LED Dress in Motion (Photo credit: orijinal)
The one and only time I ever made my own clothing was in grade 8 home economics. The entire class had to make Jams, brightly colored baggy shorts that made everyone instantly feel like a surfer. The pattern was provided but we had to go and pick our own material at the fabric store along with thread to match. We learned the mechanics of the sewing machine, how to thread it and away we went. In the twenty years since then, the sewing machine hasn’t changed very much; they now have built-in computers but the underlying purpose is the same, to stitch cloth together with thread. What has changed is how we are using new technology like 3D Printers, microcontrollers and advanced materials and e-textiles to breathe new life into how we think about and create fashion and then instantly share it and remix it.
E-textiles have been around for centuries (think metallic thread) but now that computers have become the size of a pack of gum, affordable and easily programmable, and a new 3D Printer comes on the market daily, fashion tech is starting to catch on and more and more widespread. Projects are moving away from hobbyists playing around with LED lights on their t-shirts to more sophisticated and integrated consumer-wearables such ones that help you manage your health.
One of the pioneers of wearable technology, Steve Mann defines it as,
Wearable computing is the study or practice of inventing, designing, building, or using miniature body-borne computational and sensory devices. Wearable computers may be worn under, over, or in clothing, or may also be themselves clothes (i.e. “Smart Clothing†(Mann, 1996a)).
In January of this year 3D-printed ‘tech-couture‘ dresses hit the runway at Paris Fashion Week. One of the hi-tech dresses was a collaboration between Dutch fashion designer Iris Van Herpen and MIT Media Lab‘s Professor Neri Oxman. Oxman designed a second skin with advanced materials and a high-end 3D Printer. She explained the work:
new technologies enabled the reinterpretation of couture as tech-couture, where delicate hand-made embroidery and needlework is replaced by code.
A 3D Printed Gown was recently unveiled by Shapeways, a service that prints your custom 3D creations for you. The Queen of burlesque Dita Von Teese modeled the nylon printed dress.
The fully articulated gown based on the Fibonacci sequence was designed by Michael Schmidt and 3D modeled by architect Francis Bitonti to be 3D printed in Nylon by Shapeways.  The gown was assembled from 17 pieces, dyed black, lacquered and adorned with over 13,000 Swarovski crystals to create a sensual flowing form.
Design your fashion piece, send the files to Shapeways and they’ll ship your creation to you. The Shapeways site has an entire category dedicated to fashion which is largely made up of accessories, but once designers figure out how to stitch all the pieces together we should be seeing more and more garments.
The Printing Dress is a Microsoft Research creation that is essentially a screen that allows you to text your thoughts onto the dress for everyone to read.  It is made of black and white rice paper and sewn into the bodice are laser-cut buttons. It comes equipped with a laptop, a projector, and four circuit boards. Many Fashion Tech Designers are exploring the connection between fashion, technology and interacting with our environment socially and physically.
NEW YORK, NY - SEPTEMBER 06: Award-winning Microsoft 'Printing Dress' on display at Bloomingdale's 59th Street Store on September 6, 2012 in New York City. (Image credit: Getty Images for Bloomingdale's via @daylife)
Jennifer Darmour recently stated at her SXSW talk Wearables: The Next Interactive Frontier, ‘there is a paradigm shift, instead of us interacting with technology, the technology interacts with us.’
‘Technosensual’ fashion designer Anouk Wipprecht creates technological couture; with systems around the body that tend towards artificial intelligence; projected as ‘host’ systems on the human body, her designs move, breath, and react to the environment around them. Her creations have been worn by the likes of Fergie and Britney Spears. It’s not very often you find a fashion designer that can code and make a good solder joint, but we will be seeing more of that plus collaborations between fashion designers and computer engineers.
The stage has been set for more and more high fashion designers to include a wearable tech line in their collections and for super models to become one with the next-gen fashion technology creations as they walk the runway.
Laser cutters have been around for decades but are now more affordable and a staple of hacker/makerspaces. Recently we purchased a laser cutter for LA Makerspace and made an exciting discovery â€" we can etch designs right onto tightly woven fabric. I had been trying to figure out how to embroider a logo onto a towel and that’s when we came across this alternative. I can use a simple program like Microsoft Word to create the design or phrase, place the towel into the laser cutter, change a few printer driver settings, and within a few minutes the words on the screen are etched into the cloth. This is incredibly empowering for someone that isn’t a designer or doesn’t have embroidery skills.  Perhaps even more exciting is abandoning scissors all together and using a laser cutter to cut the pattern right onto the cloth. According to Epilog, ‘…[a laser cutter] provides you with great consistency and control. Additionally, laser cutting material results in perfectly seared edges to prevent fabric from unraveling.’
etched jeans (Photo credit: matthewvenn)
The days of pulling your hair out to replace a lost button are over because now you can just take a picture of one of the remaining buttons, scan it and then print a new one. It was just announced at SXSW that Makerbot is releasing it’s new Digitizer Desktop 3D Scanner which allows you to copy objects and then print them. This is pretty much the Star Trek: Next Generation Replicator except (unfortunately) it doesn’t rearrange subatomic particles.
Disc Buttons Fabricated via Shapeways (Photo credit: aplumb)
Programmers are becoming fashion designers and fashion designers are programmatically enhancing their costumes. I can’t draw to save my life, but what I can do is download designs created by someone that has design skills, configure a 3D Printer as many times as I need to in order to get the perfect print and click ‘Run’ like I did to print a stretchy bracelet I downloaded for free from Thingiverse.
Traditional e-textiles and sewing machines will be around for awhile to come, but a whole new wave of fashion ideas are emerging because of technology for either practical or purely aesthetic purposes. Both professional and hobby fashion designers alike can easily integrate technological advances into their work, and even non-designers like myself can take those Jams I made 20 years ago and program them to change from a bright color to a more tolerable, subtle hue with the press of a button.
If you want to immerse yourself in the world of Wearable Tech and E-Textiles, here’s a few of my favorite time suckers:
adafruit #WearableWednesday
ecouterre
Electricfoxy
FashioningTech
Lilypad
Lynne Bruning
MIT Technology Review
Pinterest
Steve Mann’s Wearable Computing
Textile Messages
Wearable Tech Gadget Infographic
Source Article from http://www.forbes.com/sites/tarabrown/2013/03/11/the-future-of-fashion-download-file-and-print/
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