Performance wear is, by definition, expected to withstand whatever gets thrown at it. But many of the qualities consumers have come to expect from performance wear — stretch and recovery, water repellence, moisture-wicking, and odor control — typically rely on synthetic fibers and potentially harmful chemical coatings, membranes, and treatments. Now, brands and fiber producers such as Lenzing, Ridestore, and Hyosung are attempting to move the needle by pursuing the same level of performance with natural or naturally derived fibers and safer, certified chemistry. But can they scale?

The call for less toxic performance wear is coming from multiple angles. Regulators globally are closing in on the use of harmful substances such as PFAS (known as ‘forever chemicals’ for their ability to persist in the environment), which have been widely used for water- and stain-proofing. Customers are increasingly following the mantra “clothing is skincare” — paying closer attention to the chemical and fiber makeup of their clothes, and the potential implications for their skin, the body’s largest organ. In turn, retailers are responding with promises of ‘clean fashion’, a difficult one to uphold, stemming from the equally complex ‘clean beauty’ movement.

It’s no easy feat. To create non-toxic performance wear, brands need to go back to basics and rethink their products from the ground up. It can take years of iteration to even begin to meet the standards set by existing performance staples.

Take Tera Mira, a bio-based elastane startup and one of H&M Foundation’s Global Change Award winners for 2026. The company, founded in 2025, uses seaweed as feedstock for a fossil fuel-free elastane alternative. “We’ve got a lot of inbound interest from underwear and sportswear brands,” says co-founder and CEO Jeanne Bégon-Lours. Yet there’s still a long way to go until it can appear in products. While synthetic elastane can stretch up to 500%, Tera Mira is currently working with a stretch range of 50% to 100%, says Bégon-Lours. Pilots on industrial spinning lines are expected in 2027, and the company is aiming to license its technology to spinners in 2028 or 2029 for availability at scale. This all depends on reaching a defined formulation, shoring up feedstock supplies, and ensuring the final product withstands tests for strength, stretch, and recovery, as well as on factors that haven’t yet been tested, such as washing.

Elastane usually accounts for just a few percent of a garment's makeup. A non-toxic, or less toxic, product requires that, plus many other layers of innovation coming together, from new waterproofing technology to plastic-free zippers. Here, three early movers in the space tell us what it takes to make non-toxic performance wear happen at scale.

The (almost) plastic-free windbreaker: Armedangels and Lenzing

The new (nearly) plastic-free windbreaker from Armedangels took a five-way collaboration to bring to life, although director of impact and innovation Julia Kirschner describes the process as co-development rather than collaboration.

Johannes Fürst, co-founder and managing director of Montebelo (a solutions provider for sustainable supply chains), came on board early to help develop the product. As did Lenzing, the Austrian cellulosic fiber producer responsible for materials such as Tencel and Ecovero, which are certified by several major organizations, including the EU Ecolabel and Oeko-Tex, for attributes including safe chemistry, responsible forestry, natural origins, and biodegradability. “We work very closely with brand partners to support them on a fiber level in different development stages,” says Manuela Gesslbauer, head of global brand partnerships at Lenzing.

Lenzing didn’t have an existing material with a dense enough weave to meet the windbreaker's technical requirements, so the team had to create one. Fürst tapped Taiwanese mill HerMin to help with development, as it specializes in natural functional fabrics and has expertise in dense weaves — precisely what is needed to keep wind out. Collaborating with spinners in HerMin’s network — alongside Lenzing technicians who could advise on the properties of the wood pulp-based fiber and the optimal fiber length for the required strength — the team developed a 100% Tencel Lycocell ripstop fabric.

The fabric is first-of-a-kind, but it wasn’t the beginning and end of the research and development needed to realize the jacket. “[To] achieve a plastic-free windbreaker, it’s not about a simple fiber swap, it’s about rethinking the whole jacket with all the parts, the trims, the prints, and the elastanes, every little part,” says Kirschner.

Though the fabric’s structure provides some protection, a water-repellent treatment was still needed for the jacket to compete with others on the market. There are PFAS-free water repellents available, but they are usually applied to synthetics. Applying it to Tencel required finding the right recipe and technique, which takes time, testing, and guidance for the people on the factory floor, who have years of muscle memory attached to working with polyester and polyamide.

Despite the best efforts of all involved, there are a few compromises. The team says the jacket is 97% wind-proof (per ISO 9237 testing for air permeability), but it can’t withstand heavy rain, only light showers. And it’s not completely plastic-free: the zipper has a small patch of plastic coating at its base. “We said we wanted to be 100% plastic-free, which we didn’t achieve, and that’s how we are communicating it,” says Kirschner. Still, testing revealed the jacket does not have any intentionally added PFAS (due to the ubiquity of PFAS, unintentional contamination can occur), and the brand says the jacket will now become a permanent part of its collections.

The lower impact yoga range: Hyosung and Lenzing

When it comes to performance sportswear, one of the biggest barriers to totally non-toxic products is stretch, but switching from fossil-fuel inputs to bio-based ones is no small feat.

“The vast majority of our carbon emissions as a company come from processing raw materials, the majority of which are fossil fuel-based,” says Simon Whitmarsh-Knight, global marketing and sustainability director of textiles at Hyosung TNC, a South Korean textile manufacturer and the world’s largest manufacturer of elastane by market share. Now, the company is turning to bio-based feedstocks to reduce its impact, investing $1 billion and building a 50,000-ton factory in Vietnam. It’s not going to be an overnight overhaul. “For all the challenges around elastane, we can’t do without it at the moment, because it gives the comfort everybody wants.”

To boost the transition to bio-based alternatives and prove scale and efficacy, Hyosung teamed up with Lenzing to launch a yoga collection in October 2025. The idea took two years to come to fruition. To speed up development and get to market quickly, the companies opted to work with existing fibers. From Lenzing’s side, the range features Tencel and Ecovero made with Refibra technology, which utilizes pre- and post-consumer cotton scraps. Hyosung provided the elastane in the form of its Bio Spandex, which features 70% bio-based content made from corn (the company has since swapped corn for sugarcane due to its higher yields, higher efficiency at sequestering carbon, and the ability to use its byproduct, bagasse, as a renewable energy source). “It was a question of choosing the right fibers from Lenzing and the right fibers from us, then picking one mill that would act as a case study,” says Whitmarsh-Knight.

That mill was Pacific Textiles in Hong Kong, a key supply chain partner for both companies, with strengths in fabric structure optimization and precision heat-setting. Robert Masanari Murakami, general manager of the R&D division, says the process took four months from the first delivery of fibers.

Though the range is a coming together of certified, bio-based fabrics and a bio-based elastane, Whitmarsh-Knight is keen to stress that it is only more bio-based than conventional yoga products, not entirely bio-based. Alongside Hyosung’s 70% corn-based Bio Spandex, the yoga range also features the company’s recycled and dyeable elastanes, which are synthetic. “We can't call it 100% natural,” says Whitmarsh-Knight. “We’re working to get it to 100% in the future, but [in the meantime] we’re very careful about how we’re presenting it.”

The responsible chemistry ski jacket: Ridestore and Bluesign

Not all innovations are visible to the consumer. Take the Spartan jacket by Swedish outdoor apparel retailer Ridestore. It takes five separate factories to produce the fabric. The process starts with fibers thinner than a human hair, which a spinner turns into yarn. There is only one factory in Taiwan that can make it — a unique combination of recycled polyester with mechanical stretch yarn. Then it’s onto greige, where the fabric is woven, coming out as a dirty white color, hence the name. The dye house is next, then a PFAS-free durable water repellent (DWR) finish is applied, and the jacket is laminated to make it mountain-ready.

Ashish Ahlawat, the retailer’s head of R&D, describes the jacket as a simpler style, featuring around 45 different materials versus an average of 80. But each material and component moves through multiple different factories, and, throughout every process, there is ample opportunity for hazardous chemicals to be added — be that solvents, dyes, finishes, DWR, or something else. To ensure that doesn’t happen here, Ridestore prioritized Bluesign System Partners in its sourcing — manufacturers and chemical suppliers who have been vetted by Swiss-founded company Bluesign, which sets standards for safe and environmentally-friendly production, checking on measures such as ventilation, emissions, water treatment, health and safety of manufacturing facilities, and undertaking testing.

Each of the five factories involved in making the main fabric for the Spartan jacket is a Bluesign System Partner, subject to unannounced audits, annual reviews, continuous monitoring, and yearly chemical change meetings to ensure alignment with approved and restricted chemicals. But not every material or component came pre-approved. Ahlawat says almost 100% of the fabric and more than 50% of the films used in the jacket are Bluesign-approved, leaving plenty requiring on-the-ground testing and collaboration to ensure they meet both Ridestore and Bluesign’s standards.

The screen print on the jacket was one such element, and Ridestore had to work with Bluesign to determine which chemicals to test for during development and sourcing, and again in bulk production, where some suppliers may adjust the chemistry to work at scale. On this occasion, no issues were found, but Ridestore has had to remedy non-compliant chemicals in the past. DMF [Dimethylformamide — a solvent used in textile coatings and laminations, which is classified as carcinogenic, mutagenic, and reprotoxic] is one of the most common culprits, says Ahlawat. “You need to implement corrective action for the facility, so they don’t [use] it going forward.” Per Bluesign’s phaseout program, appropriate actions include off-gas abatement — which involves capturing and treating exhaust air — and switching to less hazardous or water-based alternatives.

Ahlawat visits Asia quarterly to meet with his R&D counterparts and technicians in factories, to observe conditions and safety measures, and collaborate on new innovations. Upgrading suppliers to meet Bluesign requirements can be a lengthy process for the factory and a significant investment. The factory that makes Ridestore’s waterproof lamination film, for example, took three years to certify, because they had to install a new exhaust to capture all the fumes coming out from the adhesive, he notes. Ultimately, the burden is on factories to fund improvements, but Ahlawat says they need to see long-term value to justify the cost — meaning some sort of loyalty or cost bump from brands.

The output of such stringent supplier expectations is a jacket that is safe to make and is safe to wear. “We took the Spartan jacket and tested it for PFAS content in the whole product. A third-party lab did a full PFAS analysis on it, and it came out with no [intentionally added] PFAS detected,” says Ahlawat. “It’s a lot of hard work, but it’s good work.”