Technology has found its way into the fashion industry. Although technology has always had something to do with textiles and sewing equipment, it is now a part of the designs themselves, and gadgets and gizmos have been popping up within dresses, jackets, shirts and suits, making life a little easier — or at least more exciting for the wearer.
Recently, the fashion industry has seen the release of running shoes with computer chips, wrinkle-free clothing, and pants and shirts that resist stains. But with science constantly blurring the line between fashion and gadgetry, conceptual clothing has become a popular medium for both fashion designers and scientists who have come up with some new clothing that furthers the amount of interaction the wearer has with his or her clothing.
The Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE) has been displaying an exhibit titled, Wear Me: An Exhibition of intelligent garments, wearable technology and smart materials. Several articles of clothing are on display at the exhibit, demonstrating what can be accomplished when technology and fashion mix.
Megan Galbraith has spent time working to combine fashion and technology. Her dress, Elroy, is being displayed at the IEE exhibit. “I feel like we’ve been developing separately for so long. The fashion world has been expanding ... and the computation world has been expanding ... we are just bringing in all the work on the computation and integrating it with the clothing,” she said.
Galbraith believes combining technology with fashion is not a new art. “It’s not necessarily a new medium. I see it as an expansion of a medium or a blending of the computation and fashion media,” she said.
Galbraith’s dress, Elroy, is an illuminating dress that “encodes time information,” according to Galbraith’s Web site. What this means is the dress can display time information to the wearer through a series of flashing patterns displayed on squares on the dress. According to the Web site, “The dress and its wearer become engaged in an informative and personal relationship. The wearer can decode needed information from the dress, thus relying on the dress as a means of assistance, as a personal information tool, even as a companion.”
Galbraith said she came up with the concept while she “was working on research as a grad student combining software with artistic expression,” she said. “Up to that point, it had been about how to take a computer and make it a part of clothing ... I was trying to work on how to take clothing as an art form ... How do we expand clothing as art?,” she said.
Famed conceptual designer Hussein Chalayan also created a dress in the exhibit. His dress, the airplane dress, changes its shape by remote control. He calls it the airplane dress because it is made using fiberglass, which is known as a material more closely related to the airplane industry than the fashion industry. The dress looks as if it was inspired by an airplane, and when the remote control is used to change its shape, the pieces that move on the dress resemble the movable flaps on airplane wings.
Another innovative design that was shown at the exhibit was the ScentOrgan dress, which has scents that can be customized flowing through the material in tubing called interactive cabling. The cabling is medical tubing and works by mimicking capillaries, carrying scents throughout the dress. The purpose of the dress, according to IEE, is for the wearer to be able create “their own personal ‘smell bubble’,” and to be able to “transform negative mood states into good scentsations.”
The Puddlejumper is an interactive raincoat that lights up in different spots when rain hits it. According to mintymonkey.com, the creators of the jacket, it works by means of hand silkscreened electroluminescent lamps on the front of the jacket, which are wired to interior electronics and conductive water sensors on the back and left sleeve. “When water hits one of the sensors, the corresponding lamp lights up, creating a flickering pattern of illumination that mirrors the rhythm of rainfall,” according to the Web site.
Although many of these articles of clothing are not yet sold in the mass market, their concepts show that the fashion industry, like many other industries, is finding a way, to make its products more interactive and technologically advanced, so that even the fashionista can surf the wave of technology.
“Immediately it won’t mean much for the fashion industry,” said Galbraith, “There’s still a lot of work that needs to be done on the fashion industry side, but in the long run we’ll see a big shift in how we use our clothes,” she said.
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