Vollebak — Clothes That Finish the Human Off

This myth is load-bearing — transhumanism as salvation narrative, ever since Silicon Valley started dreaming.

Vollebak is not a fashion brand. They say so themselves, and in this they are right — they just mean it as a compliment. What they really are can be said in three words: transhumanism to wear.

The ideology is familiar: the human is a prototype. Flesh is provisional. Technology, material, process will eventually surpass the biological — and until then, one might as well dress accordingly. Silicon Valley dreams of the singularity; Vollebak sells the wardrobe. Longevity clinic for the upper body.

Note the escalation: Longevity → Apocalypse → another planet. This is not a product line. This is a salvation narrative. And as with every good salvation narrative, nobody explains what exactly on Mars is in such urgent need of a windbreaker. The belief carries itself.

„I quite like Earth, I think it's wonderful. You've got sunshine and the sea and it's fantastic. But if you're looking at the ultimate expression of where our company goes, if someone stepped onto a new planet wearing our clothing, that would be the most extraordinary achievement I could think of." — Steve Tidball

This soulweather knows no storms. Only air conditioning.

Transhumanism has a fundamental problem with the body: it smells. It sweats. It breaks down. It ignores optimisation promises. It forgets that according to the product description it should be equipped for the most extreme conditions, and still gets backache from sitting.

Vollebak sidesteps this contradiction elegantly by not mentioning the body at all. In their communication there are no bodies — only carriers. No skin, only interfaces. No sweat, only moisture management. The man wearing their jacket has no past, no fatigue, no intervertebral disc. He is already an early draft of something better.

„We're not just asking you to adopt. We're asking you to chuck yourself in headfirst." — Steve Tidball

They don't sell clothes for the body you have. They sell clothes for the body you haven't become yet.

It works because it addresses the discomfort with one's own flesh — that quiet, Western-modern feeling that one still ought to be working on oneself. Crossfit was yesterday. Now it suffices to wear the right material. The carbon takes over. You lean back — in your 700-euro jacket for hostile environments — and become.

High-performance fibres. Materials almost nobody knows. This is the terrain on which Vollebak plays.

Vollebak is not alone in the future.

I choose two particularly ambitious competitors. ACRONYM: they speak of material application that follows design, not the other way around. The question driving them: what must the world's most extreme everyday clothing look like? ThruDark: two men from the British special forces. They don't speak of the lab, but of material use that went through extreme situations before going into production — consequence of lived survival memory.

Three brands. The same blind spot. Material innovation has a history, and that history is not linear. What was nylon in 1970 was Gore-Tex in 1990, was Merino in 2010, is graphene today. What graphene will be in 2040, nobody knows.

Vollebak's narrative takes a reckless stance toward what we humans cannot afford to blank out about our future. An earth on which the extreme has become a permanent condition cannot be inhabited simply by wearing high-performance fibres. On the day the apocalypse actually arrives, it will care little about the fibre structure of your top.

A more circumspect subtext would not shy away from the transience of innovation. Vollebak could be the custodian of material innovation — instead it exposes the bodies and views of its customers to an overheated hype around individual fibres.

„There is absolutely no seasonality because innovation is ready when it's ready." — Steve Tidball

In the end one must concede something to the Vollebak brothers that is almost admirable: they have translated the oldest joke in human history into a premium brand. The joke being that nothing is easier to sell to a human than the prospect of their own transcendence.

Nick and Steve Vollebak understood what philosophers, prophets and personal trainers before them knew: whoever promises you will be more tomorrow than today need not deliver the today. The promise is the product. The jacket is the carrier of the promise — in both senses of the word.

And us? We pay gladly. Not despite the joke, but because of it. Because the joke is well made. Because the material is genuinely interesting. Because there is a certain style to being dressed for a future one secretly considers unlikely. This is not stupidity — this is a very cultivated form of self-irony that one must be able to afford.

Nick and Steve Vollebak are human beings. They tire. They doubt. They will die — as all humans die who have ever invented clothing.

No material they ever put into production will protect them from it. The jacket will outlive them. Built to last — only the promise has mistaken the direction. The packaging endures. The body inside it, the biological creature that wants to move, sweat, age, die, will be composted. Sooner than the fibre.

The space they choose as their backdrop cannot be mapped with human sensory equipment. It reminds us that there is something we cannot manage — neither on earth nor in orbit.

Every fibre developed by humans can only struggle to grasp the complexity of that space. A narrative that names this — that says what the fibre cannot do — would be more radical than anything Vollebak has ever produced. Because all salvation promises duck before this honesty. And because customers who refuse to be fooled will love a brand that deals boldly with the limits of its material.

I confess: I joined in. For a moment I filled the gap between narrative and reality with my imagination — and it felt good.

It is like stepping into a film studio capsule. Everything feels coherent. The switches, the material, the smell of departure. Built for the camera, not for space. And then I sit there, inwardly.

This is what the future looks like?

Suddenly I am a small boy in a toy wooden car. I fantasise. I achieve nothing.

The jacket goes vroom vroom.

Gottfried Keller knew it in 1874. In his novella: clothes make the man. His tailor Strapinski is mistaken for a count because he wears a fine coat. The shell makes the person. Keller meant it as a warning. Vollebak means it as a claim to superiority.