Blue Morpho Jacket 2017

The Blue Morpho Jacket was one of our earliest and most experimental pieces. It’s a fully waterproof outer shell that recreates one of nature’s most brilliant solutions to high visibility – the iridescent wings of the Blue Morpho butterfly. Ultimately we stopped making clothing out of glass as it lacked the durability we wanted. And this batch of jackets wasn't made available at the time because of imperfections in the material and inconsistencies in the colour. But if you’re prepared to forgive its faults, visually it remains one of our most iconic pieces.

Pilots flying above the rainforest can see the Blue Morpho butterfly from over a kilometre away thanks to microscopic scales that cover its wings. These scales reflect light to create an iridescent and shimmering blue that’s constantly shifting colour and astonishingly bright. That’s because instead of being created by pigment, the blue of the butterfly’s wing is created through a phenomenon known as structural colouration. It means it’s the structure of the wing itself that creates the colour you see.

While most of the colours we see are caused by pigments absorbing and reflecting certain wavelengths of light, iridescence is caused by structures on the surface of the object interfering with how the light is reflected off it. The interference means that light isn’t simply reflected but scattered. The result is that iridescent colour looks different from every angle – it isn’t constant, and it can’t be. So the Blue Morpho butterfly can appear to be every possible blue in the spectrum at the same time, and different from every angle.

While the Blue Morpho butterfly uses these microscopic plate-like structures on the surface of its wing to make itself ultra-visible from long range, the jacket uses highly reflective microscopic blue glass spheres. With over two billion of them embedded in resin on the jacket’s surface, and over 40,000 in every single square centimetre, they’re invisible to the naked eye. When light hits the jacket, it travels through the curved surface of these glass spheres and strikes the back of them, before being reflected straight back at the original light source so that the fabric looks like it’s emitting light.

When you expose the jacket to any bright light source or sunshine it transforms instantly into a shimmering metallic blue. If you’re out on the slopes in the sun, the surface and colour of the jacket will appear to shift and warp. And if you shoot with the flash on in broad daylight, the surface of the jacket will look like liquid metal in your shot whether you’re taking a photo or filming. These shots use zero special effects other than turning the flash on.

Just like the wings of the Blue Morpho butterfly, the Blue Morpho Jacket can appear to be many different shades of blue all at once. And because of the way the microscopic glass spheres on the surface of the jacket scatter light, two people looking at the jacket from two different angles will see entirely different effects. Even if you’re holding a camera up to the jacket with the flash on, what you see through the lens and what you see in real life will be two different images.

Every element of our Blue Morpho Jacket was engineered with precision. As nothing sticks to the glass material we etched out the logo on the hood with lasers by removing a microscopically thin layer from its surface. The material is highly experimental, so blemishes and marks will appear on the surface of the jacket over time, both during the production process and once it’s being worn, which means no two jackets will ever look quite the same.