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Google And Levi’s Stitch Up A Connected Jacket

The new Commuter Trucker denim jacket, powered by Google’s smart textiles, can answer your phone and turn up your music.

Google And Levi’s Stitch Up A Connected Jacket

Paul Dillinger models the jacket his Levi’s team created with Google. [Photo: Justin Kaneps]

BY Diana Budds3 minute read

Aside from a couple of visual tells—subtle patches of raised stitches and a plastic button on its cuff—the Levi’s Commuter Trucker looks exactly like what you’d expect from the 144-year-old brand: a timeless jean jacket that keeps you warm while looking cool. But appearances deceive. The jacket is actually an interface between you and your phone. Brush, tap, or cover the right spot and you can answer or ignore calls, switch up your music, or get travel-time updates, all without looking at a screen.

The jacket is the first consumer product to emerge from Project Jacquard, an experimental initiative from Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) group–an incubator that has worked on modular mobile phones, radar sensors, 360-degree films, and, now, textiles. Founded in 2014, Project Jacquard represents the coming wave of technology that companies like Amazon, Apple, and Google are racing to develop: the internet of things and invisible computing, driven by the idea that you should be able to access information and services without having to physically interact with a device.

Ivan Poupyrev, technical lead and director of engineering for the Jacquard project, has been exploring wearable technology for more than two decades. When he launched Project Jacquard, the public was skeptical of wearables, which “didn’t feel fashionable. They felt like people with electronics on their bodies,” he says. “To break that tension, we needed to approach [Project Jacquard] at a mass scale and adapt it to everybody’s personal taste, desires, and self-image and aspiration. That’s what the fashion and apparel industry does really well. So that was a starting point: How can we integrate technology into apparel, but do it in a way that’s native to apparel?” Google partnered with Levi’s–a globally distributed brand with a large supply chain–to better understand the potential of mass-produced connected garments and how Project Jacquard could enable interactivity.

Project Jacquard is both a hardware and software platform, so one of the first hurdles for Poupyrev’s team was creating a conductive thread durable enough to withstand the manufacturing process. Electronics are generally treated with kid gloves. Textiles, on the other hand, are meant to endure the kinds of hard knocks that would shatter a smartphone screen.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Diana Budds is a New York–based writer interested in how design reveals stories about culture, policy, and history. More


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