Vollebak | Full Metal Jacket

We recently came across Vollebak, a clothing brand founded by twin brothers, designers and athletes Nick and Steve Tidball, who use science and technology to create clothing from and for the future. 

Since starting Vollebak, they’ve taken extreme challenges and tried to solve them with pieces of clothing. One of the challenges they recently explored is when Covid-19 hit, and wanted to investigate the role clothing can play in protecting against disease on Earth.

Vollebak’s Full Metal Jacket is made from up to 11 kilometres of copper, which is known for is virus killing qualities.They created this jacket to exhibit the potential of copper being used to make clothing that would be resilient to viruses such as coronavirus.

The company hopes the jacket is the beginning of  the first step in its development of antimicrobial clothing and designed the jacket to show that the material could be used to make clothing.

"So really we're still in phase one, which is proving the viability of making clothing almost entirely out of copper," said Tidball. "Phase two is starting to test what it is capable of, and that's what we're going to look at now."

The main goal of the brand is to focus on the future of clothing over the next century, and they believe that disease resistant clothing is a long term ambition with copper being one of the materials used to make intelligent clothing in the future. 

For more information, have a look at their website here.