When the American Olympic team rolls into PyeongChang for this year's Winter Olympic[1] games, they're not going to be cold. The team's opening and closing ceremony uniforms, designed by Ralph Lauren, nod to iconic symbols of American fashion—jeans, wool sweater, mountaineering boots, and brown suede explorer gloves—while prioritizing warmth in the chilly South Korean winter. There's also another high-tech advantage: As part of the uniform, Ralph Lauren designed a parka and a bomber jacket that each use a heat-conducting ink to generate warmth like an electric blanket.
“We’re looking back and celebrating what’s iconic and symbolic of America, and merging that with where we’re headed,” says David Lauren, the company’s chief innovation officer and son of the designer who founded the brand. The uniform, he says, represents American frontiers: “the frontiers of the 1800s and 1900s, between the jeans and the gloves, and then the frontier of today, which is technology.”
Turn on the Heat
Lauren says the top priority in designing the uniform was keeping the athletes warm, as temperatures in South Korea are expected to hover around 15 degrees Fahrenheit. But designers hesitated to create gear for a specific temperature range. What if South Korea experienced a cold snap and the Olympians' jackets weren’t warm enough? What if temperatures turned out to be warmer than predicted, or the athletes were packed into a stuffy backstage before the ceremony? Would the athletes sweat through their jackets, or end up taking them off? “We looked at different kinds of fabrics,” Lauren says, “and then we were like, ‘Why don’t we use technology?’”
The heated jacket works almost like an electric blanket—except instead of wires or coils sewn into the fabric, the heat comes through a special type of...