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Welcome Back to the Stone Age.

£50,000

Rock is our oldest and, in evolutionary terms, most important technology. It made us apex predators and then we used it to build cities and empires. And we’re convinced there are new ways we can use rock, that it has another trick up its sleeve.

Our Rock Jacket is at once absurd and revolutionary, primitive but highly crafted, and making use of an advanced material technology. Built out of 5mm x 5mm slate tiles with a neoprene backing, it looks like a glitching Minecraft texture pack. Or something the Star Wars costume department dreamt up, brutalist smart casual for a Coruscant cocktail party. It might also mark the beginning of a new chapter in geological history, the arrival of wearable rock.

The original deep tech

Name: The Rock Jacket
Brand: Vollebak
SKU: JKT170
Price: 50000 GBP
Availability: OutOfStock

Around 3.3 million years ago, on the shores of Lake Turkana in Kenya, one of our earliest ancestors picked up a rock, struck it against another and knocked a sharp flake off the edge. It proved useful for cutting and scraping. It's the oldest stone tool we've ever found. It long predates the evidence for controlled fire, clothing and language. Before we were fully human, we were already working with rock.

Hammerstones and brain food

For the next several hundred thousand years, we learned to do more with rock. Oldowan hammerstones and choppers, made and remade across the savannahs of East Africa from around 2.9 million years ago, let early humans butcher animals and crack bone for marrow. Rock was our most important survival technology (and all that high-calorie meaty goodness did wonders for our early human brain development).

The iPhone of the Pleistocene

Over the next couple of million years, toolmaking sharpened into a craft. We made handaxes, flint knives, obsidian blades and arrowheads flaked so finely they could split a hair. The Acheulean handaxe was the iPhone of the Pleistocene: a recognisable, adaptable and astonishingly durable piece of design. Knapped on both faces from stone, often with an almost architectural symmetry, it travelled with early humans across much of Africa, Europe and Asia. First appearing around 1.76 million years ago, it endured in some places until about 120,000 years ago, less a single object than a long-lived design language.

Rock is our oldest and most important technology

Walls, towers and the first cities

We’d already used rock to create permanent settlements, to protect the first non-nomadic communities. Rock kept the outside outside and made possible the most important invention in human history, the city. By around 8000 BCE, the inhabitants of what would become Jericho had ringed their settlement with a stone wall over three and a half metres high. They also built a stone tower, eight and a half metres tall, with an internal staircase.

Rock made us apex predators and then we used it to build cities and empires.

Marble temples and concrete domes

Athens was built quite literally on top of a limestone outcrop, the Acropolis, and then dressed in marble hauled from Mount Pentelicus seventeen kilometres away: an estimated 20,000 tonnes of it went into the Parthenon alone, dragged down by mule and pulley between 447 and 432 BCE. Rome ran on rock too, travertine and volcanic tuff for its temples and amphitheatres. It developed lime-and-volcanic ash concrete and used it to build the Pantheon and what is still the world’s largest unreinforced concrete dome.

Why nobody wears rock

But in the more than three million years we’ve been making good use of rock, we’ve never attempted to wear it. Rock is brilliant at not moving, and clothes have to do a lot of moving. Getting dressed meant getting creative with all kinds of organic and inorganic materials. We've skinned and shorn animals, plucked birds, spun plants, even knitted metals into chain mail. And, more recently, wrapped ourselves in plastics and lab-grown fibres.

The disposable wardrobe

Over time, our clothing has become hyper-disposable, hyper-synthetic, disconnected from natural cycles or deep time. We have little or no sense of where it has come from or where it goes, no sense of its real cost or value, cause and effect. So we’ve set out to create new material technologies that are built around our oldest and most essential raw materials, not just wool and cotton but wood, metals and mycelium. And now rock.

No one has tried to make rock wearable. Until now.

Raised on sawdust

Steven Leprizé is a French designer, material technologist and experimental cabinetmaker. He grew up between his grandfather's sawmill and his father's workshop and trained at École Boulle, a fine arts and crafts college in Paris. He graduated top of his class and in 2009 set up his own research-led studio, ARCA, intent on reinventing and retooling woodworking.

A new kind of carpentry

Leprizé is now based in a 600m2 studio and workshop in Paris where he leads a team of 12. The studio is part atelier, part laboratory. It’s built on traditional cabinetmaking but also applies industrial processes to woodworking, including thermoforming, vacuum pressing, CNC machining and 3D printing. His work sits somewhere between craft, art and engineering. As much as it comes out of traditional joinery, Leprizé develops many of his materials alongside engineers and researchers, stress-testing wood against metal and plastic until it stops behaving like wood.

Wood that inflates and bends

Leprizé makes radical, experimental furniture but also develops innovative materials, flexible membranes and inflatable structures. His Airwood has air channels built into it, so a flat panel can inflate into a raised 3D shape. C°-wood is thermoformable, so it bends and holds a shape with something close to the control you'd get from plastic.

Shimmering armour and elastic marquetry

Bois Larmé bonds thin metal to wood to make a shimmering armour-like surface. And WooWood is a kind of elastic marquetry, made from hundreds of small wood tiles, backed with rubber, but tightly spaced so the surface holds its pattern but can still stretch and bend.

An experimental woodworker turns to rock

Firing molten metal at wood

His latest innovation is Schoopwood, a collaboration with L’École des Mines, France’s elite engineering school. They’ve developed a process that uses a plasma torch to heat tiny particles of metal until they’re molten, then shoots them onto the wood to form a thin bonded coating. That process lets him create wood-metal hybrid pieces.

From wood to slate

We first contacted Leprizé about creating a more wearable version of our prototype Wood Jacket. But he had something else to show us. Leprizé has created a version of WooWood, but using slate. It has the same grid of 5mm x 5mm tiles, except the tiles are now thin squares of stone, backed with neoprene so the material can twist and turn. We’d spent the previous year looking at ways we might create a wearable rock jacket. This looked like something we could work with.

How to peel a rock

Slate is a layered metamorphic rock and the pressure that formed it leaves it with ‘cleavage planes’. And that means incredibly thin layers can be carefully peeled or stripped from a thicker slab of slate with the help of a resin or adhesive-backed ‘carrier’, then fixed to a reinforcing backing so the sheet can be handled and cut without breaking apart. Or that’s the promise.

Why slate was the solution

50 steps to wearable slate

The slate Leprizé uses for his rock tiles arrives in 100cm x 50cm sheets, remarkably just 0.5mm thick. Cutting this sliver of slate into perfectly finished, clean-edged square tiles, just half a centimetre across, isn’t easy. “There are 50 steps to making this material,” says Leprizé, “and the cutting of the tiles is the most important.” And the trickiest.

A machine that doesn’t get tired

When Leprizé opened his studio, this kind of precision marquetry was done by hand and scalpel. But that left a lot of space for human error and broken blades, especially at the end of a long day. Eventually he designed and commissioned a bespoke cutting machine, a 3.5m x 1.4m beast that doesn’t get tired or shaky. He says it creates cleaner and more precise edges than a laser cutter. But it was built to work with wood, and slate was a very different challenge.

Preserving the peaks and valleys

There were a number of failed attempts and ruined slate sheets before he worked out how to cut tiles cleanly. And there was no margin for error. The thin slices of slate have a sort of surface topography, what look like contour lines, suggestions of peaks and valleys. Preserving that effect on final sheets of tiles, and ultimately our jacket, means not losing any tiles along the way.

Bonding rubber and stone

Just as critical to creating a flexible slate material is glueing the tiles, under pressure, to a thin neoprene backing. Of course it’s not any old glue. “It’s a very specific glue we use between the rubber and stone,” says Leprizé. “We developed the technique with engineers at 3M in Switzerland.”

Making rock wearable

A different kind of fetish

And it’s not any old neoprene. It 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,” Leprizé says. “But it’s really high-quality rubber. It needs to be if you are going to wear it super tight against your skin.” With his 50-step production process worked out and wrinkle-free, Leprizé is now developing materials with different geology, including granite, marble, sandstone and schist.

Flexible, within limits

We concentrated on turning the slate material into a jacket, coming up with a workable cut and construction. While Leprizé’s material is flexible, it has its limits. Despite the particular provenance of the neoprene Leprizé uses, the armadillo-like tiles ruled out anything too tightly fitted. So we kept moveable parts, bends, sharp turns and gatherings to a minimum.

A sci-fi bomber

We were determined to make as much of the topographic effect as possible. But we still wanted pockets, a collar and arms that moved. We settled on a minimalist and suitably sci-fi cropped Harrington design. And laser cut our way through five of Leprizé’s slate sheets to achieve it. Stitching slate tiles together was never really an option, so seams have been visibly taped. We also added Cordura® pockets and a zip.

What comes next

The Rock Jacket is still very much a one-off, a proof-of-concept starting point. But as with the Wooden Jacket, scalability and day-to-day wearability are the ultimate ambition. “These projects inspire more R&D,” says Satish Tailor, our design director. “Somebody will go away and develop something new for us, a new material or technique that we can play and work with.”

A laser-cut, sci-fi proof of concept

Why we made a jacket out of rock

We’re not pretending the Rock Jacket is practical. Not this version anyway. But in an era when tech billionaires want to head for Mars or upload their consciousness to the cloud, escape our messy reality in one way or the other, it’s a symbol of our primal connection to the earth’s dark materials. It re-engineers and reimagines rock, the makings of our oldest and vital technologies, as something surprising and new. It’s part experimental tailoring, part art piece. It’s absurd armour and cold, hard couture. And it asks us to rethink our relationship to our resources, to reconnect.

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The Rock Jacket