Vollebak, a brand employing science and technology to create clothing, carries a curious openness to bold ideas and a willingness to push material science into wearable form. Founded by brothers Nick and Steve Tidball, it functions less as a conventional fashion label than as an ongoing exploration in human adaptation: an inquiry into the clothes of the future—when the pressures of climate, technology, and biology reshape daily life.
Vollebak clothing has a way of lingering in the imagination. There is the Sonic Jacket, which contemplates sound itself as both threat and therapy; the Martian Aerogel Jacket, lined with material developed for landing rovers on Mars; and a growing line of experiments that borrow from nature’s oldest tricks—self-regenerating systems, adaptive camouflage, extreme durability—and become wearable innovation.
At its core, Vollebak reflects a belief that the best design solves meaningful problems with clarity and imagination. Clothing becomes a medium for speculation: less about what we wear today than about what we might need tomorrow. Hube’s editor-in-chief, Sasha Kovaleva, spoke with Nick Tidball—an architect by training and an artist at heart—about functional design, transforming unconventional ideas into reality, and the future of clothing designed to enhance our lives.
Sasha Kovaleva: Vollebak often feels less like a fashion brand and more like a long-term experiment in what humans might need next. How do you decide which problems are worth building garments for in the first place? And what comes first for you: a material, a problem, or a question about the future?
Nick Tidball: I’ve got two children—my daughter is thirteen and my son is ten. I’m always fascinated by how the brain works and how ideas emerge. And now that I’m a dad, I’m quite conscious of not being too dictatorial about what a good idea is or how it comes about. In running the company, my biggest fascination is maintaining an openness to how good ideas come to you.
Sometimes you see a material which is so beautiful, or so revolutionary, or from a different industry, and you say: my goodness, that would be so cool, or so correct, in clothing, because it does this thing that no one’s ever talked about. Other times I’ll come up with ideas—mostly when I’m running, or playing the piano, or playing chess—and it’s hard to explain where they come from. If you imagine your brain as a problem-solving machine, or an idea-creation machine, it’s the vessel that holds a million different problems at the same time, and sometimes it just happens to answer some stuff you’d been thinking about. I let that happen. An idea can just come to me.
Sonic Jacket happened that way. No one had asked me to create a sonic jacket. My brain triangulated a few different things: my cat purring at ninety hertz, sonic weaponry—and I thought, well, you must be able to do sonic for good—and also the move forward in technology and clothing. It put those three together. I can’t honestly tell you how I came up with it, other than that it would be wild to create a jacket for sound and frequency.
Other times you see a problem, or witness a thing. Take, for example, the longevity of clothing. Why don’t clothes live a long time? How come they used to live longer a hundred years ago than they do now? That can’t be right. In the same way, lots of the food system is wrong—it might have been quite a lot better a hundred years ago, when you bought from markets and ate locally. The longevity of clothing would be exactly the same a hundred years ago: your shoes or your trousers or your jacket lasted way, way longer. That is a way smarter way to live. So as a clothing brand: how can I address that?
I’m also quite specific about what a good idea is. There’s a famous saying that if you can’t explain your idea to a child, you probably don’t understand it well enough. That’s so true. So much can get wrapped up in language. A beautiful concept, at its heart, is something anyone can understand. Not everyone might like it, but everyone can understand it. Say, “That’s fireproof and lasts one hundred years.” Then—“Oh, cool. Not a hoodie I throw away in three months. Okay, I understand that.” That’s what I’d class as a good idea.
I think it’s really important to have an idea that resonates with people. Doing an idea in isolation of understanding how the world works isn’t a terribly useful idea. That’s art, right? And I love art. I grew up doing art. I drew for ten hours a day, I studied architecture, I love art. But when you are building clothing with a purpose, it’s really important to understand that there might be a lot of people who would like that and need it.
