Rock has been around for billions of years. Humans have been around for a few million. In that time we figured out how to wear fur, leather, wool, cotton, plastic, and even iron, yet rock never made the cut. We used it for spears, houses, pyramids, and sculptures, but nobody looked at a boulder and thought it would make a great bomber. Fair enough, since rock is brilliant at sitting still and clothes are mostly about moving. Vollebak looked at that problem and decided to build the bomber anyway, out of actual slate.
The Rock Jacket is a one-off cropped Harrington covered in roughly 54,000 slate tiles (per Dezeen’s count), each 0.2 inches (5mm) square and 0.02 inches (0.5mm) thick, bonded to a neoprene backing. The material comes from French material technologist Steven Leprizé, who adapted his WooWood elastic marquetry, a technique he originally built around tiny wooden tiles. Leprizé says it takes 50 steps to make, and cutting the tiles is the hardest of them. The finished piece has taped seams, Cordura pockets, and a zip, so it looks wearable enough for a party. It is listed at $50,000, which is a lot for a jacket and a bargain for millions of years of geology.
Designers: Steven Leprizé & Vollebak
Vollebak got here by way of wood. The label first called Leprizé about a more wearable version of its Wooden Jacket, a prototype built from 250,000 pieces of laser-cut American walnut. Leprizé grew up between his grandfather’s sawmill and his father’s workshop, trained at École Boulle in Paris, and now leads a team of 12 in a studio that is half atelier, half laboratory. He had something else to show them, a slate version of WooWood with the same grid of 5mm tiles. Vollebak had already spent a year chasing a wearable rock jacket, so the timing could not have been better.
Slate is a layered metamorphic rock with natural cleavage planes, so sheets just 0.02 inches (0.5mm) thick can be peeled off a slab. Those sheets arrive at roughly 39 by 20 inches (100 by 50cm), and the hard part is cutting them into 0.2 inch tiles without losing one. Leprizé built a bespoke 11.5-foot (3.5m) cutting machine that he says beats a laser cutter, but it was designed for wood, so slate cost him several ruined sheets. The tiles are then glued under pressure to neoprene with an adhesive developed with 3M engineers in Switzerland. The rubber comes from a UK supplier whose core business is fetishwear, which earned Leprizé some funny looks at the office.
At 0.2 inches a tile, the surface reads like a pixelated texture, with light sliding across the folds in blocky gradients, as if a game engine were struggling with a boulder. Vollebak itself compares it to a glitching Minecraft texture pack, or brutalist smart casual for a Coruscant cocktail party. Where the sleeve bends, the tiles lift and overlap like woven leather, and I kept thinking of Bottega Veneta’s intrecciato. Stitching slate was never an option, so the seams are taped, which ended up outlining the diamond pockets and shoulder panels like a graphic. The tiles ruled out tight fits, so the cropped, boxy Harrington is basically the rock’s idea of a good fit.
Vollebak has already turned Dyneema, the fiber used to haul ships, into an Indestructible Jacket, worked stainless steel into a blazer, and released a $3,995 jacket called FWAHBL in a run of ten. The Rock Jacket tops them all on price and ambition, with a commercially viable version planned in about two years. Co-founder Nick Tidball mentioned that once you make a jacket out of rock, everything else seems easy, which is quite a flex. Vollebak admits this version is not practical, which I respect in a $50,000 jacket. Leprizé is already developing granite, marble, sandstone, and schist versions, and I badly want to see someone in a marble bomber.
