High-visibility fabrics and garments must meet a series of requirements outlined in regulations EN20471 and RIS-3279-TOM for the English market.

This regulation specifies the minimum amount of high-visibility (HV) fabric and retroreflective strips that a garment must have. Based on this amount, it is classified as class 1, 2, or 3. Class 3 being the one with the highest HV area requirement and also requiring retroreflective stripes on sleeves and/or long pants.

Three colors are required to comply with this regulation: yellow, orange, and red. These colors must have specific color coordinates and luminance factors, both on the original fabric, after washing, and after the light degradation test to ensure that the garment will remain highly visible throughout its useful life. (This requirement differs slightly in RIS-3279-TOM)

The standard also requires a series of fastness tests (rubbing, perspiration, ironing, washing, dry cleaning) to corroborate visibility, even if the garment suffers wear during its useful life. These fastness tests must be performed on both the background material and the non-fluorescent material (in the case of a garment with different colors).

Unlike other regulations, most of the physical tests, such as tensile strength, bursting, Ret, and so on, required by this standard, are performed on the original garment or fabric.

At Lenard, we have HV yellow fabrics in the Xispal RS, Valen-t, and Antistatic ranges. But we have a range dedicated exclusively to meet the needs required by this regulation while still offering other classic features of our fabrics: our Orange HV range, where we manufacture Orange HV and Red HV FR Fabrics.

If you’d like to learn more about this regulation or our high-visibility fabrics, we invite you to visit our website, where you’ll find a summary of the already mentioned regulations, as well as all our technical data sheets for the fabrics we produce.

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