Thousands of pedestrians and bike riders are hit by cars every year in a terrible trend that’s only growing. It’s a problem of our infrastructure, but the best defense can simply be making yourself as visible to drivers as possible. Which is why the young athletic wear brand Vollebak is designed specifically to stand out.
Vollebak, the same company that brought us a pink hoodie designed for maximum relaxation, is launching something new: The Nano Meter 555 Midlayer, which features two details that hack human perception to make you, theoretically, as noticeable as possible.
“The project started as a series of conversations with mountain rescue, members of the U.K. Special Forces, and World Extreme Medicine–men and women who work in some of the most remote and harshest places on the planet. Asked to describe what they would want someone to be wearing in an ideal rescue situation they wanted something that made them as visible as humanly possible to the naked eye,” says co-founder Steve Tidball. “Interestingly, it wasn’t about creating a high-tech solution for them, because technology can fail. It was all about color and human perception.”
The jacket is green, but not just any green. It’s a green that reflects with a 555-nanometer wavelength, which, according to the U.K. National Physics Laboratory, is the point at which the greatest number of cones of your eye are stimulated the most. Over a year of development and prototyping dyes and materials, the team tried to get this jacket as close to 555 as possible.
So is that faster than a blinking light on a bike? Or any old reflective garment you might wear? Frankly, who knows. But even still, one can appreciate the academic design that went into the garment (which, by the way, is also available in black if the green is too cloying), and the fact that form follows function. The mid layers are available now for $195.