Athlete Deana Shaaban Launches Global Performance Wear Brand Anatomy

Professional athlete and Egyptian fashion designer Deana Shaaban has spent the better part of the last two decades entrenched in the intricacies of the human body, from the contours of a wedding gown over a woman’s frame to the mechanics of Olympic athletes in motion. She herself competed in the Junior Olympics and broke national records as a professional swimmer. Shaaban’s new international performance wear brand ANATOMY is a marriage of the two - the global fashion ecosystem and lifelong athleticism. Each piece is engineered to move like a second skin, so nothing stands between the body and what it can do. ANATOMY is an extension of a body in motion, intent on proving itself larger than the circumstances arranged around it.

"What you put on your body every single day is one of the most important decisions that you make, because your clothing is an extension of who you are, and it is how you express to the world who you want to be at every single moment,” Shaaban said. “It was very important for me, as I was creating the sportswear brand, to extend that to this concept."

Shaaban spent years experimenting with different percentages of athletic fabrics and threads to engineer the exact fusion she was looking for in the leggings, sports bras, and tops that now fill the ANATOMY collections for men and women. She drew from a wealth of knowledge about the anatomy of the human body and the ways in which clothing should respond to it.

In 2014, Shaaban and her now husband Hussein Abdeldayem founded IGNITE Egypt, a performance training facility for everyone from Olympians to first-time athletes. Through years of training herself and others, Shaaban knew the ingredients of well-fitting and high-performance sportswear. She asked herself and her clients questions like: Which fabrics mould best to the shape of your body? What happens when you sweat? How does it perform when you move? Shaaban wanted to engineer fabric that could withstand a marathon and glide with your body at every mile.

"It's understanding what different parts of the body need and then translating that into how things are woven together," Shaaban explained about her process. “With sportswear, the fabric makes a difference, the technology makes a difference, one millimeter left and right will make all the difference.”

She was ready to launch ANATOMY over a decade ago, but every time she received a sample back from a factory in Egypt, “it was lacking the proper technology to move with the human body in a way that felt like someone's second skin,” she said.

After years of trial and error, and thousands of fabric samples, Shaaban took her search to the continent next door. "We did a whole tour of Asia around all the different factories, villages in the middle of nowhere,” Shaaban said, “until eventually we found our way to the factories that are now producing our pieces.”

The result was ANATOMY’s fabric technology being innovated in Japan, produced in Asia, and sent to Egypt. The final products now available online use breathable, temperature regulating fabrics that merge performance with fashion. They are sweat-wicking and antibacterial, to avoid the sweat smell that lingers even after workout clothes come out of the washer. And perhaps most importantly, the second-skin fit sculpts without restraining, and stays taut on your waist in any workout. But for Shaaban, the engineering was only half of the equation.

ANATOMY, and Shaaban, believe that “everything you need is already inside of you.”

The philosophy behind ANATOMY may be best understood by its logo, a circle that spins around a triangle. “The circle represents the infinite nature of the divine. There’s no beginning and there’s no end - it’s always energy in motion,” Shaaban said. “The triangle represents the mind, body, and soul trifecta. Only when that trifecta is moving in equilibrium within the infinite nature of the divine, only then does our infinite and true potential come out into the world.”

Inside each piece of ANATOMY clothing, Shaaban embroidered a secret message: “I am infinite.”

“I'm hoping that when people put these pieces of clothing on, it is a constant reminder that they are really infinitely powerful,” Shaaban said. “True strength has nothing to do with anything that exists outside of themselves, and that inside of each and every single one of us, all of the answers to the world already exist there.”