Tag Archives: shirt

This air-conditioned formal shirt keeps you cool during heated board meetings

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Let’s face it, global warming is real, and it’s already affecting millions worldwide. Japan is also bearing the brunt of hot summer days, prompting manufacturers to come up with innovative ways of cooling down in the peak heat. There are personal fans to direct chilled air at the most sensitive neck areas that cool down the whole body, or the more radical solutions like the human refrigerator to walk into and have the next-generation cooling effect.

We’ve come across another interesting personal cooling solution that comes from the land of the rising Sun, and is equally out of the box for everyday use. The solution takes the popular Yofuku no Aoyama formal attire and outfits it with fans to provide active cooling to settle down the extreme heat build-up on hot days. Called the Kuchofuku Air-Conditioned Short Sleeve Work Shirt, the attire developed in collaboration with fan-equipped fashion maker FZN is meant for people exposed to extreme daytime heat.

Designer: Yofuku no Aoyama

If you are in Japan, Yofuku no Aoyama is a household name when you need to be dressed for important events or meetings with clients. They’ve got the idea to keep you well dressed all day long without any uncomfortable feeling triggered by the lack of proper cooling outdoors. This seemingly normal button-up shirt has the understated summer business look, but on the inside, it comes loaded with two active cooling fans. Who could have thought of that? Although it does look a little bulged up on the sides, which can make you seem slightly fatty on the sides. That’s because of the wearable cooling fan system taking up the space, and the fans engaged during use.

The fans have three operating settings: direct cool air inwards, keeping the wearer comfortable when the Sun is beating down hard. Although not as foolproof as the human cooling refrigerator mentioned earlier, this one does provide temporary relief. At the highest settings, it can stretch for around 3.5 hours, while at the lowest operation mode the wearer can enjoy cool air for around 10 hours. We’ve seen such solutions in the past coming from Japan, mostly targeted for field workers, but they are mostly gear and nothing like apparel. This one changes the outlook, as it is a blue-collar uniform disguised as a cool-down solution for more formal business settings.

From the front, the Kuchofuku Air-Conditioned Short Sleeve Work Shirt doesn’t give away the innards, but from the back, the fans can be visible. That means you’ll either have to mask it with some blazer, or not expose to onlookers from the side profile. You’ll also have to be mindful of the 95 grams added weight of each of the fans, and the 165 grams rechargeable battery pack. I hope the weight distribution is done better on this formal shirt; it’ll feel like carrying a sizeable phone or battery bank.

The short-sleeved shirt meant to be worn hustling for a day’s meetings from one location to the other is available in blue or gray colors, in medium, large, or XL sizes. It can be bought right away from the Yofuku no Aoyama stores or the company’s online shop for 17,490 yen (approximately $111).

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Nike Just Turned Air Into a Fabric, and It Actually Works

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There are moments in design when a product looks so strange that you can’t stop staring at it, and then you find out how it works and it suddenly makes perfect sense. That’s exactly what happened when trail runner Caleb Olson crossed the finish line at the 2025 Western States Endurance Run in the second fastest time in the race’s history. People clapped. Then they immediately started asking: what is he wearing?

The shirt is the Nike ACG Radical AirFlow, and calling it a “shirt” feels generous. It looks more like a sweater that had an encounter with a drill press. Cone-shaped holes punctuate the fabric in deliberate patterns, creating what Nike calls airducts. They’re not just decorative (though they definitely are that, too). They’re functional in a very specific, physics-driven way. The design harnesses the Bernoulli principle and the Venturi effect, two concepts most of us haven’t thought about since a physics class we may or may not have paid attention to. The short version: as air moves through a narrowed opening, it speeds up and pressure drops. Nike essentially engineered that phenomenon into a fabric layer sitting on your body while you run.

Designer: Nike

The result, according to Nike’s own testing, is a top that absorbs and retains 50% less sweat than DriFit, the brand’s long-trusted performance fabric. It’s also 25% less resistant to the evaporation of sweat. For those of us not running ultramarathons in the California mountains, those numbers might sound abstract, but the principle holds whether you’re hiking a trail in August or doing anything remotely active in heat. The body cools itself through sweat, and anything that helps that process happen faster is worth paying attention to.

What makes this interesting beyond the performance specs is how it got here. The Radical AirFlow came out of Nike’s All Conditions Gear line, a sub-brand with a very specific purpose: designing for the outdoors, not the gym. ACG lives by the motto “Designed, Tested, and Made on Planet Earth,” which sounds like a marketing line until you realize the top was debuted mid-race at one of trail running’s most grueling events. The testing wasn’t a controlled brand activation. It was a competitive ultra-marathon.

The design itself doesn’t pretend to be subtle. It’s a cropped silhouette, worn long-sleeved, with large cutouts under the arms and at the elbows for mobility. The airducts are visible and intentional. It reads more like a prototype from a materials science lab than a rack piece at your local athletic retailer. And I think that’s the point. Nike ACG has always occupied that niche space between gear and fashion, performance and provocation. The Radical AirFlow leans all the way into that tension.

It also went viral in a way that athletic apparel rarely does, because the response was split. Some people immediately understood it. Others were convinced it was a joke. Trail runner Drew Holmen, an ACG athlete who tested the garment, said it plainly: “When I first saw the product, it was like nothing I had ever seen before.” That reaction, repeated by thousands of people online, is actually a good sign in design. If no one’s confused, nothing is new.

The broader conversation Radical AirFlow opens up is one about where performance apparel is headed. For a long time, innovation in this space meant better synthetic blends, tighter weaves, smarter seam placement. The Radical AirFlow goes in the opposite direction. It removes material entirely, then structures the absence of it. The holes aren’t a compromise or a cost-cutting measure. They’re the technology.

Whether you’d actually wear it outside of a race context is a fair question, and a cap version built on the same technology is already on the way, which might make the concept more accessible. But the full racing top is a genuine design statement, one that prioritizes function in a way that can’t be hidden. You can see it working. That kind of transparency, in design, is rarer than it should be.

The post Nike Just Turned Air Into a Fabric, and It Actually Works first appeared on Yanko Design.