Vollebak’s Spaceshop has landed – and retail may never look the same again | News
Forget flagships. Forget concept stores. Forget polite rails of neatly folded coats under warm light. Vollebak built a 2,000-pound aluminum spacecraft shop and sent it on tour.
Part retail installation, part sci-fi delivery vehicle, part sonic art object, the Vollebak Spaceshop is the British futurewear brand’s latest attempt to drag fashion out of the present and into orbit. After creating clothes from copper, graphene, aerogel and materials designed for Mars, Vollebak has now turned the store itself into a spectacle: a traveling interplanetary-style pop-up, designed to imagine a future where stores come to you – whether you’re on a beach in Los Angeles or mining asteroids somewhere far beyond Earth.
Due to its London appearance, the Spaceshop will only land for 48 hours, with Vollebak describing the event in typical cosmic style: for visitors from Earth the address is London; for intergalactic readers, the instruction is to “turn diagonally left at Sirius B.”
A store built like a spacecraft
The Spaceshop, created in collaboration with SAGA Space Architects and Bang & Olufsen, is not just a branded kiosk with a futuristic style. It is a fully designed object: a conceptual spacecraft and pop-up shop constructed from a carbon and stainless steel frame, clad in anodized aluminum panels – materials chosen for their connection to the sustainability of the space industry.
SAGA, the Danish studio behind architecture for extreme environments, helped shape the craft as a future-oriented retail vehicle; Bang & Olufsen brought the sound, material experimentation and luxurious industrial design language. The result feels less like walking into a store and more like approaching a machine that has just arrived from another century.
The craft was first launched at the Bjarke Ingels Group headquarters in Copenhagen, before being sent on a wider global tour – a fitting starting point for a project that sits somewhere between architecture, fashion, sound design and science fiction.
Retail as theater, retail as world building
Vollebak has always understood that it is easier to believe in the future if you can touch it. The clothing included jackets made from seven miles of copper, hoodies designed to outlast the wearer, and clothing designed for Mars-like conditions. The Spaceshop uses that same energy and scales it up from garment to architecture.
This is physical retail turned into theater. At a time when many brands are still trying to justify why a store should exist at all, Vollebak has responded with a simple statement: make the store so strange, ambitious and temporary that visiting becomes an event.
The Spaceshop does not behave like a boutique. It behaves like a landing. It is here, in short. Then it’s gone.
The sound of the future
The collaboration between Bang & Olufsen gives the Spaceshop a second identity: not just a store, but a sonic environment. Inside, the installation houses Bang & Olufsen’s Beolab 5 and Beosound 2 speakers, creating an immersive, space-inspired soundscape. Some reporting describes the craft as capable of delivering around 120 decibels, making the experience more like standing in front of a sonic boom than browsing a rack of outerwear.
The visual language of the project is equally dramatic. Bang & Olufsen and Vollebak also developed the Beosound 2 Vollebak Edition, finished via an experimental anodization process inspired by the unpredictable appearance of rocket combustion. What started as an attempt to create a dark metallic finish produced unexpected swirls, streaks and polished effects – a ‘burnout’ look that became central to the final design.
It’s a very Vollebak idea: turn an accident in materials science into a luxury object from the future.
The Sonic Jacket: When Clothing Becomes a Sound System
If the Spaceshop is Vollebak’s vision of the future of retail, The Sonic Jacket is her vision on the future of the body.
The jacket, described by the brand as ‘the world’s first sonic clothing’, features 180 miniature speakers distributed across the body, arms and hood. Instead of blasting sound outward, the speakers fire inward, transforming the garment into a portable sound field. It’s not a jacket you just listen to; it is one that you feel.
The numbers are wild: Vollebak says the Sonic Jacket can deliver frequencies from 4 Hz to 20,000 Hz directly into the body. Each speaker is just 32mm wide and 10mm deep and is mounted in laser-cut holes to create a distributed speaker system around the carrier. The control unit includes an MP3 player with 10 preset frequencies, a physical dial for tuning and a Micro SD card reader that can hold up to 1,000 preset frequencies.
The jacket was developed in collaboration with FBFX, the London special effects studio known for building costumes, spacesuits, armor and superhero outfits for major film and television productions. Visually, the Sonic Jacket keeps its engineering on display: exposed yellow wiring, exposed construction, and a deliberately experimental aesthetic. It looks less like fashion and more like a prototype smuggled out of a research lab.
That’s the point. The Sonic Jacket turns sound into something physical, private and immersive. It asks whether clothing can become a tool for mood, focus, energy and perception – not through apps or screens, but through resonance.
The futurewear universe is expanding
Together, the Spaceshop and Sonic Jacket show Vollebak at its most Vollebak: hyped, strange, technically obsessive and almost comically ambitious.
The Spaceshop imagines a future where the store is mobile, off-grid and potentially interplanetary. The Sonic Jacket imagines a future where clothing is no longer passive, but sensory, responsive and machine-like. The brand’s broader material experiments – from copper jackets to metal-treated outerwear – sit around these objects like artefacts from the same fictional universe.
In addition to the Spaceshop, Vollebak and Bang & Olufsen have also introduced the Vollebak Anodised Jacket, made from polyamide ripstop fused to a virtually invisible layer of metal through a galvanic treatment, reflecting the material experimentation behind the collaboration with the speakers.
This is not fashion that chases trends. It is fashion chasing the outer edge of possibility.
Why it matters
The Spaceshop comes at a time when luxury, retail and technology are all looking for new forms of relevance. Consumers no longer have to go to the store to buy a jacket. They need a reason to worry.
Vollebak’s answer is to turn retail into a myth. The store becomes a spacecraft. The jacket becomes a speaker array. The product launch becomes a landing sequence. The brand becomes less a clothing company than a future laboratory with a sense of humor.
And that might be why it works. Vollebak understands that the future is not just about utility. It’s about emotion, imagination and spectacle. The Spaceshop not only sells clothing; it sells the feeling that you parked outside tomorrow.
For 48 hours, visitors in London are not just shopping. They step into Vollebak’s version of what comes next: a world where fashion borrows from aerospace, sound design becomes wearable, stores move like spacecraft, and the next delivery might come not from a warehouse but from orbit.
Visit the SpaceShop the next 2 days
by Sid Thaker
