What We Put Against Our Skin: A Conversation with Tyler Ball of Nero Fabric.

Clothing has always been a form of technology. Long before anyone thought to call a T-shirt “high performance”, humans were selecting fibres according to an intimate knowledge of weather, movement, heat and the peculiar demands of having a body.

Somewhere along the way, however, performance acquired a different vocabulary. Faster. Lighter. More technical. More engineered. The fabric became a problem to be solved, and the body increasingly became the benchmark it was being measured against.

Activewear is perhaps the most concentrated expression of this logic. It promises optimisation with almost comic efficiency: Garments that wick, stretch, compress, regulate and dry, as though the human being inside them were a particularly demanding piece of machinery.

But what happens when we reverse the question?

Not what can we make a fabric do, but what can the fabric already do?

Not how many technologies can be added to it, but how intelligently can we work with what is already there? And what might happen if performance were measured not merely by a laboratory test, but by the rather less obedient realities of skin, movement, time and repeated wear?

These are questions that sit behind Nero Fabric, the performance clothing company founded by Tyler Ball. They also open a larger conversation about the strange relationship between fashion and progress: About materials that were once considered obsolete, the seduction of perpetual novelty, the difference between something that lasts and something worth keeping, and whether genuine innovation might occasionally look suspiciously like restraint.

We began with Manchester, polyester and a rather unlikely question about the future of activewear.

Nero Fabric begins with an almost perfectly circular coincidence: Manchester helped give the world polyester, while you grew up there and eventually found yourself questioning its dominance in what we exercise in. Did that history make the problem feel personal - and did it make you wonder whether the future of activewear might require us to revisit the past?

Tyler Ball: The coincidence is almost too neat. Manchester was Cottonopolis, the city that clothed the world in natural fibre and then, in a lab here in the 1940s, polyester was invented and quietly undid all of that. I grew up surrounded by that history without really noticing it, and then spent years training in clothes made from the very material my city gave the world, wondering why something marketed as “performance” felt the way it did against my skin after an hour of sweating.

So yes, it became personal, though not in a nostalgic way. I'm not interested in heritage cosplay. What struck me is that the industry treated the synthetic era as an endpoint, as if the question of what we exercise in had been permanently answered in 1941. But materials science didn't stop. Wool growing didn't stop. Merino today, at the micron counts we use, is a completely different proposition from the itchy jumper people imagine. The future of activewear doesn't require going backwards; it requires admitting that the past sixty years were a detour taken mostly for the benefit of cost sheets, not bodies.

“Performance” has become one of fashion's most convenient words. What first made you question the assumption that the most technologically advanced fabric must necessarily be the best one to put against the skin?

Turns out, what you wear to sweat in has a few things to sweat about.

Tyler Ball: My scepticism started with the simplest observation available to anyone who trains: The most “advanced” garments were the ones that smelled after one session, felt clammy the moment intensity dropped, and looked tired within a year. Meanwhile the fibre humans wore in extreme conditions for millennia, the one mountaineers and soldiers still reach for in base layers, was dismissed as old-fashioned.

That's not technological progress; that's marketing momentum. Nobody had asked the obvious question: if we're putting something against the skin, for hours, while the body is hot and open-pored, shouldn't the bar for what qualifies as “advanced” be set by the skin, not the spreadsheet?

Your proposition is not simply that natural fibres can be more responsible; it is that merino and Tencel can perform remarkably well under demanding conditions. What did developing Nero Fabric teach you about what these materials can actually do?

Tyler Ball: Both, honestly. Developing Nero taught me things about merino and Tencel I didn't know, how much behaviour you can engineer through micron selection, blend ratios, weight, and knit structure before you ever touch a chemical finish. Our liner short uses 17.5-micron merino, and the difference between that and a generic wool is the difference between two entirely different materials.

But the bigger revelation was the second part of your question: the industry stopped asking. Once synthetics became the default, R&D budgets, testing protocols, and even the language of fabric development all reorganised themselves around plastic. Natural fibres got frozen in time, treated as a “heritage” story rather than an engineering substrate.

When we started pushing suppliers, running independent lab tests, and iterating constructions, we found enormous headroom. These fibres were never outperformed so much as abandoned.

Nero exists in that gap.

You make the provenance of the materials unusually visible - from merino sourced from certified Australian and New Zealand farms to Tencel from Lenzing in Austria. Does knowing where a garment begins alter the way we value what eventually arrives in our hands?

Tyler Ball: I think it changes everything, and mostly in ways people don't articulate. When a garment's origin is legible, this merino from certified farms in Australia and New Zealand, this Tencel from Lenzing in Austria, the object stops being an anonymous output and becomes the end of a chain of decisions. You can agree or disagree with those decisions, but you can see them. Opacity, by contrast, is almost always hiding something, usually cost-cutting.

There's also a subtler effect. Traceability disciplines us as much as it informs the customer. When you're prepared to name your sources, you can't quietly swap in something cheaper next season. It locks the brand into its own standards. And for the wearer, I think knowing where something begins extends the timeline in both directions, a garment with a real origin feels like it deserves a real future. You repair it, you keep it.

Disposability requires anonymity.

Nero is being built “slowly, on purpose”: fewer styles, smaller runs, continual refinement. In an industry addicted to novelty, could slowness actually be a form of innovation?

Tyler Ball: I genuinely believe it might be. The fashion industry's default economic model is a novelty treadmill, new drops, new colourways, new “technologies”, because the product itself isn't compelling enough to sustain attention without constant refreshment. Slowness only works if the garment can carry that weight. Fewer styles, smaller runs, and iterating the same product over multiple versions is a bet that depth beats breadth.

It's also, quietly, a better business. We launched with a single hero product and refined it rather than diluting focus across a sprawling range. Every unit of energy goes into making one thing genuinely excellent instead of making twenty things adequate. The industry calls that conservative. I'd call the alternative, burning resources on perpetual novelty to disguise interchangeable product, the actually unimaginative strategy. Radical innovation isn't always a new material.

Sometimes it's the discipline to stop.

There is a difference between something being durable and something being worth keeping. You test for abrasion, pilling, seam strength and shrinkage, but what turns technical longevity into attachment?

Tyler Ball: We test hard, abrasion, pilling, seam strength, shrinkage, all independently verified - because technical longevity is the entry fee. But you're right that it's only half the equation. Plenty of indestructible garments end up in the back of a drawer.

What makes something worth keeping, I think, is that it gets better with familiarity rather than worse. Natural fibres age; synthetics degrade. A merino piece softens and moulds to how you actually move. There's also an emotional component tied to trust: When a garment reliably does its job, regulates your temperature, doesn't smell, doesn't embarrass you between the gym and a coffee, it earns a place in the small rotation of things you reach for without thinking.

That's the real test. Not “did it survive fifty washes” but “is it the thing you pack first.”

Merino Air approaches performance through construction rather than synthetic intervention: An open mesh that encourages airflow, combining merino with Tencel. Was the breakthrough solving a particular problem, or asking what the fibre could do if you stopped trying to make it behave like plastic?

Tyler Ball: It was both, and they converged. The specific problem was heat, high-output training where even excellent merino at conventional knit densities holds more warmth than you want. The conventional industry answer is to reach for the chemistry set: Lighter synthetics, wicking finishes, coatings. We deliberately refused that route, which forced the more fundamental question you're describing: what can the fibre do if we change the architecture rather than the substance?

The answer was an open mesh construction, engineering airflow through the garment's structure itself, and pairing merino with Tencel so each fibre contributes what it's naturally best at rather than being chemically persuaded to imitate plastic.

There's a principle buried in that which now guides everything we develop: When you hit a performance ceiling, the first move should be construction, not intervention. Coatings wash out. Finishes wear off. Structure is permanent. And structure keeps the material honest, at the end of its life, it's still just wool and wood-pulp fibre, not a laminated composite nobody can do anything with.

Activewear increasingly speaks the language of optimisation: Faster drying, greater compression, more stretch, lighter weight. Has designing around the lived experience of the body changed what success means to you?

Tyler Ball: Completely. The optimisation vocabulary, faster, lighter, more compressive, implicitly treats the wearer as an athlete in a wind tunnel. But almost nobody's actual life looks like that. Real use is a training session bracketed by a commute, a school run, a meeting. The body in those hours isn't a machine seeking marginal gains; it's a sensory system that notices clamminess, chafe, smell, and the specific unpleasantness of cold synthetic against warm skin.

So our definition of success shifted from metrics to experience over time. Not “how fast does this dry on a hanger” but “how do you feel in hour three.” Not peak performance but the absence of small irritations across a whole day. Those things are harder to put on a spec sheet, which is precisely why the industry ignores them, but they're what people actually remember about a garment.

The interesting discovery is that designing for the body doesn't mean sacrificing measurable performance. It means the measurements finally serve the person instead of the press release.

There is an uncomfortable question beneath the activewear industry: When does innovation become a sophisticated justification for disposability? If novelty stopped being rewarded for its own sake, what would the next generation of performance clothing look like?

Tyler Ball: That's the uncomfortable truth at the centre of it. A great deal of what's marketed as innovation is really planned obsolescence with a technical vocabulary, this season's proprietary finish exists substantially to make last season's feel outdated, and the garment itself is engineered to a price point that guarantees replacement. Novelty and disposability aren't in tension; they're the same business model viewed from two angles.

If we stopped rewarding novelty for its own sake, I think the next generation of performance clothing would look almost boring from the outside and radical underneath: Fewer products, developed over years rather than seasons, made from materials chosen for how they behave against skin and how they age, and judged on a completely different axis. Cost per wear instead of price per unit. Years in rotation instead of units shifted. Versions instead of collections, the way good tools iterate.

The irony is that this is what serious engineering looks like in every other field. Fashion is the only industry where “innovation” got redefined to mean “different.”

Finally, if Nero succeeds beyond the garments themselves, what would you want to change in the wearer's instinct? Is it about choosing natural fibres more often, or about creating the habit of asking a more fundamental question: what am I actually putting against my skin?

Tyler Ball: If Nero succeeds beyond the garments, the change I'd want is exactly the pause you describe. Choosing natural fibres more often would be a fine outcome, but it's downstream of something more important: the instinct to ask what a thing actually is before it goes against your skin. Most people can tell you more about the ingredients in their breakfast than the composition of the t-shirt they'll sweat into for ten years of training. That asymmetry is strange, and it only persists because the industry benefits from nobody looking.

I don't need everyone to reach our conclusions. I'd genuinely settle for everyone reaching a conclusion, reading the composition label, asking where the fibre came from, asking why it needs a coating to do its job. A market of people who pause and ask is a market that disciplines every brand in it, including us.

The garments are the argument, but the instinct is the legacy. If in ten years “what am I actually putting against my skin?” is a normal question rather than an eccentric one, Nero will have done its real job.

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Words and questions by AW.

Answers by Tyler Ball.

Photo courtesy of Nero Fabric.