Biomorphic Fit™ Apparel

Provides the Feel and Fit of SKin

It's unanimous, asics Biomorphic Fit™ sports apparel feels and fits like skin. And what’s more, it responds to motion just like skin.

Skin is the ideal material that wraps our body. It has no seams and stretches sufficiently to fit the body perfectly. Today, thanks to the lifelong work of one man, Mr Susuma Nakazawa, asics is able to offer Biomorphic Fit™ sporting apparel that’s as close to a second skin as is possible.

Born in 1929, Mr Nakazawa mastered the cutting technique of men’s clothing at an early age while working for a first-class tailor on Ginza Street, the most famous street in Tokyo. However, as a young man he wasn’t content with making only formal wear. He pondered the question: how should apparel be made to support motion?

No designer could show him the right answer, so he resigned from work and enrolled at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music to study human form and majored in artistic anatomy and human body aesthetics. Then at the age of forty, he was accepted into the Tokyo Medical and Dental University where he majored in anatomy and morphology.

As a designer, Mr Nakazawa specialises in functional clothing and has designed wear for the Olympic Games and many other world events.

For 20 years Mr Nakazawa researched the “tailoring of skin”. “No motion can cause pulling or pressure on skin. It is recognised that skin, as it demonstrates this capability, is the ideal type of wear”, says Mr Nakazawa.

The more he researched and understood the characteristics of skin, the more he was fascinated. For example, every one of the numerous wrinkles in the body serves as a detailed “pleat’ that supports motion.

After 20 years of research, Mr Nakazawa discovered the boundary lines of skin. His investigations into the distribution of nerves in the inner part of the skin showed that the whole body could be divided into zones, and that the skin also varied according to the zone.

The zone of the skin – called the dermatome – has a different elongation rate and thickness in flexible regions, such as the elbows and the knees, than in ordinary areas. Conventional cutting, which ignores these characteristics, often causes pressure that disturbs the free motion of the skin, or pulling which is induced by large movements in the fabric of the wear. On the contrary, cutting a textile along the structural line of the dermatome facilitates movement in a way never realised before.

This is how asics innovative Biomorphic Fit™ clothing was born.

Sportswear must be more functional than general apparel. asics decided to return to the origin of sportswear and launched development on a next generation cutting pattern. As a result, a completely innovative cutting technique was developed from Mr Nakazawa’s research on dermatomes and how the skin covers the human body.

With Biomorphic Fit™, the textiles are cut according to the dermatomes. In flexible regions, such as elbows and knees, it is designed so that the direction of elongation of the textiles agrees with the direction of elongation of the skin. Hence, wear is synchronised with the motion of the skin and the body, whereby providing an unprecedented smoothness of motion.

The illustration above clearly shows the difference. Until now, sportswear and general apparel alike, have adopted a draping method (three dimensional cutting), with sleeves and legs being made from a single piece of cloth and the torso being divided into back, flank and breast. Four-dimensional Dynamic Body Cutting adopts the element of motion to complete Biomorphic Fit™.

Even in the harshest motion, Biomorphic Fit™ follows the body and provides a feel found only with skin.