to source and cut than the brand’s denim, and it also fits with how CLESSTE talks about the line generally, as a functional, adaptable category rather than a precision fit product.

niche

+phenix traces back to 1952, when it launched in Japan as a ski wear brand built around a fairly simple, open ended goal: keep pursuing the enjoyment of snow activities and keep communicating that enjoyment outward. CLESSTE’s own product notes describe how +phenix spent its early decades catching up to design and technology that had a head start in America and Europe, eventually developing enough of its own expertise within Japan’s specific conditions to compete at a world class level.

Phenix traces its technical design language back to performance ski apparel built for demanding mountain conditions.

That ski heritage became the DNA the brand later built on. Rather than staying locked into snow sports, +phenix expanded what it calls its plus, adding new fields on top of its original concept: snow mountains, mountaineering, camping, city life, and business wear, all connected by the same underlying technical approach to fabric and function. The urban outdoor label that results from that expansion is the +phenix that shows up in CLESSTE’s WINDSTOPPER collaboration, and it explains why a shape as city oriented as a work short can still carry a ski brand’s name without feeling like a mismatch. The through line is the fabric science, not the specific sport it originally served.

That framing also clarifies what CLESSTE is actually borrowing from the partnership. Rather than pulling from +phenix’s ski specific silhouettes or color language, the collaboration draws almost entirely from the fabric side of the brand, the decades of experience choosing and treating technical membranes for genuinely harsh conditions, and lets CLESSTE apply its own design instincts on top. That division of labor is fairly typical of how Japanese apparel labels structure fabric focused collaborations generally, where one partner supplies material credibility and the other supplies the pattern and silhouette work, and it is part of why the WINDSTOPPER line has been able to expand into so many different garment types without any single piece feeling like it belongs to the wrong brand.

fin

The CLESSTE x +phenix CITY DOUBLE KNEE WORKER HALF PANTS releases July 22 at 8 p.m. Japan time, arriving in black, asphalt gray, and camel beige at 37,400 yen each through CLESSTE’s own online store and its flagship location. Given how quickly earlier entries in the WINDSTOPPER line have moved through CLESSTE’s in stock listings, several past colorways in the same series are already showing as sold out on the brand’s site well before this piece has even launched, a pattern that has held fairly consistently across the collaboration’s run so far.

That sell-through pattern says something about how CLESSTE has positioned this ongoing series relative to the rest of its output. Denim pieces and gabardine trousers elsewhere in the brand’s trousers category tend to stay listed and available for longer stretches, while WINDSTOPPER pieces cycle through their stock in a matter of days once a size and colorway goes live. Whether that comes down to smaller initial production runs, a narrower customer base actively tracking the collaboration, or simple demand outpacing supply is not something CLESSTE has spelled out publicly, but the pattern across roughly a year of releases is consistent enough to be worth noting on its own.