The Beauty of Making

EACH ELEMENT CONSIDERED

 In today’s fast-moving world, consumers are bombarded with a constant supply of new sportswear and sportswear brands. The lines between fashion and sportswear have become blurred, leading to garments that are disposable and unsustainable. Often, the resulting products do little to address the performance needs of the athlete. 

 How do we overcome these issues? We have the answer: sportswear that is designed from an intellectual perspective, with the user always in mind. We believe that in order to deliver true value to athletes, garments must be specifically tailored to their needs. So, we focus on creating clothes that can be fully customised to enhance a person’s body and their experience as they move.  

CUSTOMISABLE PERFORMANCE

When making performance wear, the first thing we do is analyse the body to determine how a garment can benefit the athlete. We ask ourselves: which functions need to be placed where in the garment, and what other considerations do we need to keep in mind? Some of the features we want to incorporate into our designs include: 

 • Compression that not only feeds muscles, but feels light and invigorating, whilst remaining breathable 

 • Comfort in the areas where the skin is sensitive, providing a good fit so that the body can move freely 

 • Shape that corrects body position and promotes an active posture, whilst remaining lightweight 

 Combining these elements means we need to produce a garment that fulfils several different needs at once. To achieve this, we use a collection of different functional yarns in combination with different machine settings. Designs are then body mapped so that they work together seamlessly.  

STITCH-BY-STITCH ENGINEERING

To create different functions within one seamless knitted garment, we engineer textures that have different values. We do this by adjusting elements such as yarns, needles, machine settings, tension and the way the texture Is built. 

 Textures and functions can be engineered on a stitch-by-stitch level, and can be seamlessly combined when knitting the garment in one go. We can then test and measure these textures against metrics like “Power”, “Comfort” and “Energy”: 

 • Power: the performance delivered by the garment’s fabric 

 • Energy: the energy exerted by the body as a result of garment composition 

 • Comfort: the “second skin” effect 

We assess these performance values and adjust them where needed by selecting different yarns or adjusting knit stitch settings. By increasing the restriction of the texture, for example, we can increase the energy levels of its performance, making the garment suitable for training and cross fit. By contrast, lowering the restriction and the energy levels makes the garment more suitable for competition. 

To learn more, you can watch our video The Beauty of Making below. For the latest information and images from Studio Eva x Carola, follow us on Instagram @evaxcarola.

Credits

Concept, Design and Development - Studio Eva x Carola

In collaboration with SPINEXPO

Manufacturing and Knitting expertise - Santoni Shanghai

Yarns - among others Invista, Aquafil and Nilit

Moving Images - House of Iceberg

 

Using Format