05.26.10
Technology Impacting Fashion
Saw this article titled The Little Black Piezoelectric Dress. While the idea of embedding high tech features / functions in clothing has been discussed for some time, I think technology is approaching the point where it is becoming realistically feasible.
ON A WEDNESDAY night in February, one week after fashion’s biggest names descended on New York for Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week, techy designer Diana Eng’s models were strutting a different kind of stuff: the Twinkle Dress, for example. As a striking brunette model slinked by, her flirty frock, embroidered with LEDs, conductive silverized thread, and microphones, lit up in response to tunes from a quartet playing homemade digital instruments. Off the runway, the dress’s microphones can pick up sounds from the wearer’s voice: when she speaks, she lights up in true diva style.
So what happens when these tools are part of our second skin—when instead of carrying our technology, we inhabit it, the way we inhabit a T-shirt? According to Andy Clark, a professor of philosophy and the author of Supersizing the Mind, cognition does not evolve solely from within our epidermal cloak. He argues that the tools we use also help shape our minds.
Take the M-dress, designed by CuteCircuit to solve the problem of digging through a purse in a dark lounge to find a cell phone. With a SIM card embedded in the dress’s tag, a microphone and speaker in the sleeve, and gesture-recognition software, the wearer can answer calls by simply raising her hand to her ear. There is no external device and no button to press—the movement alone activates a sensor that answers and ends calls. Our bodies become part of the communication tool, mediated by little more than fabric. “When our relation to something nonbiological is that close, and we’re secure in our access to information, then we feel the information is part of our mind,” says Clark.