Dressed for the worst case

There’s a particular kind of invention that earns two responses at once: genuine admiration for the engineering, and a creeping sadness that the engineering was necessary. AR Wear—a line of underwear, shorts, and running tights built to resist sexual assault—is exactly that kind of invention. The garments use cut-resistant fabric and locking mechanisms that only the wearer can disengage, making forced removal slow enough to be impractical. The company ran a campaign on Indiegogo to fund the line.

Whether it holds up in the actual circumstances where it would need to work is harder to say. Assaults aren’t methodical—they’re sudden, drugged, overwhelming—and no garment defeats all of that. There’s also the politics of it, the part where you have to hold two thoughts simultaneously: that practical solutions are worth having, and that engineering better clothing for potential victims is not the same thing as addressing why those victims need engineering in the first place.

I find the design genuinely interesting. I don’t know what to do with the world that produced it.