Well, the WW2 German stuff was inspired by older fashions, and quite a few modern military styles have elements from German WW2 designs. It all crosses back and forth. The German helmet designs from WW1 were light years ahead of anyone else in utility and protection. But for a long time, even after we had been copying the materials technology, we were hesitant to copy the shape because it was too distinctly “German”, even though it predated the Nazi era.
We work on a lot of the original textiles, and the quality of materials was fairly high until late in the war, but the design was very hard to beat. I can’t tell you how many times I have examined the construction details of some piece of kit, and really been amazed at the cleverness of design and construction. One of the things they did was standardize components, so parts fit on different items. that fulfilled two purposes: Parts to fix or mount one thing can be taken from a completely different class of thing, so fewer types of spares are needed. Also, if one factory got bombed, whatever it made was probably not unique, so there were alternate sources.
Well, I went off on a tangent again. At least I did not do a bunch of paragraphs on how wartime shortages lead to material innovations. Like plastics.