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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
History has not been kind to garments that serve a function other than that of keeping their wearers warm or unnaked or adorable. You don't see a lot of people running around in chain mail these days, and the vogue for beer helmets--those baseball hats equipped with beer-can holders that allow the hat's wearer to drink beer through a plastic tube--seems to have stalled in frat houses. But I have hopes of better things for the Solar-Powered Jacket, a new item that the Italian firm Ermenegildo Zegna is launching later this year. Its heart is in the right place. Moreover, after test-driving the jacket for a three-week period recently, I can report that it possesses a quality quite rare in an article of clothing: utter unpredictability.
I started on the seventeenth floor of Zegna's offices, on Fifth Avenue, where Christian Lorey, one of the company's sales directors, issued me a prototype of a silvery-gray bomber jacket made of a breathable fabric called Microtene. Lorey is an ebullient man with a diamond stud in each ear and a fondness for the word "ciao." He pointed out two two-inch-by-three-inch solar panels embedded in the jacket's removable Nehru-style collar. The panels are wired to a battery in the breast pocket which is the size of a deck of cards; with four hours' worth of sun, the battery can be used to charge five- and six-volt appliances like cell phones and iPods.
Lorey sketched a few scenarios in which the solar jacket would be useful. "Say you've driven from San Francisco to Napa and you're having lunch at the French Laundry. You can leave the collar on your dashboard and let it charge while...
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