Some of the lectures presented at the Adobe MAX conference that took place last week in San Diego were recently uploaded onto YouTube. Fashion was represented at this gathering of creative minds where designers, developers, and business leaders discuss technologies and emerging trends by Zac Posen.
Interviewed by Adobe CMO Ann Lewnes, the designer talked about how he got into fashion and launched his house, but he also recounted stories about his early fascination with mathematics and experimenting with Adobe Illustrator as a student. Posen touched upon a variety of issues including balancing public and private roles in his life, and the power of social media VS the possibility of creating global moments of connection via glamour. The designer then talked about his interest in the artisanal process and in the new opportunities offered by technology.
Last year Posen designed indeed a LED dress that integrated technology developed by fashion engineer Maddy Maxey, mentor of the Google-backed initiative Made with Code, and electronics from Adafruit. This year, instead, for the Met Gala celebrating the "Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology" exhibition, Posen created an evening gown for Claire Danes made with an optical fibre-based organza that lights up (an idea that seems lifted from Federico Sangalli's designs).
As a whole the interview was rather disappointing since, though it highlighted the increasingly important role that technology is playing in fashion, viewers weren't offered a lot of examples regarding actual techniques or software programmes. Posen made an interesting remark at some point, though, when he stated that, while we do not know what kind of products the fashion industry will manufacture in future, fashion houses may radically transform themselves turning into media companies. This may already be happening if we consider some prominent designers more interested in Instagramming their lives than in locking themselves in an atelier to do some researches.
Compared to Posen's interview, Janet Echelman's presentation seemed more refreshing and interesting. Inspired by Indian fishermen mending their nets on a shore, Echelman started experimenting with fabric. As the years passed, she moved from relatively smaller pieces to large site-specific installations that can now be permanently admired in cities all over the world, from Porto to Phoenix and San Francisco.
Her works – dynamically moving sculptures with the ethereal consistency of jellyfish floating in the sky and suspended in mid-air among buildings (imagine a gigantic version of a Bruno Munari sculpture and you get the idea) – are the result of in-depth researches into several disciplines and of a steady collaboration between her studio, architects, engineers and software developers. The latter helped her studying the strength of specific materials, allowing her to calculate also the gravity and dynamics of her sculptures made using PTFE fibers.
In other cases Echelman has also develoved work with atomized water particles and was inspired by scientific researches as well: her 1.26 installation moved indeed from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory's announcement that the February 2010 Chile earthquake shortened the length of the earth's day by 1.26 microseconds by slightly redistributing the earth's mass.
Her artworks are based on craft principles such as lace-making techniques combined with innovative materials: she adapted for example the industrial material used for astronaut's spacesuits to make long-lasting, color-fast twine, and at the moment her artworks is mainly made of Spectra fiber, a material made from ultra-high-molecular weight polyethylene that is 15 times stronger than steel, but perfectly evokes the intricacy of the most delicate handmade lace.
The artist can explore net densities, shape, and scale, and simulating the effects of gravity, wind, water and light on her living and breathing sculpture environments thanks to the software (Autodesk worked with Echelman to develop for her custom 3D software) used by her studio.
Echelman's presentation shows how an artist who mainly works by sculpting the sky and playing with the choreography of the wind can create contemplative art environments in collaboration with other professional figures who are not usually linked with the art world and this is particularly interesting.
Posen may have been the first fashion designer to appear at the Adobe MAX conference in 13 years, something that definitely proves a change in trends for what regards the "fashion and technology" connection with many tech professionals now ready and keen to jump on the fashion bandwagon.
Yet Echelman's presentation clearly shows how one of the main trends for the future is successfully combining and merging more disciplines together, but it also hints at the fact that, at least for the time being, the "art and technology" equation wins over the "fashion and technology" one. The former has indeed helped Echelman creating public art that can be enjoyed by many people out there; the latter is still at an experimental stage (I'm not referring here to the software employed in textiles or to computer-aided design tools, but at the real products available to the final consumers), producing a series of random variables such as expensive (and at times useless) wearables or fantastically beautiful designs that remain confined to the runway or to museum exhibitions, but that do not provide immediate and innovative solutions for everyday wear. Maybe looking at how art has been working and interacting with technology would benefit the fashion industry.
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