Techno Fashion hits Ready-to-Wear

Once again, conceptual fashion designer Hussein Chalayan brought techno fashion to the masses for Spring '07. World politics, transformation and flux, fusing technology and science, fashion's cyclical nature, and the tendency to dress in response to the times are themes Chalayan has continued to reference throughout his career. In the S/S '07 show he created exquisitely delicate, layered pieces: five animated dresses, that twitched, folded and morphed through three decades apiece.






The artfully concealed technology of wires, corsets and pulleys was installed by London's 2DRD, who created the engineering and computer programming. For an automatically closing bodice, a magnet was gently drawn up a string. 2DRD's director, Rod Edkins expands in this MIT Technology Review article:

"Basically, the dresses were driven electronically by controlled, geared motors. We made, for want of a better term, little bum pads for the models. So on their buttocks were some hard containers, and within these containers we had all the battery packs, controlling chips--the microcontrollers and microswitches--and little geared motors. The motors we used were tiny, about a third of the size of a pencil and nine millimeters in diameter. Each of the motors had a little pulley, and the pulley was then attached to this monofilament wire which was fed through hollow tubes sewn into the corset of the dress.

"Some of the corsets were very complicated. They had 30 or 40 of these little tubes running everywhere, carrying these little cables, each doing its little job, lifting things up or releasing little linked metallic plates. There was a huge amount of stuff going on beneath the clothes."

via twenty1f

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