linkedIn latest: discussion of the week: sportswear innovations?

This week, Mpdclick’s sportswear designer, Chantell Fenton and the members of Mudpie’s interactive group on LinkedIn discuss innovations within the sportswear market.

Chantell opens a discussion on business networking site LinkedIn, for the industry’s thoughts on the latest in sportswear innovations?

Chantell Fenton: I am interested in learning more in terms of sportswear innovations – does anyone know of any good places to start – I am currently reading The Textiles Intelligence magazine and surfing www.highsnobiety.com and http://www.freshnessmag.com - any more ideas?

Mike Jerome, Director of Design – Product Solutions: One suggestion is wearble electronics and the best starting point is Elextile – Interactive Fashion Design Consultancy: and their blog : http://www.talk2myshirt.com/

Fiona Jenvey, CEO of Mudpie/MPDclick:  I did a search on sports/ active apparel groups- these may be ones to join- you could ask the members these Qs and see what response you get- anyone else interested in these areas could also take a look at this group, active apparel design.

Paul Bond, Director at Revolution Workwear: Check out http://www.d3olab.com/ and www.3xdry.com
happy hunting!

Bryan Roberts, Sports Designer with a passion for innovation: I have a blog called sportstechreview you can view it at http://www.sportstechreview.com/. It is based more on the science side of things but may be of interest. I have also been involved in a number of sports apparel design projects for major brands.

Angelika Daniels, Project Management bei Navispace AG: I can definitely recommend the Wearable Technologies Conference taking place on February 8 in Munich!

Check out http://www.wearable-technologies.com/conference-2010
After the conference all visitors will have the chance to visit ISPO, the world’s largest trade show for sporting goods.

This conference will give you a great overview of current and future innovation regarding all kinds of wearable technolgies. Please ask if you need more information!

Stephan van Uijtregt, Sports Innovation Consultant at Nuevola: In general I think the coming years will show more and more smart textiles that will enable people to perform better under extreme circumstances (be it competitive sports, mountaineering, heavy working conditions). Applications can be as simple as heating to more complicated ones like for example sensors that warn you for poisonous gases or lack of oxygen.

Besides performance enhancing I see one other development and that one is related to the trend that especially young people like to share just about every part of their life with their friends/contacts. So I think we’ll see a fair share of more and less successful attempts to market sports/leisure wear that monitors/registers its wearers ways (like Nike is already doing with its Nike+).
The effects for the aesthetics… I think nothing much will change there. Unless the application is ground breaking, I don’t think the grand masses will be willing to sacrifice a lot of aesthetics in the fashion they wear.

For athletes this is different of course, they will wear whatever will bring them the best result (I recently saw a very relevant documentary about the guy that invented and first introduced the speed suit in speed skating (doc. is in Dutch unfortunately), at first all his colleagues laughed at him for looking silly, but as soon as they saw that it really made a difference all of them started wearing them. And other sports quickly followed.

If you want to get involved with this discussion then why not join Mudpie’s Fashion, Trends, Lifestyle, Culture group by clicking here.