I've thought about that one off and on for a while too. Maybe something like an thin wire electromagnetic mesh as the inner layer of the envelope but I'm guessi

I've thought about that one off and on for a while too. Maybe something like an thin wire electromagnetic mesh as the inner layer of the envelope but I'm guessing no one has tried that at scale because the math says no. Most likely you either have to pump a lot of power through the mesh to get field coverage enough to reliably bounce atoms away from the skin or you have to make the wire mesh so dense that you've basically got a layer of copper as your envelope and are therefore far too heavy to lift off. It seems like too obvious an option to have simply been missed over the decades. Still, I have to wonder if someone will invent a way to coat a string of fabric in like 1nm thick copper film. Or maybe graphene will save this idea too.