ByBorre:
Open Source Knits

During his final year in school, studying industrial design, Akkersdijk told his professors that he wanted to make textiles. Their response? Go to a textile factory. He did, and there he encountered a machine designed to make a padded material for mattresses. What caught his eye was a dot being knit into the fabric, helping give it a quilted texture. “I remember that I asked the manager, ‘How did you get that dot in there?’” Akkersdijk said. “And he told me it was a computer program.” Akkersdijk asked if that program could be engineered to create, say, a line, instead of a dot. It could, and suddenly a whole world of possibilities opened up before him. Within a few weeks he had “hacked” the computer to create designs that would be knit into textiles.

Akkersdijk’s obsession with materials led him to the Textile Museum in Tilburg, where he tested the limitations of their underused circular weaving machine, which is what he still uses today. He worked with the legendary trend forecaster Lidewij Edelkoort—the visionary known for her New Age-y prognostications—which exposed him to some of the most forward-thinking minds of various design disciplines, from furniture to technology. At the same time, he was working on fabric-focussed consulting projects with brands like Volvo, Moncler, and Nike.

In 2015 Akkersdijk met Arnoud Haverlag, a tech entrepreneur who would eventually become the CEO of his company. An anticipated roadblock to building a flourishing business was that the concept of textile innovation is amorphous, hard to picture in your mind’s eye. A cool jacket or covetable pair of pants, however, are not. “If we want to talk about textiles, we also need to create the perfect showcase,” Akkersdijk said. So he decided to launch a small collection of garments as a way to demonstrate what textile innovation could be.

That first season, when he tried to book appointments with buyers at Paris Fashion Week, they told him they were busy. In a stroke of brilliance, he brought the collection in a truck and drove to other brand’s showrooms and parked outside, telling people to pop in after. A few boutiques in Japan picked the collection up and the hype began to build.

It’s easy to understand why. BYBORRE’s clothing is so tactile and sensory. The day we speak, Akkersdijk is wearing a black bomber jacket with a quilted design that looks like crop rows on a farm. When he moves, the padded lines move with him, undulating, bristling with life. His designs—Eastern-inspired slouchy pants or technical coats with contrasting knit panels—have a three-dimensionality that is particularly appealing now. The pandemic has created a fashion culture that has embraced the comforting, cozy joys of “inside clothes,” not to mention an appreciation of GORPy outdoorswear’s innate emphasis on utility. BYBORRE, as it happens, marries those two aesthetics into something relaxed but elegant, the same principles reflected through a prism of innovation.

Brands so often talk about designing for the future, but their clothes just as often reference the past. BYBORRE uses familiar shapes (in some of the flowing pants or wrapped jackets one can see the echoes of martial arts gi), but the textiles look light years ahead, like a jacquard pattern mimicking computer chips or an electronic circuit board rendered in brocade. Renaissance tapestries made by future civilizations. They appear to be knit by hand on a futuristic loom, better yet, spit out by electrodes from some massive 3-D printer.

Akkersdijk speaks about his company in the way that a tech entrepreneur would about their business—not as a product, but as a platform. He talks about the way that he can build a fabric from the ground up, from the functionality of the yarn to the way in which it’s knitted, how to layer in any designs or colors you choose—and then he talks about making it open source. “There was a moment where we said, if we can do this for ourselves as creators, then we can do it for everybody as creators,” he says. “If we make better textiles and have a better way to do it, why not share this with brands that we think are leaders in the field?”

They’ve already accumulated a prestigious crew of partners, impressive not only its breadth but variety: There’s the cycling brand Rapha, for whom they made a rippling zip-up jacket; for Japanese menswear brand Kapital they made New Mexico-inspired knit vests. BYBORRE has made interior fabrics for the Italian furniture company Natuzzi, a range of bags with Japanese accessories brand Porter, and technical breathable knits with the beloved textiles trailblazer Gore-Tex. More recently, they’ve entered the high-fashion realm, working with the LVMH Award-winning South African designer Thebe Magugu and former Lanvin designer Alber Elbaz for his new brand, AZ Collection. Just don’t call them collaborations. “They’re really partnerships. Yes, we brand our textiles, but we let them create. We just facilitate.”

In launching BYBORRE, I don’t get the sense that Akkersdijk aimed to create commentary on the logistics chain that ensnares much of the fashion industry today. He talks about the isolated “silos'' that the fashion system relies on, and how affecting one silo creates a chain reaction. In bringing everything under one roof, as he has, his company can be nimble and adaptable. Just by virtue of his brand’s existence, he’s showing an alternate path, something that’s smaller, more sustainable, pure but big in its thinking.

When I ask him about sustainability, he winces. Making any textile is, by its very nature, not a sustainable practice. Instead he focuses his energies on what he calls “innovation” and “impact,” and how those two things can coexist—like a recently announced project with the environmental nonprofit Parley for the Oceans which will recycle plastics found on coastlines into fabrics. Akkersdijk wants to add to the sustainability conversation in a meaningful way: how can BYBORRE innovate to make the most durable fabric, in a style that will be timeless enough to be worn for years? What impact will his products have? That’s more sustainable than trying to feed the cycle of consumerism that creates trendy products designed to be thrown away each season. “That’s an addiction,” he says, “But I want to teach people to have a love affair.”

Max Berlinger is a freelancer writer based in Los Angeles. He writes about the intersection of fashion, technology and culture. His work has been featured in the New York Times, GQ, Los Angeles Times, and others. He is writing this bio in the third person and feels silly about it. You can follow him on Instagram and Twitter.