<p>High-performance and cost-effective polymer coatings are essential for developing advanced protective textiles that combine water resistance with water vapor permeability, meeting critical needs in diverse applications such as personal protective equipment. Nevertheless, existing polymer-based coatings can hardly achieve the satisfactory water vapor permeability required for high-performance protective textiles. Here, a network-structured polyurethane coating was developed on conventional textiles via a humidity-induced networking method based on the regulation of polyurethane concentrations in coating solutions to enable high breathability and waterproofness. By manipulating the polymer skeleton integrity and embedding depth of water droplets into coating solution through the adjustment of polyurethane solution concentrations, we endowed the polyurethane coating with interconnective porous architectures, on which waterborne fluorinated acrylates were coated to engineer magic coated networks with small apertures (pore size of 3.4&#xa0;μm), open channels (porosity of 62.1%), and good hydrophobicity (water contact angle of 133.5°). The resulting network-coated fabric can achieve a fast water vapor transmission rate of 2764.7&#xa0;g&#xa0;m⁻²&#xa0;d⁻¹ while resisting external liquid penetration with a hydrostatic pressure of 222.5&#xa0;mmH₂O, making it promising for protective textiles. Our work can provide ample possibilities to develop future coated textiles for various applications in outdoor garments, protective gloves, and surgical gowns, among other things.</p> Graphical Abstract <p>A porous network coating was developed on conventional textiles via a humidity-induced networking method based on the regulation of polyurethane concentrations in coating solutions. The fantastic polyurethane network possessed interconnected channels and small apertures, and the resultant coated fabric was endowed with superior breathability and waterproofness for personal protective equipment.</p> <p></p>