I am not exactly what you would call a “fashion” person. My preferred daily garb is a mix of T-shirts and jeans or shorts, depending on the weather. Thus, I am sorta at a loss to explain what Jony Ive, the acclaimed designer behind the iPhone, has concocted with a new line of highfalutin jackets that are set to go to market later this month. I suspect I am not the jacket’s core demographic.
Ive’s company, LoveFrom, has teamed up with an Italian outdoor luxury fashion brand, Moncler, to create a new line of what Fast Company says are a “riff on the shell coat”—a phrase I am, again, not equipped to decode. It’s also described as a series of “lightweight, gender-neutral pastel pieces.” While I can’t add any helpful context outside of the given description, we do have a picture:
Basically, the outfit is a vest, atop which you can interchangeably install a “field jacket, parka, or hooded poncho,” Fast Company writes. The big quirk of the design is the outfit’s buttons, which are basically just normal buttons except for the fact that they are magnetized so that you can swap out the separate outfit toppings at the drop of a hat. Clicking on the buttons helps engage or disengage the outer layers. In this sense, it’s a modular jacket that can shift depending on the weather you’re in (or your mood, I guess). If you’re thinking this is just “MagSafe for coats,” Fast Company already beat you to the joke, but they insist these buttons have a very unique feel.
Fast Company writes that LoveFrom and Moncler spent four years developing the line of coats and, according to Ive, he wanted to create something simple and elegant. “There wasn’t some arrogant ambition around disruption [of buttons],” Ive told the outlet. “It was a very gentle, humble exploration.”
Since departing Apple in 2019, Ive has spent most of his post-Apple career designing weird minimalist twee for the world’s richest denizens—a trend that this line of coats seems to continue (I’m not sure how much this jacket will cost but it certainly doesn’t look cheap). He recently designed the royal emblem for King Charles III’s coronation. He is also said to be collaborating with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on some sort of AI wearable hardware, though we haven’t heard much about that product lately, and it’s unclear when, or if, it will ever happen. If it took him four years to design a coat, I wouldn’t hold your breath.
