K-way

K-Way is a brand of waterproof clothing, famous for its nylon windbreaker jacket that fits into a fanny pack, invented in 1965 in the North of France by Léon-Claude Duhamel. After declining, the brand was bought by an Italian company in 2004, then relaunched as a fashionable product, with an increase in the range of items sold. The K-Way word has become an antonomasia, a common name which started to broadly define such type of garments.

==History== K-Way was created in 1965 by Léon-Claude Duhamel, son of a trouser manufacturer in Harnes in the Pas-de-Calais. One rainy day, while he was at the Café de la Paix in Paris, he had the idea of a small, light and compact protection. The same year, the company Sofinal, a fabric manufacturer in Belgium, proposed a new product to his father, Léon Duhamel, coated nylon. Léon Duhamel suggested to his son Léon-Claude that they think about an idea for a practical application of this new product on clothing. Léon-Claude's idea was to free children from their heavy and uncomfortable rain gear and to be able to fold this kind of coated nylon windbreaker into a fanny pack, all with a choice of bright colours and a colourful zip. When it was launched, he called his nylon windbreaker "En-cas" (for rain) and the pouch was separate from the garment.