This invention relates to garments, especially combinations or suits of garments, and to easing the difficulty with which such garments can be fitted to the wearer. The invention is advantageous especially where the wearer is a child, and has to be helped into the garment, and especially where the wearer is a physically-disadvantaged child.
Although the invention may be applied to the design of other types of garments, the invention will be described herein mainly as it relates to wetsuits.
A wetsuit can be difficult even for a strong healthy wearer to put on. One of the difficulties with putting on a wetsuit lies in inserting the arms into the tubes that form the arm-sleeves, and in inserting the legs into the tubes that form the leg-sleeves. Even a non-disadvantaged person finds that it can take a good deal of muscular strength to force the hand and arm into and along the tight-fitting tube that comprises the sleeve. Also, the material from which wetsuits are made is generally foam rubber, which has a high coefficient of friction. The combination of tightness and high friction can leave even a normally-functioning person momentarily exhausted from the muscular effort of forcing the arms into the sleeves, and the legs into the pants, of a typical conventional wetsuit.
The therapeutic benefits of swimming are well known, and these benefits are no less applicable to disadvantaged children (and adults) than to normally-functioning persons. Indeed, swimming is often favoured, as being the activity in which a physical handicap is the least restrictive.
For a physically-disadvantaged person, especially a disadvantaged child, the effort needed to force the arms and legs into the sleeves and pants can be simply too much. Even with an adult caregiver assisting with the heavy pushing, it can be a major task for a disadvantaged child to get into a wetsuit. The task of getting a cold wet child out of a saturated wetsuit also carries its own difficulties.
The invention is aimed at providing a design of e.g. a wetsuit, in which the adult assistant finds it very simple to assemble the (helpless) child into the wetsuit.
The invention lies generally in providing a garment as an integrated unitary piece of fabric material. That is to say, the garment can be fabricated by stitching together separate pieces of fabric, but the finished manufactured garment is effectively a single piece. The garment has zippers, whereby the garment can be opened out. As will be described, the zippers are arranged in such a manner that the garment, and especially the sleeves (both arm-sleeves and leg-sleeves of the garment can be so completely opened out that the wearer can simply be laid upon the opened out garment. Then, an assistant can very easily wrap the garment around the arms and/or legs of the wearer, and the assistant can then easily do up the zippers. Removing the wearer from the garment is also easy to accomplish, at least in the case of a small physically-disadvantaged child, in that the assistant, having released the zippers, and laid the garment flat, can then simply lift the child up and out of the garment.