VOLLEBAK ROCK JACKET TURNS SLATE INTO FLEXIBLE OUTERWEAR
Vollebak takes its material experiments underground with the Rock Jacket, a one-off garment built from thousands of tiny pieces of slate. The British clothing brand has previously worked with copper, wood, aerogel and electromagnetic shielding, but its latest prototype goes considerably further back in the material timeline: stone. Rather than treating it as a rigid shell, the project sets out to make rock behave more like fabric.
Each 5mm x 5mm slate tile sits on a neoprene backing, forming a gridded surface that can twist and bend while retaining the uneven texture of natural stone. From a distance, the jacket reads almost like pixelated armor; up close, its fragmented surface reveals the layers and variations of the slate itself. The result lands somewhere between geological sample, digital texture and something a particularly well-dressed space miner might keep by the door.
STEVEN LEPRIZÉ ADAPTS WOOWOOD MARQUETRY TO STONE
The material was developed with French designer, material technologist and experimental cabinetmaker Steven Leprizé, whom Vollebak initially approached to explore a more wearable version of its earlier Wooden Jacket prototype. Leprizé adapted WooWood, his elastic marquetry technique that bonds hundreds of small wooden tiles onto a flexible rubber membrane, replacing timber with thin squares of slate.
Producing the new surface is a precision-heavy exercise. The slate arrives in sheets measuring 100 x 50cm and just 0.5mm thick before being cut into clean-edged squares half a centimeter wide. According to Leprizé, making the material involves around 50 individual steps, with the cutting process determining whether the final grid can move cleanly without losing the visual character of the stone.
SLATE TILES AND CORDURA SHAPE VOLLEBAK’S CROPPED HARRINGTON
Vollebak turns the flexible sheets into a cropped, minimalist Harrington jacket with a deliberately stripped-back silhouette. The slate panels are laser cut and joined with visibly taped seams, while Cordura pockets and a conventional zipper bring a few recognizably garment-like details back into the equation. The contrast is part of the appeal: an everyday jacket typology, except its surface happens to be made from rock.
The Rock Jacket currently exists as a one-of-one piece, with Vollebak positioning it as the beginning of a longer investigation rather than a finished material system. Co-founder Nick Tidball suggests that rock could eventually be explored as a construction material for clothing in much the same way it has long been used in architecture. Whether stone ever becomes wardrobe staple is another question, but a jacket made from a fragment of the Earth’s crust certainly makes the usual seasonal turnover feel rather hurried.
