Designing prints that survive chlorine and sun: the technical side of swimwear print

Swimwear print looks simple from the outside bright, bold, decorative but it’s one of the most technically demanding categories we design for. A print that looks stunning on a flat swatch can fall apart entirely once it meets chlorine, salt water, UV exposure and a fitted, moving garment. Here’s what actually goes into getting it right.

Colour has to survive more than it looks like it should. Chlorine and sun both cause colour fade and shift over repeated exposure, and certain pigments hold up far better than others. Reds and darker tones are often the first to go; some colour combinations that look perfect in a design file simply won’t hold their contrast after a season of pool use. We factor this into colour selection from the start rather than leaving it to the printer to solve.

Placement is engineering, not just decoration. Unlike an all-over repeat, an engineered swim placement print has to be planned around cup construction, seam lines, ruching and the way fabric stretches over the body often across several sizes at once. Getting this wrong means a beautiful print that looks distorted or misaligned the moment it’s on a body rather than a flat pattern piece.

Repeat has to behave differently at swim scale. Prints are frequently used at a smaller scale in swimwear than in other apparel categories, which means fine detail can get lost or start to look muddy. We test our swim prints at production scale early, not just at design scale, to make sure detail and colour separation still read clearly.

Production-readiness matters more than in most categories. Because swimwear fabric behaves so differently from woven fabric, a print that hasn’t been developed with manufacturing in mind can cause real problems downstream — colour bleed, poor repeat matching at seams, dye issues. We work directly with swim manufacturers on fabric type and cut before finalising a design, which is part of why so many swim brands come back to our collection and service season after season.

If you’re briefing a swim or beachwear range and need a print built to survive more than a single season in the pool, we’d love to talk about a bespoke swim print project.