The Darkside Initiative

Engineering Nike Tech Knit

Each time, before they even put pencil to paper, Nike designers gather insight from athletes. In Nike Sportswear, this performance approach is applied to lifestyle design to deliver innovation for everyday life. Designers seek inspiration from history and place, traveling the world to tap into global culture and current trends. Then, they synthesize their discoveries into groundbreaking designs.

The new Nike Tech Knit collection is a product of this distinct algorithm, combining empirical insight with thermoregulation findings to create pioneering garments with a progressive blend of form and function.

Inspiration From Everyday Life
Athletes, both professional and everyday, experience fluctuating body temperatures and desire garments that respond to their varying level of activity to help enable the natural thermoregulation process. The athlete’s average day provides the blueprint for this engineering.

Interdisciplinary Collaboration
To engineer apparel that offers both warmth and breathability for more than 14 hours of movement, while advancing aesthetics, Nike designers collaborated with yarn specialists, computer programmers and knitting machine technicians to develop the next generation of technical knitwear.
The team combined cotton and nylon to create a new performance yarn, with an emphasis on rich texture and surface structure. They then experimented with different stitches and wefts to achieve the optimal knit, which – in keeping with the craft history of knit – is hand-finished.