You can buy bulletproof polo shirts, safari jackets, kurtas, and ecclesiastical vestments. Illustration by CHRISTOPH NIEMANN

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.