Design Talk with Michelle Rose, Co-Inventor

Michelle Rose, designer and co-inventor
Kinflyte Designer & Co-Inventor

I worked with Kinflyte founder Vivian Lee on the product design and development of the posture essentials. We've brought together performance technology with the soft, gorgeous side of intimate apparel.  

In terms of background, I'm a classically trained fashion designer who fell into performance and technical design early in my career. I was a senior designer for companies like Columbia Sports and The North Face, and then co-founded Agency Aspect launching ergonomic crossbody bags.

Aesthetics and Innovation through Design

My passion has been applying fashion, style, and design in with technology. Partnering with Viv, we took inspiration visually from art deco and early lingerie shapewear. We brought those elements together with new technology using advanced, soft fabrics to create something new.

Viv and Michelle working on Kinflyte

Viv brought her Korean heritage, and I brought my perspective from many years of martial arts training. Asian culture is very inspiring to me. There is a healing aspect to it, which influenced the design.

Functional Apparel Built with Purpose

We started design and development with posture always in mind, thinking through the alignment of the spine and how you hold your head on your spine and move on your axis.

Michelle with fit model during prototyping session
Prototyping at innovation lab Studio 317

We designed Kinflyte's posture wear, so that your body learns to align itself properly. Therefore the muscles, the ligaments, and joints - everything would come in and strengthen - creating an internal support system.

Experience as a 5th Degree Black Belt 

I’ve been training in martial arts for over 27 years, and everything in martial arts is about balance and alignment. It’s about yin and yang, front to back, side to side, and rotating on a strong axis. 

In martial arts, alignment is everything. Martial arts is not just about body mechanics and how your bones align, it is about creating a strong structure in which your muscles can operate smoothly and freely. It’s also about energy flow. This concept of "chi" and how energy flows through the channels and keeps your joints open and lubricated.

Retro-Future Stylings of Kinflyte

With Kinflyte, we created gorgeous visual lines that evoke beauty, create symmetry, and affect how it makes you feel. We pulled from art deco, asian culture, and sci-fi classics like Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. The aesthetic is retro-future. We designed posture wear with inspiration from structural intimates wear from the '20's and '30s.

Back then, everything had these gorgeous lines deriving from art deco architecture, creating this visually stunning look with an optimistic view of the future.

Final Word: Push for Greater Inclusivity

Body diversity is obviously so important. Women have always been diverse and our bodies are constantly changing throughout our lives. If you study fashion history, women used to make their own clothes, or had clothes made specifically for them. We are so far beyond that now. 

Very few women fit into what is considered standard sizes. We're finally seeing more brands step up to the plate, and creating clothes with a wider size range.