What is Fastskin?
The Fastskin FS-Pro swimsuit features a new, water-repellent fabric made by weaving a combination of spandex and nylon yarn. The fabric feels like a windbreaker when dry and is patented and dubbed LZR Pulse. It weighs 70 percent less than other swimsuits, but has 15 percent better compression – an important feature to maintaining the pace of world-class swimmers. It retains almost no water and needs only 45 minutes to dry after being in water. Sharp said that Speedo officials already had identified the fabric with the right low-drag characteristics by the time they contacted him. But they had to fit that fabric into a design, which is where he came in. “Once they put together prototypes, they had several testing sites around the world for different aspects of the testing,” he said. “We’d collect all the information from the testing and feed that back to the group as a whole and come up with ideas for the next prototype – what we would tighten up, loosen up, etc. “That was my chief role
