The Vollebak brand developed a jacket that resists viruses, fungi and bacteria owing to its antibacterial properties, while also looking cool. Even Stanley Kubrick would be impressed by this jacket, and for good reason. Please welcome the “Full Metal Jacket”.
Many innovative product ideas emerged in the past period that, owing to their sufficiently futuristic looks, landed right on the covers of design magazines: however, whether these masks, face shields, suits and other accessories looking like the props of science-fiction movies can be used at all remains to be seen. Seeing Vollebak’s development makes us think that there is hope, and it is indeed possible to design products for everyday use that will hold their ground in a hundred years’ time, too.
The products of the brand established by Nick and Steve Tidball showcase the meeting of science, technology and fashion, in a quite impressive manner. Only two years after its launch in 2016, the brand was awarded by TIME magazine: their solar charged jacket was chosen as the invention of the year in 2018. The guys are always at the forefront when it comes to innovation. In the past years, they have experimented with many materials: they created the world’s first graphene jacket, but one may also purchase T-shirts made of eucalypt, beech and algae from them.
Their latest development received the quite telling name “Full Metal Jacket”: a copper fiber of a length of almost 11 kilometers is used for creating each jacket. The unusual choice of materials results in an extraordinarily exciting outlook, and the jacket has all the “superpowers” that can be expected from an average yet practical coat: it’s wind and waterproof, breathable, and it also provides comfort in colder times. The most important quality of the jacket containing 65% copper is that it can kill off every type of bacteria, fungi and virus, so probably this material will gain even more ground in the textile industry in the upcoming decades.
Of course, the guys didn’t reinvent the wheel: the beneficial properties of copper were already known in ancient times, the Egyptians made their medical equipment out of it, and it has also proven its diversity in many other fields (telecommunication cables, circuits, computer parts, medical sciences). Here we also have to mention a Hungarian example: in her diploma project, Karolina Fábics designed an alternative uniform collection in 2017. For creating the apparel named “electric smog”, the designer used textiles galvanized with copper plating, resulting in a feminine collection with silky, brilliant tones.
We will need quite deep pockets to get our hands on a Vollebak super jacket: the “Full Metal Jacket” costs EUR 995, but the same as a good denim or leather jacket doesn’t come cheap, we can also think of it as a form of investment.
Source: Yanko Design
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