Moisture Management Fabrics: Performance Apparel Markets, Issue 20

The Invista Portfolio and Its Challengers

The competing companies named in the report show how wide the contest had become: American Fibers and Yarn, Comfort Technologies, Hind, Honeywell, Intera, Intex, Lenzing, Marmot, Milliken, Mitsui, Nano-Tex, Nike, Patagonia, Pearl Izumi, Polartec, Reebok, Rhovyl, Schoeller, Tomen, USA-Pro and Wellman, alongside Invista itself. Fibre producers, fabric mills, finish specialists and apparel brands all appear on the same list, because moisture management can be engineered at every level — in the fibre, in the fabric construction, or in a finish applied to it.

Materials: Polyester, and the Alternatives

For applications in which wicking is essential, such as base layer garments, the most commonly used material is polyester. It is often chemically modified to create a fabric in which the fibres encourage moisture to migrate through it. However, fabrics made from modified wool, cotton and polyamide (nylon) may provide similar or superior properties to polyester — a qualification that matters to brands choosing base layers on comfort as well as transport speed. The number of moisture management fabrics on the market has increased dramatically in recent years, and the report expects the trend to continue as manufacturers strive to boost the comfort of their offerings, with applications spreading beyond sportswear and active wear: there is growing interest in the use of moisture management fabrics in the flame retardant apparel market, where comfort under protective layers is a safety issue as well as a preference.

Next Generation: Nanotechnology and Smart Fabrics

The next generation of textiles is likely to incorporate nanotechnology, as it has already been proven that extremely fine fibre surfaces have beneficial properties. In addition, the near future could see the development of smart fabrics which are able to respond to changes in the environment by adjusting their pore size or thickness at a given moment to facilitate moisture transmission — fabrics that manage moisture actively rather than passively. Set inside Issue 20 of Performance Apparel Markets, the report gives fabric specifiers the market's structure — one dominant portfolio, a long field of challengers, and the material choices between them — in a single independently-researched account.

Reading the Report as a Specifier

For a garment technologist, the report's value lies in its comparisons. The dominant Invista brands set the benchmark names buyers ask for; the challenger list shows where equivalent performance can be sourced from fibre producers such as Lenzing and Wellman, mill specialists such as Milliken and Schoeller, or brand-owned developments from Nike, Patagonia and Reebok. The materials discussion then separates the claims by fibre — chemically modified polyester, modified wool, cotton and polyamide — so a base layer can be specified on measured moisture behaviour rather than on brand familiarity alone.