Science Meets Fashion

Financial Times (January 10 2009)

Hussein Chalayan is not the only contemporary fashion designer combining the traditional thimble and thread with mechanical wizardry and the occasional soldering iron.

Japanese label Issey Miyake is renowned for embracing technological methods, from boiling and melting fabric to creating seamless clothes. For its Wind collection in 2008, Miyake collaborated with Sir James Dyson, inventor of the eponymous vacuum cleaner, to create futuristic-looking garments including a grey and pink “wind-coat” with sculpted hood and pockets that echoed the styling of Dyson’s famous machines.

Spanish fashion house Balenciaga’s young designer Nicolas Ghesquiere has also used scientific methods – pattern-cutting with laser technology and molding man-made foam into futuristic, shell-like coats. Another artist, London-based Rob Ryan, chose Tyvek, a synthetic material made from polyethylene fibres that weighs, feels, folds and creases like soft paper, to create a dress commissioned for British Vogue. “The material is easy to cut with scissors but tear-resistant and, worn with some restraint, I imagine the Tyvek dress would last for at least one social season,” Ryan says with a smile.

Wearable electronics, such as the Chalayan dress that used interwoven Swarovski crystals and tiny lasers to project beams of light, are also attracting designers.
New York-based Angel Chang has produced velvet dresses with built-in iPod controls and tops embedded with thermochromic inks that change colour when you touch or breathe on them.

Other innovative pieces come from British firm CuteCircuit, whose Hug Shirt (costing upwards of £100) is a sweater interwoven with sensors that wirelessly link up to your mobile phone. The sensors feel the heartbeat rate, body temperature and strength of touch of the sender and transmit it through an SMS message to the recipient wearing a hug shirt, allowing you to send the sensation of a hug across the world. The company’s latest creation is the M-Dress, a silk dress that doubles as a mobile phone and works by inserting any standard SIM into the neck of the dress. A tiny microphone and series of buttons inside the sleeve enable the wearer to answer calls or to ring up to four chosen telephone numbers that can be pre-programmed into the garment.

Moritz Waldemeyer, an inventor, designer and engineer from Germany who is now based in London, lent his scientific know-how to the LED dress and has contributed to three Chalayan collections, says of these developments: “It is interesting to try and reinvent fashion with technology as there are only so many things you can do with fabric.”

And it’s not just design that is taking advantage of technology. Bodymetrics, a tailoring service available online and in Selfridges department store, uses futuristic pods that scan the body, recording 200 personal dimensions to create bespoke denim-wear from £250 per item. The final product arrives two to three weeks later in a metallic taffeta bag.