On the night of the Opening Ceremony to the Olympics, there is a lot of standing around and waiting to parade into the stadium for the opening event. With the Winter Olympics, that means a bunch of standing around in the cold. Fortunately for the US Olympians, Ralph Lauren will have those sporting the red, white, and blue covered with heated apparel.
The new Opening Ceremony gear will have built-in heating components that will provide up to 11 hours of heat.
“It’s the most technologically advanced jacket ever produced,” Ralph Lauren chief innovation officer David Lauren said to USA Today. “There have been heatable blankets for kids before but they have wires. This is a fabric with ink that heats up — it’s weightless, it’s conductive and it’s immediate.”
As described by USA Today, the electronic-printed ink mentioned will be bonded to the inside of the jackets to be worn by the US delegation. The athletes can even customize the temperature they would like the jacket to reach by using their cellphone. That’s right, we even have jackets you can control with your phone these days. It was bound to happen one day. Now if we can just get Nike to get those auto-laced sneakers seen in Back to the Future Part II to go mainstream…
“We’re using mobile technology so it’s literally wired but with no wires,” Lauren says. The heating system is embedded in “an American flag inside the jacket, only the athletes will see it, so the American flag will heat the jacket — it’s a symbolic ode to our flag.”
The American flag keeping USA Olympians warm? Sure, why not?
[USA Today/Photo: Ralph Lauren]
