I’ve never been one for fashion, but I think that has just changed with the introduction of clothing that eats smogs and kills bacteria. Olivia Ong, a design student at Cornell, came up with the idea of making a jacket that protects the wearer from bad things. It uses nano-materials (pictured) to do its thing, which makes the material itself very very expensive. Just imagine a world in which clothing actually makes the world better.

Ong’s dress and jacket, part of her original fashion line called “Glitterati,” look innocently hip. But closer inspection — with a microscope, that is — shows an army of electrostatically charged nanoparticles creating a protective shield around the cotton fibers in the top part of the dress, and the sleeves, hood and pockets of the jacket.