Betabrand’s new jacket lets you wear headphones over your hood

Wearing a hoodie and listening to music with large headphones are two things that do not always go together, but one company believes it’s solved that problem. San Francisco-based Betabrand has come up with a new hooded jacket that uses “acoustically transparent fabric” to let sound pass through unabated, meaning you can show off your cans to the world and actually hear them too. As it turns out, the idea behind the jacket is not about making headphones an external style accessory, and instead about allowing sound to come through while the hood is up — even if you’re wearing headphones. “For engineers that work with bands on tour, who generally want to be as inconspicuous as possible when adjusting things on a live stage, wearing black is key, hence all the blacked-out trim and fabric selections,” explains Steven Wheeler, a designer at Betabrand, who also came up with the company’s NASA-inspired down jacket. Wheeler worked with Nic Pope, an audio engineer at Different Fur Studios in San Francisco, to come up with this particular design. Wheeler says the material the pair ended up using is simply “high-end speaker fabric,” which is more commonly used to cover the front of custom-made speaker cabinets in order to let sound, but not dust pass through.