Graphene T Shirt - Zipped Navy edition

If you’re looking to reverse engineer superhero gear, then graphene is your material. Invisible to the human eye and only a single atom thick, it’s the lightest, strongest, most conductive material ever discovered. So we’ve used the lightest material on the planet to create the lightest t shirt we’ve ever built.

Thanks to the graphene it’s also the fastest-cooling t shirt we’ve ever built. The human body loses more than half its heat by radiation – that's why elite marathon runners wrap themselves in reflective foil blankets at the end of races to keep warm. This t shirt has the exact opposite effect. Because graphene rapidly absorbs and redistributes heat, it creates a much larger surface area for heat loss – and this means you stay cooler for longer when you're working out at a high intensity.

Every Graphene T Shirt is knitted with an ultra lightweight blend of nylon, polyester and elastane. And we add the graphene to these yarns during the production process. First the polymer is melted, then it’s extruded – which basically means pushed through a nozzle. As the molten yarn goes through the extrusion process, we add powdered graphene oxide so the graphene is baked into the yarn. And because graphene can’t absorb dye, you can see it on the t shirt as a subtle tessellating pattern against the t shirt’s base colour.

The existence of graphene as a supermaterial was first theorised in the 1940s, but it wasn’t until 2004 that two maverick scientists at the University of Manchester – Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov – were able to isolate and test it. They peeled layer after layer off a shaving of graphite using Scotch tape until they produced a sample of graphene just one atom thick. In 2010 their work won them the Nobel Prize. And thanks to their pioneering work we’ve been creating our own world firsts with graphene since 2018.

Even without graphene, this would still be one of the most advanced t shirts you’ve ever worn. At just 158 grams, especially with a full-length zipper, it’s incredibly light. It’s built with four-way stretch so will never restrict your movement in any direction. And it’s also highly breathable – so will wick moisture away from your skin and dry fast.

Normally ultralight t shirts don’t come with a zipper that runs from the collar right down to the hem, but we wanted to add another level of functionality to the Graphene T Shirt. Constructing a zipper into an insanely lightweight fabric like this one is a challenge. The zipper itself has to be ultra lightweight, and you have to get the balance of weight just right. This zipper is protected by a layer of soft graphene material on the inside so it doesn’t rub on your skin, it locks into place, and it allows you to open up the t shirt in extreme heat when you need to cool down.

The side seams of the t shirt are designed to curve towards your back. It creates a more tapered shape, and stops the seams from rubbing against your sides when you’re training hardest. We’ve also used stretch stitching to reduce stress on the seams when you’re moving fast.

We’ve designed the Graphene T Shirt for a slim fit – because the closer you can get graphene to the skin, the more it can help regulate your temperature. But thanks to the four-way stretch, you’ll never feel restricted.  

When graphite is reduced to a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagon formation, it turns into a supermaterial unlike anything ever known before – it’s so strong and so stretchy that the fibres of a big enough spider web coated in graphene could catch a falling plane. With the potential to transform almost every industry from space travel to electronics, graphene is so mind-blowing that its discovery was described as like finding CERN’s Large Hadron Collider on your desk.