We’ve built new material technologies out of wood, metals and mycelium. Creating a Rock Jacket would be our greatest challenge, a 3-million-year-old problem.

Rock has been our most important technology. It made us apex predators. We used it to build cities and empires. Now we’ve worked out how to wear it. Welcome back to the Stone Age.

Around 3.3 million years ago, on the shores of Lake Turkana in Kenya, one of our ancestors bashed together two rocks and knocked off a short, sharp flake. It’s the oldest tool we’ve ever found, and it long predates fire, clothing and language.For almost all of prehistory, rock was our cutting edge. Stone blades and hammerstones meant we could hunt, tear and scrape meat and marrow. And the calories they provided built bigger brains. So we started to think bigger. And taller. By 8000 BCE Jericho was ringed by a stone wall. Stonehenge, the pyramids, the Parthenon and the Pantheon followed. Rock is how we held territory, honoured our gods and told the future we’d been here. But in more than 3 million years of making good use of rock, we’ve never managed to wear it. Rock is brilliant at not moving. And clothes have to move all the time.We’ve built new material technologies out of wood, metals and mycelium. Creating a Rock Jacket would be our greatest challenge, a 3-million-year-old problem.

Woowood. stevenleprize.com

We found part of the solution in Paris. Steven Leprizé is a French designer, material technologist and experimental cabinetmaker. He makes wood that inflates, bends and bonds with metal.Hermès used one of his materials for its KellyWood bag. Jony Ive commissioned him to make bespoke furniture for his yacht. He’d taken WooWood, his elastic marquetry of tiny wood tiles backed with rubber, and made a version in slate. Slate splits along its layers, so it can be peeled incredibly thin. The sheets Leprizé uses arrive at 100cm x 50cm and just 0.5mm thick. Cutting them into perfectly clean 5mm x 5mm squares isn’t easy. “There are 50 steps to making this material,” says Leprizé, “and the cutting of the tiles is the most important.” Each slice of slate has its own topography of contour lines, peaks and valleys. Preserving that flattened landscape means not losing a single tile.

“There are 50 steps to making this material,” says Leprizé, “and the cutting of the tiles is the most important.” Each slice of slate has its own topography of contour lines, peaks and valleys. Preserving that flattened landscape means not losing a single tile.

The tiles are then glued under pressure to a thin neoprene backing, using a technique Leprizé developed with engineers at 3M in Switzerland. The neoprene comes from a UK supplier whose core business is fetishwear. “I got some funny looks in the office when I was ordering the neoprene online,” says Leprizé. “But it’s really high-quality rubber. It needs to be if you are going to wear it super tight against your skin.” Leprizé’s material got us part of the way there. But we still had to make it truly wearable. In design terms, the material’s armadillo-like tiles ruled out anything too tightly fitted, so we kept bends, sharp turns and gatherings to a minimum. We settled on a minimalist and suitably sci-fi cropped Harrington and laser-cut our way through 5 of Leprizé’s slate sheets. Stitching slate was never an option, so the seams are visibly taped. We added Cordura® pockets and a zip.

The Rock Jacket is a one-off, a proof of concept. We’re not pretending it’s practical. Not this version anyway. But as with the Wooden Jacket, scalability and day-to-day wearability are the ultimate ambition.In an era when fashion is barely worn before it’s thrown away, our jacket is a piece of Earth’s crust that took millions of years to form. It’s absurd armour and cold, hard couture. And it asks us to rethink our relationship with the oldest materials we have.

For the Silo, NICK AND STEVE TIDBALL – FOUNDERS Vollebak