Wouldn’t it be great if you could rock Kanye West’s outfit from the Grammys, but without the bulky battery pack? Power gadgets by plugging them into your collar? Or do as-yet-undreamed things with garments that produce their own electricity?

It could happen. In a paper published today in Nature, scientists from the Georgia Institute of Technology grew zinc oxide nanowires around kevlar textile fibers. Then the researchers wove the fibers together; when the wires rubbed against each other, an electric charge built up and was channeled into a cathode output.

The fabric is the latest and most personalized form of piezoelectric power generation, in which mechanical stress is turned into electricity. Other piezoelectric garments have been proposed, but they involve polymer inserts rather than fundamentally charge-generating textiles.