This gel-filled vest can instantly heat you up on command, helping you deal with cold temperatures

The Entropy Vest comes from the creators behind the award-winning Petit Pli, a children’s garment that was designed to grow with its little wearer. The vest, however, tackles a rather different problem. Designed for adults, the Entropy Vest is meant to be worn under clothing and comes with a special heat-storing chemical gel that can release heat on command, helping insulate its wearer from extreme cold.

Designer: Petit Pli

The vest comes with a phase change material suspended inside its vein-like hollow channels. When activated, the gel heats up to as high as 40°C (104°F), giving users thermal relief in cold, biting temperatures. The Entropy Vest works without any electronics, and can simply be reset by boiling the vest in water to alter the phase change material’s structure and ‘recharge’ it.

The Entropy Vest is the perfect layer for bitingly cold starts. It is light enough to be worn over a t-shirt or compression top, and thin enough to fit easily under a windbreaker. The transparent vest contains a Phase Change Material that instantly heats the body on activation, changing from a liquid to a gel-like solid. Once hot, it begins gradually dropping temperature when you move, so as to prevent the wearer from feeling excessively hot.

“With the Entropy Vest, Petit Pli explores the potential for garments to have adaptable thermal properties without the need for electronics”, said the company. On account of a lack of infrastructure for wearable technology recycling processes and e-waste generated in 2019 – 53.6 million tonnes (MT) will increase by 38% by 2030 (United Nations University, 2020) – a rather scary statistic that Petit Pli hopes to fix.

“Petit Pli’s Entropy Vest was created to challenge the true capabilities of existing thermally regulating fabrics or embedded electronics”, says Ryan Mario Yasin, Founder and CEO at Petit Pli. “The Entropy Vest will also be released in a cooling version, for sweltering heat conditions.” The company also hopes to extend this technology to wearable vests for children in the future, offering its uniquely life-saving abilities to humans across all age groups.