You know how you don’t bike to work because you get hot and sweaty and gross? A group of MIT graduates has stolen that excuse. They copied technology from spacesuits and used it to make what BikeBlogNYC has rightly dubbed “the TANG of dress shirts” — a sharp-looking top that regulates your body heat. No sweaty pit spots! No overheating before your meeting! Now helmet up.
The shirt’s called the Apollo shirt, because it’s space technology and presumably also makes you look like a Greek god. The creators, whose company is called the Ministry of Supply, say that it pulls heat away from your body and stores it “like a battery” — when you get into your badly climate controlled office, you get that heat back to battle the A/C. (Although you, Grist reader, of course work in an office that properly manages its temperature in a sustainable way.) Also there are vents for airflow, and we’re going to give the Ministry of Supply bonus points for creating a wrinkle-free shirt without formaldehyde.
The company is raising money on Kickstarter for this project, and they have made their goal. So this isn’t just a pipe dream; this is real. A $95 pledge gets you a shirt (and if this is like most Kickstarters, they’ll cost more once they go on the market, so hop to it). Four people so far have kicked in at the level that will get them a shirt for every day of the week.
Our only cause for complaint is that, right now, these shirts are for boys only. We initially assumed that these gentlemen assumed girls don’t sweat because, you know, it’s not ladylike, but they do in fact have a woman on their team, who is on the case. She told Inc.:
“As the sole female on the team, I am very much wanting to expand into women’s wear,” says Hickey. “But that will have to wait until we know that we have gotten our designs already in the market as close to perfection as possible.”
So I guess we can let the men be the guinea pigs. Let us know how cool and breezy you feel when the threat of sweat is no longer a worry.
