As seen in yesterday's post, throughout the decades visual futurist Syd Mead imagined a future made of complex architectures and flying vehicles, yet in interviews he also stated clothes may mutate one day, thanks to the integration of electroluminescent fabrics that will create movable shapes and patterns. In some ways that has already been done via augmented reality garments that achieve a new life when a tablet device (or a smartphone) with a special app reads the information embedded in the fabric, but a young label that took part in the VFiles showcase at New York Fashion Week has been experimenting further along these lines.
Inspired by the possibility of wearing, rather than breaking, the Internet, Nayana Malhotra's Neuro Couture showcased garments that displayed popular GIFs like the "Sad Frog" and Donald Trump's face.
The designer integrated in the garments consumer-grade electroencephalogram (EEG) devices detecting electrical activity in the wearer's brain via electrodes, and monitoring factors ranging from the wearer's emotions through to their body temperature.
The factors alter the appearance of the projections, rendering them into GIF graphics and distributing them on the garment surface via LEDs. The result is a collection that can be considered neurally "behavioural" since it responds to the wearer's feelings, providing the clothes with an element of unpredictability (in a nutshell, you wear what you feel).
Design-wise, though, there wasn't anything new in the collection since the pieces showcased consisted mainly in outerwear and oversized white ponchos with moving GIFs repeated ad infinitum. So, culturally speaking the garments - undoubtedly the results of a long research process - ended up revealing a lot about our society in which advanced technology is employed not to improve the condition of the wearer, but to make a strikingly visual statement.
threeASFOUR, also opted to keep on developing their experiments in technology in their A/W 2016 designs. Their new collection entitled "Biomimicry" unveiled yesterday at Milk Studios, New York, saw the designers playing at being Mother Nature: Gabi Asfour, Angela Donhauser, and Adi Gil borrowed indeed the shapes and silhouettes for their pieces from geometrical figures find in nature, including honeycombs, plants and animals.
They also experimented with a new 3D printing technique with a little help from New York-based architect and industrial designer Travis Finch and in collaboration with Stratasys Ltd., the 3D printing and additive manufacturing solutions company.
The new technology was applied to two fully 3D printed dresses made with a light-based photo-polymer process (it takes around 200 hours to print one dress, so forget about even dreaming of printing your dress at home for the time being...).
The "Harmonograph" and the "Pangolin" dresses were indeed produced using Stratasys' Objet500 Connex3 3D Printer, a very precise machine that features the world's only multi-colour, multi-material 3D printing technology and is therefore capable of varying material properties such as rigidity and colour gradation.
A combination of geometry, biology and logarithms, the "Harmonograph" dress circles around the body in three spirals, following the geometry of the Fibonacci sequence and optically portraying the effect of a harmonograph. The "Pangolin" dress, comprises instead 14 pattern pieces, and an overall skin created by mixing a variety of interlocking weaves, biomimicking natural animal textures.
"Having the capability to vary colour and rigidity in a single piece using Stratasys' Connex3 3D printing technology inspired us to explore flexibility, depth and transformation as inherent design objectives," Adi Gil from threeASFOUR stated in an official press release. "As artists and designers, it is our prerogative - and our nature - to explore the bounds of new technological opportunities, and to push the limits of the way in which forms are created. As the most advanced 3D printed dresses that we have created to date, we are extremely excited to showcase these pieces and demonstrate the unique possibilities unfolding at the intersection of fashion, design and technology."
The 3D printed dresses - at times reminiscent in their shapes and formations of other fashon experiments in 3D printing such as Iris Van Herpen's - are also the first demonstration of a special Nano Enhanced Elastomeric Technology material (that will become commercially available later in 2016) from Stratasys which has extreme flexibility and durability and that may find more applications in future in the automotive industry, in consumer goods, consumer electronics, medical devices and the fashion industry.
threeASFOUR have developed 3D printed designs for their Spring/Summer 2014 and 2016 collections (the latter featured a collaboration with architect Bradley Rothenburg, who helped in the 3D modelling process, while the final designs were printed using Belgian company Materialise's services), but this new technology has allowed them to experiment further with porosity, flexibility and the creation of new nuances.
Fans of new technologies interested in seeing more 3D printed pieces by threeASFOUR and by more designers, will have to take note of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute's upcoming exhibition "Manus x Machina" (5th May - 14th August 2016), that will explore the concepts of hand-made and machine-made in the creation of haute couture and avant-garde ready-to-wear.
The event was previewed yesterday during New York Fashion Week, but once the exhibition will open, let's hope it will inspire new researches into wearable technologies and high-tech in fashion. Most designers seem indeed to keep on focusing on using new technologies to satisfy our visual instincts and are struggling to bridge the gap between the useful and the glamorous.
Actually there is someone who has been trying to do so, even though she's not strictly a designer - Iris Apfel. The 94-year-old icon of style launched in January at Las Vegas' CES (the International Consumer Electronics Show) her jewellery collection in collaboration with WiseWear. The pieces monitor the wearer's health, and keep track of their physical activities.
The three bracelets included in the collection - The Kingston, Duchess and Calder - feature activity tracking (the devices record number of steps taken, calories burned, and level of hydration), haptic feedback and built-in geolocated distress messaging, so, by tapping the bracelets three times, they will send messages to pre-approved contacts, identifying also the location of the user. Apfel has more plans to expand the line and include also statement pieces, such as necklaces and brooches, and men's accessories.
You may like or not the looks and materials employed in Apfel x Wise Wear pieces, but at least in these cases technology is employed for useful purposes. Having satisfied our visual needs via incredibly intricate 3D printed designs or visually striking solutions that can merge the digital and the real world, we will now have to find further ways to develop intelligent designs that can improve the wearers' life on a daily basis. After all fashion should be not just a frivolous - but also a useful - escape into technology.
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