Inspiration from Designers

Hussein Chalayan was a pioneer fashion designer, who associated technologies with fashion. ‘Echoform’(1999) and ‘Before Minus Now’(2000) were his early electronic fashion pieces, which implemented by fibreglass and could be controlled to transform on the runway. The metamorphosis of fabric was the theme of his fashion show ‘Hundred and Eleven’ in 2007. The dynamic fashion pieces involved magical transformations which could twitch, ravel or unravel, zip up or split open. Those fluid movements were driven by the servo-driven motors, pulleys and wires, which were achieved by a professional engineer through six months of experimenting. Technologies perfectly combined with Chalayan’s fashion design, and still kept elegance and beauty. The keleton structure of the dress was inspirated from the architecture design and mechanical kinetic design (Santiago Calatrava, Philip Beesley, Theo Jansen). The challenge of this research project was to develop a novel kinetic movement which could be integrated with the dress to attract attention from onlookers. The kinetic movements of the dress also acted as an output to deliver meanings that represented the emotions and body movements of the wearer.

Inspiration from Biology

The initial idea of employing the kinetic movement on the clothing was inspired from animal behaviours. Transformation over the skins or body shape was a kind of animals’ behaviours to protection and communication, such as inflating of a balloonfish, the camouflage patterns of an octopus for protection, the spreading of fanlike back feathers of the peacock and the adaptive coloration of cuttlefish for attracting mates. However, humans was different from animals, and did not have these natural abilities. Attaching computing technologies on the body might help humans to achieve these purposes. Clothing was the second skin of humans, with which it was the best interface to collaborate with the technologies.

Through observations in the aquarium, got inspirations from the marine animals,like cuttlefish, jelly fish, seahorse, lion fish. The idea of kinetic movement came from the lionfish which had brightly coloured venomous spines in the dorsal fin and pectoral fins. Spreading their fins was the reaction of lionfish for defencing against predators, repelling rivals or attracting mates. It was a clear signal for protection and communication. The dorsal fin moves elegantly with waved movements. The kinetic dress ‘Silver’ was designed to represent this kind of movement from the lionfish, and created unique dynamic transformation for purposes as communication and attraction.