High-tech
clothing brings together cotton, silicon
By
Mary Beth Lehman
Daily News
MUNCIE, Ind. (U-Wire)—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 between it and the wearer.
The Institute 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 said 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?”
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 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-silk-screened 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. |
