The 100g T-Shirt

Light as a Feather

Lightness in performance wear is something we’re always striving for. When you’re embarking in high-intensity exercise, breathability and weightlessness are key factors to feeling comfortable and getting the most out of your workout. 

When we set out to create our signature training t-shirt, the Onyx, we wanted to challenge the concept of lightness. It’s not as simple as using a lighter material for the reason that durability and sheerness becomes an issue. 

Light fabric with high stretch is notoriously hard to work. As a team, we had to come together, drawing on previous experience and knowhow to reach our ultimate goal of making the 100g t-shirt.

Fabric

We wanted to explore fabrics from Europe that were known for their circular and warp knits. After reviewing hundreds of swatches from a handful of the best mills, we found a micro mesh fabric from Spain that caught our attention.

At 90gsm (grams per square metre), it was truly like a feather and the mesh structure aided airflow making it incredibly breathable. It was an ideal fabric for its end use, high intensity training. 

Dyeing

At such a lightweight, there was the concern that after dyeing the fabric, it would remain sheer. It did. The combination of its weight and mesh honeycomb structure left us with a super light t-shirt, but one that was mostly see through.

Seemingly ready to go back to the drawing board, our designer used all of her problem solving experience learnt from her previous roles at Rapha and Orca to suggest a new approach to adding colour; sublimation.  

Sublimation

Sublimation is the process of transferring dye to fabric using heat. Differing of course from standard dyeing methods where you dye the fabric itself, sublimation uses a special type of printer holding rolls of paper up to 45kg. The printers heat the solid sublimation ink and then sublimates it onto the paper, to finally transfer onto the fabric. 

In our case, we sublimated both sides of our micro mesh fabric in our chosen colours, lilac, black and our latest sage green. By printing the colour on rather than dyeing the fabric, this eliminated the sheerness whilst maintaining all the existing properties. As a result, we achieved our 100g t-shirt. 

The great thing about sublimation is that it also uses water based inks making it 100% eco-friendly, and because it’s printed, the colour will always remain true, however many times you wash it. 

 Shop Onyx T-Shirt.