Jony Ive jacket design features innovative ‘duo button’ magnets

Former Apple design chief Jony Ive designed a modular jacket for Italian luxury brand Moncler. Naturally, it comes with built-in magnets. Ive reinvented the button with a new, super-clever magnetic clasp for the jacket/poncho collection.

“There wasn’t some arrogant ambition around disruption [of buttons],” Ive said, in typical Ive-speak. “It was a very gentle, humble exploration.”

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Jony Ive jacket reinvents the button (with magnets)

Ive’s San Francisco design collective, LoveFrom, created the new jackets in collaboration with Moncler, a luxury Italian outdoor brand best known for extravagant black-and-white puffer jackets. The LoveFrom, Moncler collection revolves around a base-layer vest, to which a variety of outer shells can be magnetically attached.

The vest is down-filled and comes in yellow or off-white. The pastel-colored outer layers include a hooded poncho, a field jacket and a parka.

The design collaboration goes back four years. Instead of using zips of Velcro, Ive and Moncler spent 18 months alone designing a new kind of magnetic button that actually sounds incredibly cool and clever.

How the magnetic duo button works

The innovative “duo button” is made up of two metal pieces — kind of like a donut and a donut hole — which pull themselves together magnetically when in close proximity to each other.

Five duo buttons appear on each layer, all in the same place. Simply pulling the top layer over the vest attaches the two parts of the garment. Because the buttons align themselves naturally, they automatically join with a series of satisfying pops.

“When you put the shell on top, you don’t fix anything. It’s like, ‘pop pop pop!’” the CEO of Moncler told Fast Company, which got a preview of the collection.

The magnetic button works “uncannily well,” the magazine said.

“We did months and months of fastener research and button research before we even started drawing anything,” Ive told Vogue magazine.

The buttons are also easy to undo: Just press on the middle part and it comes undone. Ive’s team even paid attention to the sound the button made. They carefully tuned the mix of bronze, aluminum and steel until it produced the most satisfying click possible.

Jony Ive’s ‘fiddle factor’ in a jacket

The duo buttons on the jackets deliver Jony Ive’s unmistakable “fiddle factor” — a tactile attraction that makes people want to touch and fiddle with Ive’s designs.

Early in his career, before joining Apple, Ive’s fellow designers noticed that many of his creations proved fun to fiddle with. For example, a ballpoint pen he designed for a Japanese company featured a spring mechanism that people fiddled with almost addictively. It made the pen especially desirable.

The fiddle factor also defined a lot of Ive’s designs at Apple. The first iMac came with a handle — not for moving the computer, but for signaling to a prospective buyer that it was OK to touch the machine. Ive felt it made the iMac less intimidating. The iPod‘s click wheel offered a very high fiddle factor, too. And the iPhone, of course, is all about touching (all detailed in my book, Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products).

The Moncler jacket’s new duo button also sounds fun to fiddle with. It “is the most satisfying, addictive, fidget-spinner of a button I’ve ever used,” said Fast Company. “As Ive, Ruffini, and I talk, I notice that we’re each holding the duo button, compulsively clicking it together and pushing it apart again and again.”

LoveFrom, Moncler collection: Innovative materials, unknown pricing

Of course, everything else in the collection went through a similarly exhaustive design process. They even developed a new kind of recycled nylon, then figured out how to make sheets of it on giant looms.

The LoveFrom, Moncler collection goes on sale September 24 in select stores, and online in October. Pricing remains undisclosed for Jony Ive’s new jacket, but it likely will cost a small fortune. You know the old phrase: If you have to ask, you probably can’t afford it.