Former Apple design chief Jony Ive designed a modular jacket for Italian luxury brand Moncler that, naturally, has magnets built into it. For the jacket/poncho collection, Ive reinvented the button with a new and very clever magnetic fastening.
“There was no arrogant ambition to destroy the button,” Ive said in his signature Ive voice. “It was a very calm and humble quest.”
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Jony Ive’s jacket reinvents the button (with magnets)
Photo: Moncler/LoveFrom
Ive’s San Francisco design collective, LoveFrom, has collaborated with Moncler, the Italian luxury outdoor brand known for its gorgeous black-and-white down jackets. The LoveFromMoncler collection is centered around a base-layer vest to which different outer shells can be attached magnetically.
The down-filled vest is available in yellow or off-white, while pastel outerwear includes a hooded poncho, field jacket and parka.
The design collaboration dates back four years, when Ive and Moncler spent just 18 months designing a cool and clever new kind of magnetic button to replace zippers or Velcro.
How the Magnetic Duo Button works
Photo: Moncler/LoveFrom
The innovative “Duo Button” consists of two metal pieces, like a doughnut and a doughnut hole, that are magnetically attracted to each other when they come close to each other.
Each layer has five Duo buttons, all in the same place. Simply pull the top layer over the vest to attach the two pieces of the garment. The buttons naturally align and automatically join with a series of satisfying pops.
“You put a shell on top and it doesn’t fix anything. It’s like, ‘Pop, pop, pop!'” the Moncler CEO told Fast Company while previewing the collection.
According to the magazine, the magnetic button “works surprisingly well.”
“I spent months studying fasteners and buttons before I even started drawing anything,” Ive told Vogue.
The buttons are easy to release; just press the center section and they pop out. Ive’s team also thought about how the buttons sounded, carefully tweaking the mix of bronze, aluminum and steel until they found the most satisfying click.
The “fiddle element” in Jony Ive’s album jacket
Photo: Moncler/LoveFrom
The jacket’s two buttons represent Jony Ive’s unmistakable “tinker factor” – the tactile appeal that encourages people to touch and play with his designs.
Early in his career, before he joined Apple, Ive’s fellow designers noticed that many of his creations were fun to tinker with — for example, a ballpoint pen he designed for a Japanese company had a spring mechanism that people found almost addictively tinkering with, making the pen particularly appealing.
Tinkerability is reflected in many of Ive’s designs at Apple. The first iMac had a handle, not for moving the computer but as a signal to potential buyers that it was OK to touch the machine; Ive felt that the handle made the iMac less intimidating. The click wheel on the iPod also adds a lot of tinkleability. And of course the iPhone is all about tinkle (more on that in my book Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Great Products).
The new Duo Button on Moncler jackets also looks like a joy to play with: “The most satisfying, addictive, fidget-spinner-like button we’ve ever used,” Fast Company says. “As Ive, Ruffini, and I talked, we each found ourselves holding a Duo Button, obsessively clicking and releasing it over and over again.”
LoveFrom, Moncler Collection: Innovative materials, price unknown
Of course, everything else in the collection went through an equally thorough design process: They developed a new kind of recycled nylon and devised a way to spin it into sheets on giant looms.
The Love From Moncler collection will be available in select stores on September 24th and online in October. The price of Jony Ive’s new jacket hasn’t been announced, but it’s likely to be a pretty penny. You know the old saying: “If you have to ask, you probably can’t buy it.”
