“You grow up in England,” says Mr Ben Stubbington, senior vice-president of men’s design at lululemon, which arrives on MR PORTER this week, “and it’s very much team sports, football. For some reason, that was never my thing. Maybe it’s because I didn’t love school and it was more about running away, and running away from people at that point, but I ended up getting into running, and into cycling – the road riding I do now.”

From his hometown of Portsmouth, Mr Stubbington ran as far as the University of Brighton, where he studied fashion and print design. And from there to the US in the early 2000s, where he worked at Banana Republic and Calvin Klein, before becoming men’s creative director at Theory, a post he held for seven years.

And still he kept running. But in 2007, when Mr Stubbington was 27, while training for the New York City Marathon, he discovered an egg-sized growth behind one of his knees. The growth proved benign – but the surgery to remove it was less so. He was left with extensive nerve damage in his leg and given slim chances of even ever walking again, let alone running long distances. The physical therapy to get him back on his feet, he says, was gruelling. “I was very sick for a long time, and the only reason I walk today is because my mind was strong enough to power myself through. I had to rebuild my body,” he says. “A lot of that was done through weights, TRX and things like that. But from there I found yoga as part of the process of healing, trying to create balance in my body, but also in my mind. I got into meditation as well,” he says. “And I think when you get into these high-endurance activities, that’s where you click into [the zone].”

Nowadays, the “flow state” is a principle pursuit of Mr Stubbington’s, whether he’s pursuing it through yoga and meditation, surfing or in his art – oil on canvas. “My personal artwork is very close to what I get from sport or these activities we’re talking about,” he says, “which is this level of flow and reliance on self and this inner drive. And that’s very separate from what I do with work. My design work, whether here at lululemon or past companies, is about finding a real equilibrium and working with a team.”

Mr Stubbington joined the team at lululemon two years ago, relocating from New York to Vancouver where the company is based, and immediately fell for the Endor-like environment of the Pacific Northwest, where he cycles to work every day, spending time in the mountains, trail-running and snowboarding when he can, and at least once a week takes one of the yoga classes held at the company HQ. “So I maintain this constant level of fitness,” he says, “but it’s not an extreme level of fitness.” He just watched the film Free Solo about climber Mr Alex Honnold, saying, “That guy trains.” Whereas, by contrast, Mr Stubbington says, “I’ve always tried to maintain a baseline – the only person I’m competing with is myself. No one’s ever going to rile me up more than I rile myself up. And I’ve got to be thankful, because at one point in my life I was told I might not walk again. So, to me, training – be it in yoga, be it in outdoors training – sometimes it’s about sort of running away from myself and losing myself. And then sometimes it’s about a more inward journey, I think.”

Indoors or out, whether he’s moving away or moving inward, Mr Stubbington functions as the sort of ideal guinea pig for road-testing his designs. “At lulu,” he says, “we’re thinking about a guy who’s on the move all the time. My friends who work in a music engineering studio or as fashion photographers or as architects, they’re running from meeting to meeting or getting on a plane, and they’re training. I think it’s become more common for guys to be taking care of themselves now. Maybe it’s an age thing, but I’ve always been into health and fitness, although I’ve always liked the other side of things, too. I think for me it’s about the yin and the yang. I love to be at a dive bar, but I also love to be going to yoga, so when you can have the two and work them into your life in a way that gels and works, for me there’s a real beauty in that.”

It is a priority for Mr Stubbington to create clothes that can go here and there, can play at all the various speeds and in all of the various contexts through which our modern-day lives may take us. And the way that is done, Mr Stubbington says, is by designing with the function of a garment as the primary consideration. “It’s almost like product design,” he says, of this methodology. “We’re constantly trying out new products, new fabrics, new ways of making things to try and optimise the performance of the human, how those clothes feel on your body, and how they feel in your mind. But we really design here with this minimalist ethos that everything within the garment has to work, has to function. The function is the most important thing. So innovation comes through functionality – and that ends up creating the design.”

The exclusive collection lululemon has created for MR PORTER is based on its core coding. Coding that manifested itself, he says, “through colouration and through print and through graphic, a lot of which itself is functional because it’s reflective or it’s in a 3D-engineered net, part of the garment”. In the capsule, some of the brand’s classics are reimagined in new colours and fabrics, including a one-off reflective camo-print textile with a DWR (durable water repellent) finish, and a special enzyme-washed jersey, which gives a warm, uneven finish to a lululemon trademark, the 5 Year Basic Vitasea T-shirt.

All these pieces are, of course, designed for performance, but not every garment lululemon makes is ultramarathon garb. As men’s lifestyles are beginning to incorporate more of a mix, so too are their offerings. “It doesn’t all look like sport clothes,” Mr Stubbington says, “but it has the functionality.” In fact, “We’ve just launched some flannel shirts in our stores. The flannel shirts are made of polyester, because they’re fast-drying, fast-wicking. They have insulation to them. They have a high level of stretch. So they look like a familiar flannel shirt, but they’re a more modern-day version in their use of fabrication and in the detail that we’re putting into them.”

Wait, what? Flannel, like, grunge? “I’m an indie kid at heart,” Mr Stubbington says. “I’m not one to sit around in sweatpants all day, but the way we’re camouflaging it is adding functionality to clothes that you can wear every day. I love that ethos, too. I believe that guys want to feel more comfortable in the clothes they’re wearing every day. Because you don’t want to go back to something uncomfortable once you’ve worn something comfortable or something that really functions.”