The Professional Clothing Industry Association Worldwide (PCIAW®) is pleased to announce Clara Sorel, Global Market Development Leader for Soft Armor, Kevlar® and Kevlar® EXO™ at Arclin, as a speaker at the PCIAW® Summit, Exhibition & Awards 2026, taking place at the De Vere Grand Connaught Rooms in London on 21–22 October.
Clara will bring her expertise in advanced personal protection to the session “Defence & Law Enforcement: Evolving Operational Risks, Sovereign Resilience & Accelerating Innovation in Rigid Tenders,” taking place from 12:35pm–1:15pm.
Her perspective, “From Protection to Performance: Aligning Body Armor Requirements with Today’s Operational Reality,” will examine how changing threats and operational demands are reshaping expectations for body armour across military and law enforcement applications.
Moving from protection to performance
Operational environments for military and law enforcement personnel are evolving rapidly, creating new challenges for the design and specification of personal protection.
While ballistic protection remains fundamental, Clara will explore why the next generation of body armour must be considered through a broader performance lens.
Recent operational experience has highlighted the growing importance of fragmentation protection alongside traditional ballistic threats, while personnel are simultaneously being required to carry increasing amounts of equipment and operate for extended periods.
This creates a complex challenge for the protective equipment industry.
Protection cannot be considered independently from the person wearing the system. Comfort, mobility, endurance and user acceptance can all influence how effectively protective equipment performs within real operational environments.
At the PCIAW® Summit, Clara will explore how these requirements can be balanced as body armour systems continue to evolve.
Responding to changing operational realities
Clara brings experience working across the personal protection ecosystem, including engagement with military and law enforcement stakeholders, armour manufacturers, procurement professionals, standards organisations and end users.
This provides insight into how operational requirements are changing and where gaps can emerge between frontline realities and established specifications.
Her presentation will consider observations from recent conflicts, including lessons emerging from Ukraine, where the nature of battlefield threats has reinforced the importance of fragmentation protection.
These developments raise wider questions for the industry about whether existing protection requirements and procurement specifications are evolving quickly enough to reflect changing operational conditions.
For manufacturers and suppliers, responding to these realities requires innovation to move at a pace that can be difficult to reconcile with long procurement and tender cycles.
Balancing protection, comfort and mobility
A key focus of Clara’s perspective will be the relationship between protective performance and wearer performance.
Historically, weight has often been used as a proxy for comfort, but it does not fully capture how a system performs on the body during real-world movement. The new comfort and mobility tests provide objective measurements of factors such as range of motion, restriction and wearer burden, creating a more complete picture of user performance.
Increasing levels of protection can bring additional considerations around weight, mobility and comfort. For personnel operating for long periods in demanding environments, these factors can have an important impact on overall operational effectiveness.
Clara will draw on recently developed comfort and mobility testing to explore how wearer performance can be measured and evaluated alongside traditional protective requirements.
This creates an opportunity to consider body armour as a complete system rather than assessing protection in isolation.
The challenge for the next generation of solutions will be to achieve the required levels of ballistic and fragmentation protection while supporting the wearer’s ability to move, endure and perform effectively.
Can procurement keep pace with innovation?
The session will also examine the relationship between rapidly evolving operational requirements and the procurement structures used to acquire protective equipment.
Institutional tender specifications can operate across multi-year cycles, while threats, technologies and operational requirements can change significantly within much shorter periods.
Clara’s perspective will consider whether current specifications are adapting quickly enough and how closer engagement between end users, procurement stakeholders and the protection industry could help emerging technologies respond to new requirements.
Creating this connection is particularly important where innovation has the potential to improve not only protective performance but also the comfort, mobility and wearability of equipment.
Strengthening European supply-chain resilience
Alongside product innovation, Clara will bring a European manufacturing and supply-chain perspective to the discussion.
Arclin’s defence business has a global footprint, with a major Kevlar® manufacturing facility in Maydown, Ireland, providing a manufacturing base for advanced aramid materials used in personal protection.
Against a changing geopolitical and operational landscape, security of supply and resilient manufacturing capabilities are becoming increasingly important considerations for defence and law enforcement procurement.
Clara will explore the role that resilient European supply chains can play in supporting future protection systems, contributing to wider discussions surrounding security of supply and European strategic autonomy.
The Implementation Phase
Clara’s contribution reflects the wider theme of the PCIAW® Summit 2026 – “The Implementation Phase.”
As operational threats evolve, the challenge for the protective equipment industry is not simply to identify emerging requirements, but to translate them into specifications, technologies and procurement models capable of reaching frontline personnel.
By bringing together perspectives on protection, wearer performance, procurement and supply-chain resilience, Clara will explore what the next generation of body armour needs to deliver within today’s operational reality.
Clara Sorel will contribute to “Defence & Law Enforcement: Evolving Operational Risks, Sovereign Resilience & Accelerating Innovation in Rigid Tenders” from 12:35pm–1:15pm at the PCIAW® Summit, Exhibition & Awards 2026.
The event takes place at the De Vere Grand Connaught Rooms, London, on 21–22 October 2026.
