Carole Collet & Textile Futures

Posted on Jul 26, 2011 in Smart textiles | No Comments

Central Saint Martins is famous in regards to high fashion and couture, having shepherded countless avant-garde luminaries such as Hussein Chalayan, John Galliano, Christopher Kane, Stella McCartney, Phoebe Philo, Zac Posen, Gareth Pugh, Riccardo Tisci, Matthew Williamson, and the late Alexander McQueen. This list of names gives us a sense of the scope of design ...

Emily Crane & Micro-Nutrient Couture

Posted on Jun 29, 2011 in Smart textiles | No Comments

Emily Crane is a new breed of designer working at the intersection of molecular gastronomy and textile innovation. Invested in the material exploration and alchemy of processes, she is growing, cultivating and forming new hybrid fashion futures. She borrows skills from molecular cuisine at the service of envisioning a future where fast fashion is supplanted ...

Illuminated vs. Shape-Changing

Posted on Feb 28, 2011 in Fashion-tech | No Comments

What are the core differences between illuminated vs. shape-changing garments? Perhaps it is best to begin with a few examples: Illuminated displays integrated into wearables have had the most success in mainstream fashion from Cute Circuits’ “Twirkle” series of T-Shirts and dresses, to the “Galaxy Dress” with 24000 full color LEDs – the largest wearable display ...

Wearable Open Design

Posted on Jan 14, 2011 in Open design | No Comments

There are good arguments as to why wearables are closely aligned with the growing movement of open design practices. To being with, Johanna Blakley has argued that fashion is predicated on “free culture”, i.e. that the history of fashion points to borrowing, remixing, and re-inventing known patterns and methods. Other designers, such as Otto von ...

Poiret: The Original Modernist

Posted on Dec 13, 2010 in Fashion-tech | No Comments

Modernity created a number of key factors germane to the production of “fashion” culture today: a mobile urban society where individuals at leisure could observe one another, a fluid economy that supported upward economic and social mobility and the technological means for things to be reproduced on a large material and geographical scale (i.e. publishing, ...