Card up your sleeve: Lyle & Scott’s ’Contactless Jacket’

For those cold days, when the weather is foul and taking your card out of your wallet to pay for that coffee seems a little too much of an effort, Lyle & Scott have devised a fashionable new answer to our payment needs. The ’Contactless Jacket’ is the first of its kind; a neat design that we suspect might catch on further with other brands.

The concept comes in the wake of an innovative trend in Barclaycard’s wearable payments devices. Following on from wristbands, fobs and stickers, the jacket is a first in outright fashion-forward wares. It comes in a choice of two colours, admiral blue or true black. The unique feature which makes the jacket ‘contactless’ is a small pocket for a bpay chip – rather like an Oyster card for retail purchases – insertable into the cuff. The chip is then linked up to the customer’s digital wallet, the payment process managed by a digital app.

With a similar advancement in NFC-equipped devices, such as the recent launch of Apple Pay, the Lyle & Scott and bpay collaboration is likely to be the first of many joint projects to bring useful technologies to customers in a way that fits in with their lifestyles. Samsung have developed the technology for a ’Smart Suit’ as well as a technologically advanced handbag complete with phone charging ports. Both products were launched at the 2015 IFA Consumer Electronics Unlimited show in Berlin.

While this jacket may be the first of its kind, expect to see micro pockets stitched into more and more fashion pieces when bpay takes off.