Fibre to Form
A Forward hoodie with A.W.A.K.E Mode skirt, vintage sunglasses from Bridges & Brows, and Manu Atelier boots (illustration: Theresa Marx).
As you might expect of Nike’s chief design officer, John Hoke owns a lot of hoodies. “Really old ones,” he says. “Nike fleece from years ago that I’ve washed a thousand times so they’re supple and buttery.” Recently, however, Hoke hasn’t been wearing his old stalwarts quite so often.
Four months ago, Nike’s apparel innovation team gave Hoke a new hoodie to wear. On first glance, it seems pretty ordinary. It’s a standard heather grey, which is about as conventional as you can get in a hoodie – Nike uniform, if you like. Having said that, the new design is a little more voluminous than you might expect. It’s more structured and sculptural than most hoodies, to the degree that it looks as if it might be quite stiff – the material holds its shape, rather than slumping in the way that synthetic fleece does. Hoke, however, is adamant that it’s perfectly soft. “It has a slightly different feel to it, I will tell you that,” he says. “A little bit lighter. There’s a structure to it – I have my cuffs on my wrists, it sits on my shoulders, and it gives me a little bit of an offset, if you will. Layering, which I like.” If Hoke’s old hoodies are slouched and slumped, the new piece is poised and airy. It falls into shapes that most hoodies would not.
Hoke has been wearing the hoodie around Nike’s campus in Beaverton, Oregon, where it has prompted questions from colleagues. “I have people stopping me to ask what it is,” he says. They may have noticed, for instance, that the hoodie has no zippers, aglets or laces, and there’s a fairly minimal use of seams across the design. It’s very stripped back, which, for a garment already as stripped back as a hoodie, is really saying something. There are pockets, but even these are pretty raw – just slits in the fabric. “We laser cut and seal it,” Hoke explains, “and it doesn’t have any hardware to it.” The longer you look at Hoke’s hoodie, the more its differences to a conventional garment become apparent – particularly when you notice that its entire surface has been perforated. The fact that it’s only people on Nike’s campus asking Hoke about the hoodie is also telling. At present, wearing the garment off-campus is verboten – it’s the first result of a top-secret material research project.[1] “This is a big one,” Hoke tells me, grinning. “This is one of those innovations we’re just at the dawn of.”
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Hoke’s hoodie is the first example of Forward, a new material that Nike has developed as part of a seven-year research project that was led by Janett Nichol, the company’s vice president of apparel innovation. “This is a future long-term play that we’ve been driving towards,” Nichol tells me, “so it’s taken us a minute, but that’s what innovation does.” The key to understanding Forward, she says, is to appreciate that its composition is fundamentally different to that of fabrics conventionally used in contemporary garment design. “In the apparel industry, you have predominantly two main material types,” she explains. “You’ve got a knit, and you’ve got a woven.” In both cases, a fibre is first developed into a yarn, which is then processed in one of the two main directions: either interlaced or stitched. “But Forward is not a knit or a woven,” Nichol notes. Instead of being transformed into a yarn, the shredded polyester fibres that make up Nichol’s textile (the bulk of which are produced from recycled PET bottles and sourced from a third-party manufacturer in Taiwan) are processed directly into a final material. “This is going from a fibre to a form. This is not woven through a regular weaving machine and it’s not knitted – it’s needle punched.”
In itself, this is unremarkable: needle punch is a standard process. It’s one of the methods through which felt is produced, and it’s widely employed in the creation of a whole host of non-woven textiles; materials that variously serve as cleaning cloths, under-carpet, filters, and geotextiles. “They’re made on a massive machine,” says Nichol, recounting her visit to the Taiwanese facility that currently produces Forward, “I’ve never seen anything so huge in my life.” This machine has a moving bed onto which loose fibres are fed, coupled with a board filled with barbed needles. As the fibres pass through the machine, the needles rapidly stab down into the bed, catching the fibres and causing them to become enmeshed. Eventually, the fibres coalesce to form an interlocked, non-woven structure. “It just keeps punching and you see the material coming out the other end,” summarises Nichol. Non-woven materials, of which needle-punch textiles are one variety, may be common – “That industry creates a lot of things that we use every day,” explains Nichol, “things like tissue, paper and diapers” – but the technology has historically had few applications within sportswear. “Early stages of this exploration were really clunky,” admits Hoke, “[because they were] thinking about a non-woven process which, let’s be honest, is mostly used to create carpet padding.”
Forward joggers, paired with an A.A. Spectrum jacket.
Over the course of Forward’s development, Nichol and her team went back and forth with the factory, exploring different methods of tailoring its output towards a material suitable for apparel. “We spent a lot of time with these partners working through whether we could create something that you can put next to skin,” she says. “We were asking them to take shredded fibres from a recycled polyester and create a material, and that took a lot of time to figure out because they weren’t used to using this type of fibre to create products. That’s where the art and the science had to keep going back and forth: a little more of this, or less of that, or the fibres are too thick [and so on].” With time, the team began to zero in on a textile formed from five discrete layers of needle-punched material. “When we did six [layers] that was too many, and when we did fewer it was too light. We had to figure out the right combination and solution to get us to where we are today.”
Yet while this may explain where Nike currently is with Forward, less certain is where the brand is taking it. Alongside the flagship hoodie, which launched in September 2022, the earliest pieces produced using Forward are a small collection of sweatshirts and jogging bottoms, in which the material plays a similar functional role to synthetic polyester fleece. It’s a use that Forward seems well suited to, particularly given that it has a higher Rct rating (a measure of thermal resistance) than Nike’s existing microfibre fleece, which means Forward is lighter and warmer than other materials in the company’s stable – something of a no-brainer for sweats. But Nichol is adamant that thermal insulation is only one direction in which Forward may develop, and states that the material’s structure can be adjusted to serve other purposes. “We wanted it to be able to solve what we have always continued to drive, which is our FIT platform,” she says. FIT, which launched in 1991, stands for Functional Innovative Technologies and is the terminology used by the company to refer to technical materials with particular functional qualities: Dri-FIT wicks sweat away from the body, Therma-FIT provides insulation, and Storm-FIT offers protection against wind and rain. “In this particular solution, [Forward] happened to solve the Therma-FIT proposition,” continues Nichol, “but when you think long term, it can potentially expand across any of the dimensions of our FIT platform.”
Such remarks undoubtedly serve a promotional role, but Hoke tells me that the company’s optimism surrounding the material finds a precedent in Flyknit, the footwear technology that Nike launched in 2012. A means of knitting racing shoe uppers to reduce weight and waste, Flyknit now pervades the brand’s collections, with a host of similar technologies also adopted throughout the wider industry. “Forward is much like what we did with FlyKnit years ago,” Hoke states. “It was small at the beginning, [launching in February 2012 with the Flyknit Racer shoe] and this programme will be almost identical: starting small as a hoodie. But down the road it can be anything and everything, frankly. And it’ll change pretty dramatically. The way we think about fabric and material usage, and how we innovate at a thread – or, in this case, at a substance level – lets us do the things we need to do with form, function, beauty and utility.”
A Forward sweatshirt, accompanied by tights by Zoe Horgan and Manu Atelier boots.
In this vein, Nike’s ambition is that Forward will quickly spread throughout its apparel range, with the expectation that competitor versions will spring up from other companies, even if the brand holds patents on aspects of the production process. “I hope that other designers or manufacturers and brands are inspired by the push that we’ve made,” says Hoke, “and they can go apply that to their particular product.” While the initial designs’ aesthetic leans heavily into perforations, and the garments are presently only available in grey, Nichol says that these are both choices, rather than technical requirements. “We decided to look at the way we style it, how we finish it, and what the trims are, because we didn’t want to take away from the innovation of Forward,” she says. “It was intentionally designed in such a way that could amplify the beauty of this material and highlight the structural aesthetic of it.” Yet the material can present differently: it takes colour, can be cut and styled as desired, and the composition of the different layers can be adapted between garments or functions. Forward, if all goes to plan, will soon be perceived as a broad material base within Nike, rather than a specific product range. “The general public is not aware of what this is yet,” Hoke tells me, “but they will be.”
This envisaged versatility hints at one of the complexities surrounding the Forward project: why develop a material to perform the same role as existing textiles, particularly given that Nike says it has no plans to cut those pre-existing materials from its range? “[Forward] does not remove fleece,” Nichol tells me bluntly, with the company noting that pricing between Forward and its existing Tech Fleece is roughly commensurate – the pair do not necessarily fall into separate brackets, but will instead compete with one another. “There are now two different solutions that can solve the same problem,” says Nichol, “and it really is up to the consumer to decide which one they choose to engage in.” Forward, she argues, stands on its own and its planned applications need not be placed in dialogue with other materials. “When we started on this journey, we did not start off by saying, ‘Let’s solve fleece.’”
This is worth exploring. When I ask Nichol what did prompt Forward’s development, she cites the mismatch between the process’s traditional output and Nike’s aims as a central part of the creative appeal. “A lot of things spark our interest,” she tells me. “[Here,] we were just inspired by a different part of industry and thought: ‘What if?’” The decision to explore needle-punch, she says, was in this sense fortuitous, with little prevailing logic at the beginning of the process. “We just happened upon this [needle punch] vendor, and one of the things we’re always trying to do is look at machines as a way to create new ideas in the apparel space.” This is no doubt true, but it also seems an incomplete explanation for the authorisation of a seven-year, funded research programme. After all, while Nike hopes to present the initial Forward collection as unrelated to polyester fleece (likely because it is continuing to sell fleece), there are clear comparisons.
One of the central virtues of Forward’s production process, for example, is its lightness in comparison to a traditional fleece, with Nike citing a 75 per cent reduction in carbon emissions between the two.[2] In part, this has been achieved through methods that could be applied more widely across Nike’s materials. Forward is made using at least 70 per cent recycled content by weight (its constituent layers can be produced using industrial, pre-consumer or post-consumer waste), and its fibres are solution-dyed as opposed to relying upon more traditional dyeing methods. Conventional batch-dyeing processes for yarns are notoriously energy- and water-intensive, whereas solution dyeing (which is only possible for synthetic fibres) cuts down on these demands by introducing pigment while the plastic is still molten, meaning that the colouration becomes intrinsic to the resultant fibre. It is a process that is relatively uncommon within apparel, insofar as it raises costs and forces decisions about colour to be made early (causing challenges around maintaining stock across colourways), but Nike is not alone in using the technique. Patagonia, for instance, also creates a selection of its pieces through solution dyeing, citing a resultant “90 per cent reduction in water use and 96 per cent CO2e [carbon dioxide equivalent] savings overall compared to batch-dyeing, with considerably fewer chemicals released from the overall process.” In the case of Forward, Nike states that no water was used in either the dyeing or finishing for the debut collection. While improving dyeing methods and upping recycled content would, perhaps, be good policy across Nike’s range, more unique to Forward is the fact that its higher Rct rating means it has a corresponding lower base weight to fleece. As a result, less material is needed to fulfil the same functional requirements, with the additional virtue that a needle-punch material does not shed fibres at the same rate as fleece, thereby limiting the amount of microplastics released into the environment.[3] “One of the things we want to make sure really lands with the consumer is that this is different,” says Nichol. “We’re trying to solve many different things and we want consumers to connect with not just the item itself, but to understand what we’re trying to do around the future of circularity.”
While the company is proud of these material developments, part of its optimism is grounded in a focus on what the material may mean for the manner in which it designs and produces apparel. While the reductivism of the garments’ styling is, as Nichol notes, an attempt to display the material front and centre, it is also a means of designing clothes that can be more easily processed by recycling systems at the end of their lifespan.[4] “They’re [made from just] one material, [which] I think is part of the future,” says Hoke. Zips and aglets have not been used in the designs because these elements would need to be separated from the garments pre-recycling, and the overall simplicity of the design is similarly intended to reduce friction in this area. “What more can we do with one material?” continues Hoke. “[Can we] give it creasing, perforations, different depths and textures, and different apertures that can mimic and act the way people have thought about fabrics in the past?” Further experiments in achieving complexity through a single material are, Hoke tells me, underway. “I get to see what’s coming around the bend. You’ll see the same progression of Forward as you saw in FlyKnit. It becomes more dynamic, more breathable, and it’ll have different uses of colour, different weights, drapes and hand feels. That’s all coming, but what we’re trying to do now is get the public interested in the idea that this is a material that has been reclaimed, can be reused, and which is produced differently.”
Consumer engagement seems key to the project, which ties in with Nike’s broader design plans. This year marks the company’s 50th anniversary, during which the brand is trying to connect its past and future through an ongoing “Never Done” campaign. It’s a communications strategy summed up by hiring Spike Lee to create Seen It All, an advert that attempts to knit together the company’s timeline by way of Lee reprising the role of Mars Blackmon, his motormouth bike messenger character from She’s Gotta Have It (1986), in order to wax lyrical about how “I’ve seen it all before” as he traipses back through 50 years of sporting achievements while playing chess in New York. Lee’s opponent, Zimmie (Indigo Hubbard-Salk), represents sport’s future, countering Mars’s rhymes about past greats with reflections on contemporary sporting icons. “Look OG, I know you think you’ve seen everything, but you ain’t seen nothing yet,” she announces before swiftly putting Mars in checkmate.
I have limited patience for this sort of thing, beyond a willingness to tip my hat to Lee for what was, presumably, an almighty pay day. Taken on its own terms, Seen it All is campy and celebratory, but provides little clarity as to where Nike is heading (the closest it comes to any concrete information is a shot in which Mars and Zimmie turn to the camera, hold up sneakers, and roar Mars’s catchphrase “Yo! It’s gotta be the shoes!” – shoes, after all, remain Nike’s biggest seller, bringing in more than twice the revenue of apparel). Clearly, not much weight can be placed on Seen it All – it exhibits the natural tendency of advertising to gravitate towards bluster and grandiloquence – but some other initiatives from the anniversary year have been similarly reticent around detail, offering aspiration in place of information. All Conditions Here, for example, is a 2022 design fiction that the company published in the form of a free newspaper. In this story, Nike imagines a future in which landscape, design, technology, data and sport have become fully integrated: “Our clothing and gear now interact directly with the landscape,” says one of the characters as they explore a Nike running course outside Nairobi. “The landscape is constantly sensing us.” The ideas within All Conditions Here are, perhaps, an interesting barometer as to where Nike sees itself heading (or a horrendous premonition, depending on your perspective on surveillance capitalism), but they also seem far-flung and distant. It’s an issue that appears particularly acute when there are more pressing design challenges facing the brand.
Nike states that it was responsible for the emission of 11,706,664 metric tons of CO2e in its 2020 financial year alone – a vast figure and one that the company says it is working to bring down. As part of its “Move to Zero” campaign to become “zero carbon and zero waste” by 2050, for example, Nike has set itself a number of sustainability targets for 2025. Precise targets are difficult to track down (the company seems to prefer speaking about the progress it has made, rather than the exact endpoints it is working toward), but those that do appear in concrete form mostly focus around reducing waste, increasing the percentage of renewable energy utilised in Nike’s facilities, and upping the proportion of recycled materials in its products.[5] “We have a goal of reducing absolute greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 70 per cent in our owned and operated facilities by using 100 per cent renewable energy and converting our fleet to electric vehicles,” the company notes in its 2021 fiscal year ‘Impact Report’. “Today, we are 78 per cent of the way to that goal.” These are sizeable achievements but, given the scale of Nike’s production, they need to be – ecologically speaking, the status quo cannot be maintained. “Most people understand Nike is big,” the company states in its ‘Impact Report’. “But we thought it would be worthwhile to give that idea more context.” Running over a host of numbers – 75,400 employees; upwards of 1 million workers across production facilities; and more than 1,500 physical spaces – the report reaches a surprising summation. “If [Nike] were a city,” it notes, “we’d have roughly the population and carbon footprint of Amsterdam, Netherlands.”
This is where complexity arises. There is little doubt that Nike is right to try and reduce its impact, but given its status as a major manufacturer there are obvious limits to the methods it will countenance in order to achieve this. Nike is unlikely to cut back on the scale of its production, for instance, with its 2021 ‘Impact Report’ making interesting reading when placed alongside the company’s 2022 financial report: a document which notes that yearly revenues have “increased 19 percent to $44.5bn”, with around $5.8bn returned to shareholders. Sustainability may be of interest to Nike, but its pursuit is clearly yoked to profitability. Given this constraint, however, [6] the brand’s only real option for improving its environmental footprint is to reduce the impact of its processes and distribution networks, improve its recycling and reuse systems, and introduce materials and designs that represent an ecological advancement on those already in use – a strategy that has historically left the brand open to charges of greenwashing. In 2021, for instance, the Changing Markets Foundation, a Dutch sustainability body, criticised Nike and other brands for utilising recycled polyester as a sustainability initiative, given that the material continues to draw upon petrochemicals as a source of fibre. “If fashion brands are serious about reducing their environmental impact,” the foundation said, “they should stop the charade of downcycling plastic bottles into clothes and instead focus on cutting their addiction to fossil fuels and curbing overproduction.” [7] New materials and techniques may be commendable, but they do little to rupture the existing cycles of rapid consumption and production that have been a key driver of climate crisis – if anything, they likely drive further consumption through the creation of desirable products marketed as eco-friendly. I’m not sure that any manufacturer bringing in $44.5bn in annual revenue could be considered sustainable.
A Helmut Lang top, with Nike bumbag and Forward joggers, paired with Manu Atelier boots.
This is a criticism to which Nike’s design team are alert, with Hoke acknowledging that “if you look at any company that’s making things, you’re gonna find some things that might not be great.” While Nike’s sheer scale undoubtedly exacerbates these issues, Hoke argues that this same size can also represent an opportunity for design to drive change, of which he sees Forward as an example. “Our scale is the change, right?” he tells me. “If we make incremental and exponential adjustments in how we source, build and think about eventually designing for disassembly, and [creating more circular systems], we’ll change the industry.” Hoke similarly believes that existing structural concerns should not deter designers from improving products already present on the market. “We are committed to looking at ourselves internally and saying to ourselves, ‘What can we do as a design organisation to make better choices to make positive change?’” he says. “That’s going to be progressive – there’s no silver bullet here. It’s a matter of committing, changing and adjusting[…] Our intention is to protect the future of sports, and we’re going to do that incrementally, making small adjustments to everything we do, and exponentially introducing completely new fabrics and new methods of making. That’s the commitment.” An obvious rejoinder to this is to note that design can and should also influence the overall curation of a brand’s range – reducing product bloat, cutting out the worst offenders regardless of impact on profits, and avoiding the annual iteration of new models to which sportswear brands are prone – but this is a difficult discussion to have within corporations, where design principles frequently conflict with business models. Design may be a hopeful discipline that can initiate change, [8] but it is pointless to pretend that it is not equally at the service of wider economic forces. Either way, Hoke’s optimism seems undimmed. “A universal need today is, ‘What can designers do to help think about a better tomorrow?’” he tells me. “The future is unwritten, but not unimagined. And that’s what we do.”
This is one of the central complexities of the Forward story. The programme’s material innovations merit acknowledgment and, according to Nichol and Hoke, would not have been possible without the financial backing made possible by Nike’s scale. “It’s hard – it’s really hard to do,” says Hoke when I ask why non-woven materials have not been more widely adopted within apparel. “This material is something that was behind the scenes. What happened [with Forward] was that we said, ‘Well, what if it wasn’t behind the scenes? What if it was the scene?’” The resultant development process, Nichol recalls, made demands that smaller companies would simply not have been able to absorb. “It takes a while and so it takes investment and it takes commitment,” she says. “It takes a bunch of amazing, brilliant innovators within Nike to say, ‘We can we can crack this and we can make this.’ We’ve got a pretty big target from a purpose perspective and we want to contribute to that target on the apparel side. We know that we make a lot of products and we want to make sure as we’re continuing to make amazing products that we’re doing what’s right.”
Yet Nike’s scale also serves as a limiter on Forward’s ability to make meaningful change: a more ecologically sound material represents no advance until it actually replaces the materials that have come before it. If it is simply an addition to an existing stable of products, there is no advantage. This, then, is the central challenge facing Forward. If new materials are to form a bedrock of the company’s wider sustainability strategy, can they squeeze out their predecessors? It is a decision that Nike hopes to place at the feet of consumers. “The Forward proposition is a choice,” says Hoke. “It’s a choice option for consumers out there. As a consumer, what am I investing in?”
Speaking to Hoke and Nichol, I’m in little doubt as to what they would choose. Both eulogise Forward’s ecological advantages, as well as the options that it provides to designers. “It has the ability to be so sculptural,” Nichol says. “You can create shapes that you wouldn’t necessarily be able to do with a knit and it doesn’t drape the same way. That’s what makes it really appealing.” When I ask each of them what wearing the material feels like, they are unequivocal. “It doesn’t compare to anything,” Nichol offers, whereas Hoke opts to reflect on his experiences wearing the hoodie around the Nike campus: “It just feels like it’s something from the future.” Have no doubt: there are a litany of ethical and environmental issues with placing the responsibility for creating a more sustainable future at the doorstep of consumers,9 but this is the reality of our current material development and manufacturing systems. Both Nichol and Hoke will simply hope that the work they have accomplished with Forward within these parameters is enough to tip the needle in the material’s favour. “Part of the magic of design in this particular era is that we’re here to innovate, and we’re here to make things better,” Hoke concludes. “What we’re asking the public for is a bit of their attention, a bit of their imagination, and to go on a journey with us. Because we’re not saying it’s perfect; we’re saying it’s another step.”
1 So I imagine there’s a whole wardrobe of the stuff in Mar-a-Lago.
2 A measurement taken by the Dutch sustainability consultancy PRé as a cradle-to-gate assessment: a partial product life cycle that excludes use and disposal, but which incorporates processes from resource extraction through to sale.
3 “You will experience some pilling [with Forward], but it’s minor,” says Nichols. “You can just get one of the the fabric shavers that you’d use on your couch or a sweater – takes it right off.”
4 Worth noting, however, is the fact that just because Forward is recyclable, does not necessarily mean that the garments actually will be recycled at the end of their lifespans. To Nike’s credit, it does have better form in attempting to tackle this issue than some corporations. The company launched its Nike Grind initiative in 1992, which collects manufacturing scrap, unused materials and end-of-life shoes and converts them into materials for sports surfaces, trainers, underlay and other applications.
5 On the topic of which, there are worthwhile questions to ask about whether the wide-scale use of any synthetic fibre, recycled or not, plays a role in trying to create a more sustainable apparel industry.
6 Assuming that a complete overhaul of society’s political and economic systems is unlikely to occur in time for those 2025 targets.
7 Criticism of this downcycling approach focuses on the fact that it takes PET bottles out of a closed loop system.
8 Sometimes.
9 Not to mention questions over the actual efficacy of this approach.
Words Oli Stratford
Photographs Theresa Marx
Photo assistance Andre Vasiljev
Styling Veronica Blagoeva
Make-up Sunao Takahashi
Hair styling Linnéa Nordberg
Models Charlotte Carey and Patrick Wilson
This article was originally published in Disegno #34. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.
Nike contributed financially towards the photoshoot acccompanying this article.