In yesterday's post we looked at a humble material, paper, employed to recreate historical costumes and grand gowns. Let's move on today and look at how technology can instead be used to create futuristic clothes, like the latest creations by designer Ying Gao.
As you may remember from previous articles, Ying Gao, a professor at the University of Quebec and former head of the Fashion, Jewellery and Accessories design programme at HEAD-Genève, created in the past advanced behavioural garments that responded to external stimuli.
Gao's "Possible Tomorrow" collection featured for example robotic dresses integrating fibrous panels that moved and twisted when a stranger got near the wearer.
The motion was activated by a fingerprint scanner incorporated around the wearer's neck that sent data to an Arduino-enabled microprocessor. The latter would trigger the motion in the panels if it didn't recognise the fingerprint.
Previous to that collection Gao created dresses made of photoluminescent thread and with embedded eye tracking technology activated by the spectators' gaze.
Entitled "Flowing Water, Standing Time", Gao's new project comprises two new dresses, and could be conceived as a natural progression of her behavioural studies in autonomous garments.
flowing water, standing time : robotic clothing reacting to the chromatic spectrum by ying gao from ying gao on Vimeo.
The way the fabric on the dresses curls, twists and turns, expands and contracts, calls to mind Gao's "Neutralitè" project, but there is more behind these new garments.
The new designs were inspired by the volume The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, by neurologist Oliver Sacks and in particular by the case of "The Lost Mariner". The latter focused on a 49-year-old man, Jimmie G., who had a peculiar amnesia: he had spent time as a mariner in the navy in his youth, and believed he was 19 years old. Shown a mirror, he was shocked and terrified to see a middle-aged man staring back at him. Yet, shortly afterwards, he would completely forget the mirror incident. Jimmie was locked in his amnesia, and was stuck in a temporal, perpetual moment.
Gao's new dresses integrate colour and light sensors, plus cameras connected to a Raspberry PI computer that gathers information from the environment surrounding the wearer. The data activate the actuators and magnets integrated within the silicone that make the fabrics move.
The garments can basically react to what they "see": they recognise colours in their surroundings and can chromatically move, they have therefore a chameleon quality about them. The clothes are therefore characterised by a higher degree of autonomy compared to the previous designs.
Like Sacks' Jimmie, the garments pass from one state to the other, they perpetually create variations into two opposite states that represent for Gao dropping-off points among an infinite array of possibilities, mutations and alterations that also hint at the complexity of our minds.
The clothes integrate silicone and reflective glass elements (the latter enhance the iridescent lightweight and gauzy organza), PVDF and electronic devices, materials that allow Gao to achieve flexibility and strength in her designs.
The name of the project - "Flowing Water, Standing Time" - seems to go well with the main theme of next year's Met Museum's Costume Institute's exhibition - "About Time: Fashion and Duration" (May 7 - September 7, 2020) - an exploration of how clothes generate temporal associations that conflate the past, present, and future. Who knows, maybe Gao's dresses will be included in that exhibition, but, before then, they will be on display at the "Making Fashion Sense" exhibition at the House of Electronic Arts Basel (January 16 to March 8, 2020).
Image credits for this post
All photographs by Malina Corpadean
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