Vollebak’s Jackets Are Changing How Humans Experience Nature
A solar-powered jacket. A hoodie made out of granite that’s designed to last 100 years. A ski jacket that glows in the dark. These are just some of the ideas put forth by London-based outdoor adventure outfitter Vollebak, who first became famous for making a pink hoodie that can help you relax.
“We make the future of adventure gear,” the brand rightly states on their website, which features pages and pages of science-backed information and videos about the engineering of their outdoor adventure gear, which was designed with extreme athletes, campers, and outdoor adventurers in mind.
Outerwear is a big deal these days, and Vollebak has managed to create a series of products that are both aesthetically appealing and functional, even in the extreme.
In the video below, watch how the team’s solar powered jacket glows kryptonite green in the dark after charging in the sun all day. Once charged by the sun, the jacket can glow for up to 12 hours, making the transition from daytime to nighttime that much more seamless (it’s great for camping, as you might imagine).
“Even if you took away this jacket’s ability to store sunlight, you’d still be left with one of the most technologically advanced jackets ever made,” the brand explains on their website. “That’s because the light-responsive material is also insanely high performance. While the jacket is waterproofed to keep you dry from ocean spray or summer showers, it’s also soft and breathable enough for any sport, and so thin you can roll it up into your hand.”
When fully charged, Vollebak’s solar powered jacket will glow in the dark for up to 12 hours.
Other jackets that caught our eye with their incredible performance capacity were the 100 Year Hoodie— “an insanely hardcore jacket that’s designed to outlive you”– and the world’s first all black night visibility gear.
The 100 Year Hoodie is made with Kevlar fiber– a durable and heat-resistant fabric that is often used in ballistic-rated body armor. In a video on their website, the Vollebak team drags it across a tarmac tailing from a motorbike, over rocks and through rivers without getting damaged. It’s like the [easyazon_link identifier=”B001OTPBPK” locale=”US” tag=”gardcoll03-20″]Nalgene Waterbottle[/easyazon_link] of clothing, in that it cannot break, even if you try.
Vollebak’s Night Visibility Jacket, meanwhile, is super reflective despite being jet black. There are 22 black dots embedded with 60,000 black glass spheres to reflect light back at any source from eight key points in the body– elbows, wrists, shoulders, head, hips. According to experimental psychologists, the human brain’s embedded “pattern recognition systems” require only eight dots of light to recognize a shape as a human form when left in complete darkness. “Our brains are so good at it,” Vollebak claims, “That in 0.25 seconds we can predict what [the person is] doing, where they’re going, and how fast.”
As of this writing, Vollebak only makes clothing for men, but we’re hoping they’ll soon expand to include a women’s collection. Solar-power jackets are a good idea, regardless of what gender they serve.
Read our related story on the Best Outerwear for Men.
