Designboom_ Vollebak creates first Wooden Jacket prototype, a fashion piece with a hood made of flexible timber arranged in tiny grids. The wooden jacket is complete with zippers and two exterior pockets. There’s also a hood, also made of timber. From afar, the Vollebak prototype looks like a tree trunk or a freshly varnished plank. The design team captures the look of a tree’s growth rings all over the Wooden Jacket prototype. They also reposition the timber grids so that these natural wood lines are not uniform or don’t look all horizontal or vertical.

So far, Vollebak’s Wooden Jacket is still a prototype. There’s no news yet on when it will launch. On the other hand, the design team says it’s coming soon. They’ve made it because they believe turning a tree into a jacket is‘an absurdly difficult technical challenge.’They want to overcome this by taking the matter into their own hands, quite literally.‘It’s all about the technical feat versus the performance advantage of the material,’says the design team.

While Vollebak is still developing the Wooden Jacket, the prototype can already showcase the flexible properties of timber. The design team embeds the cut-up slabs of timber onto a fabric, which makes up the interior of the jacket. In this way, the clothing can freely move and isn’t stiff. On the breast part of the fashion piece, there are two semi-hidden zippers on both sides. They can be extra pockets for the users, just above the two ample exterior ones.

Visible lines divide the Vollebak’s Wooden Jacket prototype. These allow for the material to bend and be flexible when the users move around and stretch. The design team has yet to unveil the technical details of the Wooden Jacket. So far, they say that the prototype is a way for them to tackle and then solve what would otherwise remain ‘completely theoretical.’ If everything goes according to plan, the Wooden Jacket transitions from prototype to full product. In this case, it joins the Vollebak ensemble, which includes their glow-in-the-dark jackets.