Two jackets exist. Both were cut from the same retired Red Bull kites, flown by the Dutch kitesurfer who invented the megaloop. One hangs in our studio. The other went back to Ruben Lenten, and he wore it in Cape Town at King of the Air.
This is how they were made, and why a retired race kite is one of the hardest objects in sport to dispose of responsibly.
The problem with a retired race kite
A professional big-air rider goes through kites at a rate that would bankrupt most people. Megaloops load a canopy in ways it was never designed to survive repeatedly — the kite is thrown through a full rotation while the rider is thirty metres up, and every one of those loops is a shock load through the ripstop, the seams and the leading edge.
Kites do not last long under that. They get retired long before they are worn out in the everyday sense: the fabric is often still beautiful, still printed, still perfectly waterproof, and simply no longer trustworthy at the loads a professional puts through it.
So what happens to it? In almost every case: nothing good. A kite is not one material. It is ripstop nylon in the canopy, polyester Dacron in the leading edge and struts, Mylar film laminated into some panels, polyurethane in the bladders, plus silicone and polyurethane coatings and aramid reinforcements — bonded, laminated and stitched into a single object. Conventional recycling needs a clean, single polymer stream. A kite is the exact opposite of that, in volumes far too small for anyone to build a separation process around.
The result is that some of the most technically advanced textile in sport goes to landfill or to an incinerator. Which is why every useful answer to this problem involves keeping the fabric as fabric.
Who is Ruben Lenten
Ruben Lenten started kiteboarding at twelve and won the Red Bull King of the Air in 2005. He is best known as the rider who pioneered and popularised the megaloop — steering the kite through a tight full rotation while at the top of a jump, which is now the defining move of big-air kitesurfing and the thing every King of the Air is judged on.
He later stepped back from the competition circuit to build his own projects under the LEN10 name, including the LEN10 Megaloop Challenge. In practical terms, that means a career's worth of kites flown harder than almost anyone else's — and a garage full of them once they were done.
The collaboration: he sent us his kites
The collaboration started the way most of ours do: a conversation about what to do with gear that has stopped being equipment but has not stopped being material. Ruben donated a set of his used Red Bull kites — the actual sails he had flown, in the livery he flew them in.
That matters more than it sounds. When we cut into a donated sail, we are not sourcing "kite fabric" as a raw commodity. We are cutting into a specific object with a specific history, and the graphics on it are the record of that history. A generic panel of red ripstop is fabric. A panel with the leading edge scuffing, the repair patches and the print of a kite that has actually been looped over Cape Town is something else.
The process: how a kite becomes a jacket
Turning a kite into a wearable garment is mostly a problem of triage, not sewing. The steps we follow are the same on every sail that comes through the studio:
- Wash and dry, completely. Salt crystals left in the weave are abrasive — they destroy needles, chew up seams, and will keep working at the fabric for years after the garment is finished.
- Map the sail. Every kite gets laid out flat and assessed panel by panel. The trailing edge and the top surface usually take the most UV; shaded panels are frequently still perfect. Pressing a thumb hard into a panel tells you almost everything: sound fabric resists, UV-cooked fabric feels papery and tears along the line of your thumb.
- Select the panels. This is the design step, and it is where a kite jacket is actually decided. The graphics are fixed — you cannot move a logo or rescale a stripe — so the pattern has to be placed on the sail rather than the sail cut to the pattern. Where the Red Bull livery lands on a finished jacket is a choice made with the whole kite on the floor.
- Cut and construct. Canopy ripstop behaves well; the Dacron from the leading edge and struts is stiffer and needs different handling. Seams, panels and reinforcements are built around what the fabric will take, not around a fixed spec sheet.
Because the graphics are non-repeating and the damage is non-repeating, the output is non-repeating. Two jackets cut from the same set of kites are still two different jackets. That is not a marketing position — it is a physical constraint of the material, and it is the reason we number our pieces individually instead of running seasons.
Two jackets, one worn at King of the Air
The kites yielded two garments.
The first stayed with us as a studio piece — the reference object, the one that proves the process works and that stays in the room where the work happens.
The second went back to Ruben. He wore it at Red Bull King of the Air in Cape Town, at the event he won in 2005, made from the kites he retired. There is a closed loop in that which we did not plan and could not have designed: the fabric went from the water at Kite Beach, to a workshop, back to the beach it came from, on the rider who flew it.
That is the whole argument for upcycling in one object. Nothing about the material was downgraded. It did not become insulation or filler or a lesser version of itself. It stayed exactly as technical as it started — light, tough, waterproof, printed — and simply changed job.
Why kitesurf upcycling beats kitesurf recycling
Recycling, in the strict sense, means breaking a material down to reprocess it. For kite fabric that is currently close to impossible and, where it is possible, energy-intensive and value-destroying: you spend a lot to get back something worth less than what you started with.
Upcycling skips the destruction step entirely. The ripstop in a retired kite has already had its energy spent — the petrochemical feedstock, the weaving, the coating, the printing, the shipping. All of that is embodied in the fabric whether it becomes a jacket or goes to landfill. Keeping it in use is the only route that gets a return on the energy already spent.
It is also, frankly, the only route that produces something anyone actually wants. Nobody has ever been excited about a bale of shredded mixed polymer. People are extremely excited about a jacket cut from a kite that a rider they follow looped over Table Mountain.
Send us your kite
The Ruben Lenten jackets were a collaboration, but the process behind them is the same one we run for anyone. If you have a retired kite in a garage — too damaged to trust, too full of memories to bin — it can become the same thing.
Tell us the kite's model, brand, size and condition, plus the city and country it would ship from, through our donate a kite page. We will come back to you honestly about whether the sail is still good enough to cut, because a UV-dead canopy is not worth the postage and we would rather say so.
You can also see what the process produces in our upcycled sail jackets — each one cut from a single retired sail, each one numbered, and when a number sells, that jacket is gone.
Not sure whether your kite is repairable, sellable, or ready to become something else? Send us a photo — we will tell you straight, even if the answer means you do not buy anything from us.