Survival of the Fitted

The rise of bulletproof couture.

On my first day in Colombia, two women in an old Toyota drove me to an industrial park on the outskirts of Bogotá. There, in a building that from the outside looked like a warehouse, the man I’d come to interview—early forties, black hair, not tall—shot me in the abdomen with a .38-calibre revolver. I felt a thump in the gut, then nothing. The man was Miguel Caballero. He’s the founder and chief executive of a company that makes “specialized personal protection,” and when he shot me I was wearing one of his products, a black suède jacket with lightweight bulletproof panels in the lining. The company, which is called Miguel Caballero, makes fashion-oriented body armor, and sells it mainly to executives, celebrities, political figures, and others who have security concerns but don’t want to dress like members of a SWAT team. Popular items include a three-button blazer, a V-necked wool sweater, a Nehru vest (for customers in the subcontinent and, conceivably, for anxious idolizers of Sammy Davis, Jr.), and a polo shirt, which, because of its extra bulk, may usefully promote a compact golf swing. Caballero also makes bulletproof camouflaged hunting clothes, to protect hunters from misdirected shots fired by their companions—an eventuality that he referred to as “a Dick Cheney accident.”

Before shooting me, Caballero hollered across the main manufacturing area to warn the several dozen workers there—most of them women sitting at sewing machines—to put on ear protection. They complied without apparent curiosity. Carolina Ballesteros, who is the company’s design director and Caballero’s fiancée, told me that being shot by her boyfriend is “very normal”: he has more than two hundred employees and has shot most of them (including Ballesteros) at least once, a practice that encourages team loyalty and close attention to quality control. Caballero, nevertheless, is aware of the dramatic possibilities, especially when the target is a visiting journalist. After removing his revolver from its case, he held out an open box of Colombian military ammunition, and—saying, “We respect the human rights”—invited me to select my bullet. He positioned me at a slight angle to himself, near a tabletop shrine to the Virgin Mary. (“This is a Catholic country,” he’d explained earlier, when he noticed me looking at the shrine.) He told me that he was going to count to three, and that when he began counting I should take a big breath and hold it. He asked me to point to my belly button, then held the pistol’s barrel a few inches from my descending colon and closed his eyes, as if praying or collecting his thoughts, while one of his suppliers took photographs with my camera. The jacket felt a bit heavy, but pleasantly so—like a dentist’s X-ray apron. After firing, Caballero lifted my shirt to check my abdomen for bruising, and found none. Then he used a pair of long-nosed pliers to extract the bullet from inside the suède. It was flattened and rounded like a mushroom cap, and it was still hot.

Protection from projectiles has been a human concern for as long as there have been projectiles. (I myself often weighed the subject in the early nineteen-sixties, when, as a typical child of the American suburbs, I was addicted to television and heavily armed with toy weaponry.) Caballero’s sales have roughly doubled annually in recent years, and his marketing ambitions, increasingly, are global. When he started making bulletproof garments, nineteen years ago, his customers were almost exclusively Colombian—a reflection both of the small scale of his original enterprise and of the turmoil in the country at the time. Today, ninety-eight per cent of his production is for export. He has dealers in two dozen countries and customers in more than fifty, and he has a retail boutique in Harrods, where some of his golf shirts sell for the equivalent of about twelve thousand dollars.

Caballero was born in Bogotá in 1967. He studied business administration and marketing at the University of the Andes in the late eighties and early nineties, a period during which kidnapping and murder were omnipresent threats for wealthy Colombians. One of his friends, the daughter of a prominent politician, was accompanied everywhere by bodyguards, and Caballero noticed that the bodyguards usually left their bulletproof vests in the trunk of their armored Mercedes-Benz, because the garments were heavy, inflexible, and ugly. He and a classmate decided to try to create bulletproof clothing that people would actually wear—in Caballero’s words, “to combine fashion and protection at the same time”—by concealing the bulletproof panels within the linings of attractive clothes made from regular materials.

Caballero owned a car, a gift from his father, and used it as partial payment for a small manufacturing plant in a rundown section of the city. “We didn’t have a computer,” he told me. “We had one assistant and a fax machine.” The first product was a bulletproof leather jacket. Caballero shopped for the leather in Bogotá’s reeking tanning district, San Benito, and carried the hides back to the workshop by slinging them over his shoulder. Proceeds from the first jacket financed the second. Caballero’s sales pitch consisted of shooting his partner the same way he shot me, and it was highly persuasive. (He later bought out the partner.) The jackets each sold for the equivalent of about a thousand dollars, and they were outwardly indistinguishable from ordinary jackets.

Those first jackets were heavy—fifteen or sixteen pounds. Making them lighter required years of experimentation and a significant investment in technology, and it drove up the price. But the company’s primary customers have always been concerned more about comfort and discretion than about cost, and the business grew rapidly. By the late nineties, Caballero told me, the company had developed its own bulletproof material. When Ballesteros showed me around the factory’s design area, on an open mezzanine above the production floor, she pointed to a bolt of yellow fabric lying on a cutting table. “That’s the big secret of the company,” she said. “It’s the Coca-Cola formula.” Caballero told me that this material—which he described as “a hybrid between nylon and polyester”—is lighter, thinner, and more flexible than comparably protective versions of Kevlar, the best-known bullet-stopping textile, which DuPont invented in the nineteen-sixties. Kevlar is the critical component of much of the world’s body armor, but, according to Caballero, it is too bulky and rigid to be used in the protective panels of, say, a stylish white dinner jacket like the one he sold to the rapper Diddy, or a kimono like the one he custom-made for the actor Steven Seagal, or tunics like the ones he created for the Wu-Tang Clan.

Ballesteros—who is slender and pretty, has long brown hair, and is younger than Caballero—studied fashion and industrial design, thus serendipitously making herself the ideal candidate for her current position. On the day that she showed me around the factory, she was dressed in tall boots, black tights, a diaphanous gray minidress, a darker gray sweater, and a long green scarf. On her right wrist she wore a dozen bracelets made of what appeared to be barbed wire but was actually gray plastic gimp. The bracelets, she explained, were a symbolic protest against Venezuela’s ongoing epidemic of kidnapping. (Abductors in that country sometimes use barbed wire to hog-tie abductees.) Venezuela, like much of Latin America, represents a growth market for Caballero’s products, and his customers there include the President, Hugo Chávez.

We walked back downstairs and across the production floor, to a long, narrow area enclosed behind sliding wire-mesh partitions. There Ballesteros introduced me to Rosalba Tapias, who was the company’s first employee. One of Tapias’s jobs is inserting the bulletproof panels into finished garments, the final production step before packing and shipping. (The panels are removable, and must be taken out before the clothes are cleaned.) Near Tapias’s worktable were several standing coat racks made from lengths of galvanized piping. Ballesteros pointed to a gray flannel suit hanging at the end of one of the racks, and said, “This is for Uribe”—meaning Álvaro Uribe Vélez, who was then serving his final weeks as Colombia’s President. “Our warranty is for five years,” she said, “because in five years the ballistic materials and also the guns improve. We made a suit for Uribe five years ago, so he sent it back and now Rosalba is going to send him the new one. He will no longer be the President, but of course it’s still very dangerous.” I had heard that President Obama, during his Inauguration, wore clothing made by Caballero. Neither Ballesteros nor Caballero would say anything about that, but they did tell me that the company’s customers include King Abdullah II of Jordan, the Prince of Asturias, a Thai princess, and the leaders of El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Paraguay, Panama, and Malaysia.

Part of Ballesteros’s job is accommodating cultural idiosyncrasies. (Venezuelan buyers, for example, have a marked preference for the color red.) Her fashion sensibility, she said, is mainly “European,” but she has broadened the company’s offerings with global touches. Caballero’s priciest and most fashion-oriented line, the MC Black Collection, now includes a white linen tunic, which has sold well in Arab countries and is an especially fast seller in Dubai. Tunics leave lots of room for bulletproof panels—something that is also true of kurtas, another successful recent innovation—although the draping can be tricky. Among Ballesteros’s most popular new designs is a close-fitting sleeveless undershirt, a classic American wife beater, which can be worn under almost anything. (The President of Panama has one.) Partly for the American market, Ballesteros designed a “sport hoodie” and an “urban hoodie,” both of which have been in demand among danger-prone hip-hop stars and their entourages.

Last year, Ballesteros introduced a safari vest, which, she said, is favored by reporters in countries like Venezuela and Nigeria. She removed one from a coat rack and told me, “If you’re going to buy, this is the one—with all the pockets, and a place for the camera.” The vest looked like the one the foreign correspondent Roland Hedley wears in the comic strip “Doonesbury.” Like the hoodies, it’s part of the company’s Gold Collection—a step down from Black, with price points that are more within the reach of journalists and their employers. (An extra-large safari vest capable of stopping shots from a mini-Uzi sells for about five thousand dollars.) For Latin America, principally, Caballero makes bulletproof vestments for Catholic priests, who risk assassination if they speak out against drug trafficking, political corruption, or other locally sensitive topics. The company also sells a large bulletproof Bible, which a priest can use, mid-sermon, as a protective shield, and a bulletproof blanket, which can be thrown over a pulpit (or a national leader undergoing a coup d’état).

A couple of years ago, Ballesteros created Caballero’s first women’s line. Women pose a challenge for a designer of fashionable body armor, since their breasts are situated inconveniently, in terms of panel placement, and since women tend to be more fussy than men about things like thickened abdomens and visible panel lines—although men can be troublesome as well. Ballesteros told me, “A man will say, ‘I want a marvellous jacket, like this.’ ” She used her hands to suggest a sports coat open to the navel, perhaps to frame a patch of thick chest hair or a heavy gold chain. “But we can’t, like, put the lapels of a jacket lower than a certain distance from the sternum, or the heart will be exposed. I just say, We can’t, we can’t, we can’t. I tell them that, if they want a jacket like that, then I’m also going to give them a T-shirt with a bull’s-eye printed on it.”

On display at the State Library of Victoria, in Melbourne, Australia—where I recently spent a week—is the homemade bulletproof suit that the nineteenth-century Australian outlaw Ned Kelly wore during his gang’s final shootout with colonial authorities, in 1880. The suit, which is now considered a national treasure, was made from steel moldboards taken from plows. It covered Kelly’s head, neck, shoulders, and torso, and weighed more than ninety pounds, and it kept him alive long enough to be hanged.

Kelly’s armor, though crude, remained pretty much the state of the art for decades: if you wanted to be truly bulletproof, you needed moldboards or the equivalent. Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria is said to have been wearing a protective vest made of multiple layers of silk fabric when he was assassinated, in 1914. Whether the vest could stop bullets is unknown, because the shot that killed him struck his neck, which was uncovered. During the Second World War, DuPont introduced a tough synthetic material, called ballistic nylon, that was used in the flak jackets of airmen. It provided some protection against shrapnel and flying debris but couldn’t stop even pistol shots. (Today, it’s used mostly in things like suitcases, tool belts, and tough-guy watchbands.) Then, in 1965, a DuPont scientist named Stephanie Kwolek invented poly-paraphenylene terephthalamide: Kevlar. She had been mixing petroleum-based monomers, and had produced a solution with properties she didn’t recognize. I spoke with her recently—she’s eighty-eight—and she said, “I certainly didn’t start out to make bulletproof vests or anything of that sort. I was trying to make a superstrong fibre for reinforcing radial tires.” The liquid she created had a cloudy appearance, which her colleagues assumed was evidence of an undissolved polymer. “But I didn’t think so,” Kwolek continued, “because I let the flask sit around for about a week, and I shook it, and so forth, and it didn’t behave like a solid. Even when I filtered the liquid, it looked the same.” She tinkered with it some more, and surprised herself and everyone else when she ended up with lightweight, unreactive, flame-resistant, non-melting, shrinkproof fibres that, for their weight, were five times as strong as steel.

Kevlar rapidly achieved success as the basis for bullet-resistant fabrics—one of its earliest major commercial applications, beginning in the mid-seventies. Cops who had previously relied on ballistic nylon and good luck could now wear vests that really did stop many kinds of ammunition. (In 1987, DuPont and the International Association of Chiefs of Police founded the I.A.C.P/DuPont Kevlar Survivors’ Club; its three thousandth member was inducted five years ago. Caballero has a survivors’ club, too.) The keys to Kevlar’s strength are the unusual tenacity of the bonds within and between its molecules, and the regimented alignment of the molecular chains, like bundles of tiny rebar. (It was the cloudiness in her beaker—which increased as she stirred the liquid—that made Kwolek think her concoction was promising: a more random molecular arrangement would have left more spaces for light to pass through, making the liquid transparent.) All the polymers that are used in bullet-stopping fabrics—including Caballero’s “Coca-Cola” material, whatever it is—share these characteristics. The fibres, acting in combination, are strong enough to resist the force of an impact, and the aligned molecules are rigid enough to transmit that force sideways, away from the target. One of the challenges with any bullet-stopping material (and the main reason that it’s difficult to make protective clothing inconspicuous) is the necessity of limiting what’s known as “back-face deformation,” or denting, a problem that usually increases as the fabric is made thinner. Tucker Norton, a DuPont scientist, told me, “You can think of it like a net on a soccer goal. If you’ve got a net that’s really loose and you kick a ball into it, that net is going to go way, way, way back. Now, if you’re wearing that net on your body that’s not what you want to happen.” Stopping a bullet doesn’t help if the bullet stops in your liver.

A couple of years ago, DuPont introduced Kevlar XP, a lighter, thinner version of the classic material, with enhanced resistance to back-face deformation, among other desirable properties. Norton told me that he was familiar with Caballero, but said he didn’t know what Caballero’s own lightweight fabric might be made of. He did say that all manufacturers of protective materials are engaged in “a bit of a true arms race” with people who shoot people. “You’ve got the criminals or foreign militaries attempting to devise ammunition that penetrates the latest armor,” he said, “and then our response is to develop stronger and tougher and lighter armor that stops those threats, and back and forth, back and forth.” DuPont recently introduced a Kevlar-based automotive product called Armura, exclusively for the Brazilian market. It’s a consumer version of the kinds of heavy-duty protective system DuPont makes for military and other vehicles. The company chose Brazil because that country has a favorably high threat-to-muzzle-velocity ratio; in other words, there are lots of bad people in Brazil, but their guns aren’t very good. The level of protection provided by Armura, Norton said, “probably would not be sufficient” in a country as elaborately armed as the United States.

My conversation with Norton took place during a conference call, whose other participants were a second DuPont scientist named Kevin Corby and a representative of the company’s public-affairs office. When I said, late in the call, “Hey, am I the only person on the line who’s actually been shot in one of these things?,” there was a protracted silence. DuPont researchers, it turns out, don’t test their inventions on one another, or even on reporters. Corby said that, in his case, he wouldn’t be worried about the efficacy of the material but would be concerned about “the possibility of a misfire.” DuPont refers to its Kevlar products as bullet-resistant, rather than as bulletproof; Caballero is less cautious. At any rate, I enjoyed being shot, and I’m glad I didn’t interview Norton and Corby until I got home from Bogotá, when it was too late for them to try to talk me out of anything.

Before travelling to Colombia, I did check the U.S. Department of State’s Web site, which was rather discouraging: “The potential for violence by terrorists and other criminal elements continues to exist in all parts of the country. . . . U.S. citizens have been the victims of violent crime, including kidnapping and murder. Firearms are prevalent in Colombia and altercations can often turn violent.” So I called a lawyer friend of mine, whose clients are mostly Colombian, and he said there was nothing to worry about. Sure enough, I roamed Bogotá at will, and had the exhilarating and, by now, virtually extinct pleasure of being a tourist in a large foreign city that often seemed to contain no other tourists.

Also, the food was terrific. After shooting me, Caballero took me, his fiancée, his father, his brother, and four other people to lunch at a restaurant downtown. (His father, who used to be in the retail-clothing business, is the company’s production manager.) Because Caballero’s minivan would seat only eight of us, and those just barely, one of the guests, a company employee, travelled separately, by motorcycle. That employee wore a suit from Caballero’s Road Collection, a line of one-piece outfits intended to protect motorcyclists from abrasion injuries caused by skidding along the ground. (Ballesteros told me that Venezuelans, in addition to ordering their Road suits in red, usually want them to be bulletproof, too.) As we moved slowly through one of Bogotá’s semi-interminable traffic jams—which included not only exhaust-spewing cars and trucks but also an occasional donkey cart—Caballero, who was driving, reached back over his right shoulder and loaded a disk into a ceiling-mounted DVD player. The disk contained a promotional video, which is also on his Web site. It included footage from Intermoda 2006, a big fashion event in Guadalajara, Mexico, at which Caballero’s clothes were worn by the sort of models you see on runways in Paris and Milan. Mexico, not surprisingly, is a major growth market for bulletproof clothing, and Caballero’s line was a hit at the show. The company now has offices, a small manufacturing facility, and a retail showroom in Mexico City.

At the restaurant, Caballero and Ballesteros ordered for me. Between courses, Caballero explained that his company had, unfortunately, been unsuccessful in its effort to develop bulletproof underpants, because, he said, the prototypes had looked and felt “like Pampers.” Sitting to my right was a representative of one of Caballero’s suppliers, a Mexican company that weaves bulletproof cloth. The protective panels in Caballero’s clothes consist of multiple layers of such cloth, since the outer layers typically give way in the course of stopping a shot. (Bulletproof garments are single-use items; Caballero will replace yours free of charge if you’re shot while wearing it during the first six months of ownership.) As seems logical, one of the hardest things to do with bullet-stopping textiles is cut them. Ballesteros told me that Caballero’s fabric-cutting method is a trade secret; a DuPont representative said that her company uses “special industrial tools,” and that “there’s nothing in your home that would work”—unless your home happens to contain a pair of superhard high-carbon-steel Kevlar-cutting shears, which are purchasable online.

After lunch, I visited Caballero’s offices in downtown Bogotá. He and Ballesteros told me that one of the challenges they face in the protective-clothing business is accommodating not only different fashion sensibilities but also different kinds of threat. “In the beginning, we developed only bulletproof fashion,” Caballero said. “Now we have de-mine protection. Stab protection. Riot protection with bulletproof at the same time.”

You might think that protecting people from stabbing would be easier than protecting them from shooting, but that’s usually not the case, especially if the stabbing is done with something skinny and sharp, like an ice pick. A knife doesn’t move as fast as a bullet does, but its impact area is small, so the force is highly concentrated. Stabproof garments typically require protective fabrics with less space between threads, and it wasn’t until the past year or so, Caballero said, that he was able to develop a single lightweight material that could handle both threats. Among the main users of stabproof garments are prison guards, who face fewer smuggled guns than improvised knives. Another big market is Europe, where firearms of all kinds are less widely owned than in the United States.

“In London, maybe you need only stab protection, knife protection,” Caballero said. “In India, maybe between knife and guns. Malaysia, stab protection. Latin America, bullets. But in Russia the risk is not only with guns. There they have special ammunition, called Tokarev—nickname, ‘police kill.’ It is very similar to regular nine-millimetre but is armor-piercing.”

The Tokarev round is named for Fedor Vasilievich Tokarev, an early-twentieth-century Soviet arms designer, who is best known today for the Tokarev TT-33, the Red Army’s standard service pistol after the Second World War, and for the 7.26-by-25-mm. ammunition that it uses. Some versions of Tokarev bullets have steel cores, and, unlike bullets made entirely of copper or lead, they don’t flatten when they strike most targets, which makes them hard to stop with textiles, or even with metal plates. Most ammunition used by soldiers is similarly troublesome: it goes right through the kinds of bulletproof material that are worn by cops and recording artists. Largely for that reason, manufacturing or importing armor-piercing pistol ammunition is illegal in the United States. Also for that reason, such ammunition is quite popular with thugs in the former Soviet Union.

In general, the bullets that are the easiest to stop are the ones that unprotected people often fear the most: hollow-point, or dumdum, bullets, which are designed to fragment and spread on impact. Such bullets do horrific damage to flesh and internal organs, but when they strike bullet-stopping fabrics or other impenetrable surfaces they splatter almost like paintballs, and they cause less back-face deformation than other types of ammunition. And almost any round fired from a pistol is easier to stop than the same round fired from a rifle.

The sale of body armor is closely regulated in many countries, to prevent criminals, terrorists, and other undesirables from making themselves more difficult to apprehend, like Ned Kelly. Caballero does background checks on his customers, he told me, and he won’t sell to anyone who, for example, appears in the U.S. Treasury Department’s voluminous listing of “Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons,” a sort of international White Pages of bad guys, maintained by the Office of Foreign Assets Control. Every garment that Caballero sells has a label that includes both the name of the purchaser and a serial number, so that its provenance can be traced if it ends up in the wrong hands. “From the beginning, we do not sell to any bad people,” Caballero said. “This way, I can sleep well at night.”

After shooting me, Caballero gave me my bullet and spent cartridge, as souvenirs. I happily carried them in my pocket as I walked around Bogotá; they seemed like lucky charms. Then, when I packed to go home, I put them in my (ballistic nylon) laptop case, in a little Velcro-topped pocket near some pens. At the airport, a security inspector at the departure gate went through my bags. He overlooked my bullet and cartridge, but he did remove my camera from my suitcase and ask me to turn it on, to prove that it was just a camera. The image on the LCD, when it powered up, was of Caballero plugging me in the gut. The inspector, with a bored expression, waved me through. ♦