Conceptual Style

GENIUS the cloths change, they get longer or shorter depending on time, or altogether disappear how is that for a wardrobe malfuction!

Hussein Chalayan s/s 2007, transformed www.style.com
For his s/s 2007 show presented in Paris earlier this week, Hussein Chalayan astonished the crowd with self-contained fashion retrospectives - garments that transformed themselves to represent styles from chosen eras. The magic was made possible by a collaboration between Chalayan and the team behind special effects for Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, who microchipped the garments to perform to the tune of the designer’s vision.

Chalayan is the first big-name designer to inject this kind of technology into fashion, forging the inevitable path ahead. There’s really no telling which direction the industry will take with this first effort. A few considerations regarding the use of technology in garment design with a purely creative intent (apart from functional intents such as RFID chipping for monitoring inventory or theft prevention, nanotech swarms repairing fabric tears and weaving computer and communications technology into the textiles):

1. How will the market respond?

2. Technology of this sort will probably not escape the fickleness of patent law and its stifling of creativity.

3. The possibilities of personalizing clothes are endless, opening up a whole new dimension for bespoke.

Mixed in with the novelty shapeshifting garments in Chalayan’s collection were wearable clothes, appropriate for the s/s season (which deserve mention later). If patent infringement nonsense doesn’t stifle the magic and hinder progress from the example he has set, there will come a day when the integration of technology in garment design will be seamless and practical, and will rightfully be defined as ready-to-wear.

Digital Viral fashion

HMMM... very cool in theory? great digital media project. No more laundry maybe. Read on... According to MIT researchers, fashion in the physical world is moving at a much slower pace than online. "[In the online world,] fashion has been moving faster and faster as communication systems become faster and faster," said Judith Donath, director of the Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Lab, who is conducting this research with student Christine M. Liu.

Urbanhermes defines a communicative fashion framework that would ultimately consist of OLED-integrated clothing material that could display digital images and designs, updating whenever the user desired. For instance, a T-shirt could be solid blue one day and striped the next, she said.

These digital images could then be transmitted wirelessly to clothing worn by other people, thereby creating a sort of viral fashion, propagating in much the same way a virus does online. Each piece of clothing, in this example, would also have user-set permissions that could allow/disallow this propagation, or enforce a degradation of images upon transmission, ensuring that the original artwork is always the best quality.

The key to Urbanhermes, Donath explained, is to bring this propagation speed to the physical world so that changing the pattern displayed on your shirt or pants would be as simple as absorbing fashion from the person next to you, or even subscribing to a feed from a designer.

"In the physical world, fashion is not limited by the communication rate [like an RSS feed] but by material," Donath said. "People can't discard their clothing on a daily basis."

The proof-of-concept, which Donath admitted is simplistic, consists of a Sharp Zaurus PDA woven into a messenger bag. The LCD screen of the Zaurus, which features a Linux-based development platform, is visible through a clear plastic window. The device uses Bluetooth and infrared technology for proximity detection and data transmission.

While the idea of OLED-integrated clothing is not new -- the military has been researching adaptive camouflage for years -- the MIT approach to fashion and viral propagation is innovative.

Flickr, which is an website dedicated to photo sharing, is an example of electronic fashion, according to Donath. Images on Flickr's photo feeds change on a real time basis, and are propagated via the Internet. One method to display Flickr fashion, for example, would be to stream an RSS feed of community-supplied images from Flickr to a desktop PC to display as a screensaver.

"[With Urbanhermes,] the notion of fast fashion, as we've seen it on blogs and on Flickr, can migrate to the physical world of face-to-face urban integration," Donath said.