| Over the last 18 months our friends at Vollebak have been building the Shielding range, a wearable defence system against electromagnetic radiation. Some of it is literally silver and shiny. In other cases, they have integrated the shielding technology more discreetly, in a super comfortable t shirt and, shipping in September, one of the best-looking leather jacket ever made. Gamma rays turned Bruce Banner into The Hulk. Which turned out to be mostly a good thing. But in reality radiation and human beings don’t go well together.And as we enter an era of cybersecurity breaches, geopolitical instability, the first manned missions to Mars and increased cosmic radiation exposure, it’s going to present more of a threat.Luckily, there are ways to stop electromagnetic radiation in its tracks. Long before the Curiosity Rover was sent to Mars to search for signs of life, it had to be tested on Earth. So NASA built an electromagnetic shielding tent to completely block out external radiation during testing – anything from a text message to a chat with the James Webb telescope. EXPLORE THE Vollebak SHIELDING RANGE Vollebak took that technology and put it into clothing. The Shielding Jacket and Shielding Pants are built from a lightweight ripstop embedded with pure silver that blocks radio waves and microwaves across the frequencies used by WiFi, Bluetooth, Ku-band satellites and radar. This means the jacket and pants deflect infrared, so you can’t be seen on a thermal camera. And each one has a hidden pocket that works like a Faraday cage, sealing your phone off from the outside world whether it’s switched on or off. So you can’t be hacked, tracked or even called. The Shielding Bomber, based on the original MA-1 flight jacket, wraps this space-age protection in a jet-age shape. Arriving in September, the Leather Shielding Jacket is a re-engineered version of the A-2, the most famous leather jacket ever made. It’s cut from black nappa sheep leather, tanned with plant-based tannins so it breathes and ages gracefully, and is lined with the same silver shielding technology as the Shielding Jacket, Pants and Bomber. The Shielding T Shirt works slightly differently. It’s knitted from silver-plated fibres spun from wood pulp, forming a conductive network. Lab tests show shielding from 30MHz to 10GHz, with the strongest effect across common mobile, WiFi and Bluetooth bands. It won’t hide you from a satellite, but it’s supersoft, endlessly wearable and the logical thing to put on under everything else. |
