Eight National Teams Renew with UYN

From the body to the garment

The requirements are consistent across every team, and they come from anatomy rather than from a specification sheet. The body does not retain or lose heat evenly: the chest and lower back need to keep it in, the spine and underarms need to let it out, and the legs need support that never becomes restriction.

We find those boundaries in the Arctic Chamber, a sealed room at AREAS held at a constant minus twenty degrees, where a thermal camera reads the body and returns a map rather than a number. Our circular machines then translate that map into fabric. Because each garment is knitted seamlessly in a single piece, its structure can change across the body with no seam to interrupt it: denser where insulation matters, more open where moisture must escape, more elastic where movement is widest.

The layer they will race in

From this season, as part of these renewed partnerships, every athlete and every team will be equipped with our most recent generation of base layer and socks: the Natyon Biomorph collection, developed with their requirements directly in mind.

Natyon Biomorph is built around a biomimetic three-dimensional structure that follows the musculature, and it is made from plant-based fibres, each present for a specific reason. Biolight, from beech wood, regulates moisture up to twice as effectively as cotton. Ecolypt, from eucalyptus, absorbs and releases it progressively, holding body temperature steady at full effort. Flexicorn, from corn, stretches like elastane and recovers its shape after every load.

And then there is kapok.

The fibre they noticed first

Kapok is one of the lightest natural fibres on the planet. It grows in such abundance that it requires no cultivation and no irrigation, and its structure is largely hollow, which gives it an insulating capacity disproportionate to its weight.

It is also the component the athletes identified immediately, which does not usually happen. Most material advances are felt gradually, or inferred from data, or taken on trust. Athletes who had been racing in our garments for years put on Natyon Biomorph for the first time and knew at once that something had changed, before anyone had explained what.

That reaction is the clearest confirmation we have had that the direction we have taken with natural fibres is the right one, delivered by the people least likely to say so out of politeness.

What they feel in a race becomes the brief for the next layer.