High Style Goes High Tech

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According to a study released by the NPD Group last fall, 58% of men and 33% of women have bought clothing with wrinkle-resistant fabric. What's more, one in four men has purchased clothes that contain wicking features and 37% have bought into stain resistance.

Still, although high-style, high-performance business wear only makes up a small percentage of the overall apparel market, sales have grown significantly in less than a decade. Of the $55 billion in U.S. menswear sales in 2006, about $8.8 billion, or 16%, was of garments with some type of technological product enhancement, whether wrinkle free or stain resistant. That percentage has nearly doubled since 2000. The share of women's sales was much smaller, about $2.1 billion, or 2%, of the $105 billion total annual market. Cohen says women still largely shop for style and image first, and are less prone to buy into features.

Pharma-Like R&D

Those numbers could change drastically in less than five years, though. NPD predicts that up to 50% of menswear will incorporate high-performance features by 2010 and that womenswear will catch up by 2012 or 2013, catapulting potential sales to between $25 billion and $50 billion annually. Some, like Cohen, see the gender clothing gap slowly closing and say that, once an idea sticks, adoption rates for trends in womenswear are much quicker than in men's. "In the fashion industry, success brings more success," Cohen says. "There's nothing greater than copying a good idea, and once some of these companies start to see results, everything will change."

DuPont (DD), which makes Teflon, now has divisions focused on manufacturing high-technology apparel incorporating the sturdy substance, but few big-brand companies are jumping on the bandwagon…yet.

But comparing high-tech fashion to the pharmaceuticals industry, Cohen says there are dozens of small outfits, labs, and even individual inventors working on advancements that are likely to be acquired. One company that's singularly focused on extolling the virtues of technology to big-name brands is Emeryville (Calif.)-based Nano-Tex. The company, part of International Textile Group, uses nanotechnological manufacturing processes to produce wrinkle-free and stain-resistant fabrics.

Making Apparel Better

Nano-Tex sells the technology to major brand names, who then make everything from high-performance dress pants, shirts, and ties to bed sheets. Brands that have rolled out products based on Nano-Tex technology include Eddie Bauer, Gap (GPS), L.L. Bean, Marks & Spencer, and JoS. A. Bank (JOSB), among many others.

Nanotechnology is the science of fabrication at the molecular level. Applied to materials, nanotech innovations can endow products with unique properties, from uncharacteristic strength to stubborn stain resistance. "Talking about nanotech as a market is a bit of a misnomer," says Michael Holman, a senior analyst with the New York-based market research firm Lux Research. "It's not a market so much as an enabling technology. What we're seeing now is companies discovering how to make existing products better."

Nano-Tex has made a name for itself as a consultant to buyers, advising how to best market features and benefits endowed to products by the nanotech inside. "Nano-Tex is really one of the first companies to understand that an application has to be easy to adopt," says Holman.

Wait and See?

To that end, Nano-Tex executives work to translate often-complex science into easily digestible bullet points destined for the hangtags that communicate the benefits of enhanced apparel. "Consumers are all about the benefits," says Renee Hultin, the company's executive vice-president of sales. "They don't care about how we assemble the polymers, they care about features and performance."

Still, high-tech clothing, nano or otherwise, has a long way to go before it becomes a mainstay of haute couture. At least one adventurous designer familiar to fashionistas, Yeohlee Teng, incorporated spill-resistant technology into the silk and linen garments in her Spring, 2006, collection during New York's Fashion Week more than a year ago. But that test run was exceptional. Hultin says, "Most high-end makers have taken a 'wait and see' attitude."

And yet, if consumers warm to tech-wrought features in high-style clothes, heavy-duty wear may be jumping from the treadmill to the runway fast enough to qualify as a bona fide fashion trend.

Matt Vella is a writer for BusinessWeek.com in New York.