Animatronic Clothes

[swestrup]

As sps pointed out in his journal a few months back, animatronic clothing has finally appeared on the fashion runways of Paris, with Hussein Chalyan's Spring and Summer collection for 2007. In this collection he introduces clothes that change shape and even, in the most extreme case, completely retract into the model's hat.

I've just found his show on YouTube, so I'm embedding it below. Its in two parts since it runs over the 10-minute limit YouTube has. The first part is mostly a normal fashion show, but it gets weirder towards the end, with dresses made out of spaghetti and of bubbles, and finishes with the first of the animatronic outfits.

The second (and more interesting) part has all of the other animatronic clothes. Before watching these, please note that this is a fashion designer in Paris, so these are in no way practical outfits and are, if anything, even more conceptual than ever before. Still, they're a watershed, because now fashion designers have to think about the space of clothes that morph from one use to the next. Maybe it won't be too long before we see something practical.

And now, the videos!

Part 1

Watch on YouTube

Part 2

Watch on YouTube

Comments

[kinra.livejournal.com]

That's awesome and more than a little unsettling, a bit like that "invisibility cloak" that they demoed a year or two ago.

The slow, methodical movement was particularly creepy. But creepy-awesome. And that sort of thing would work brilliantly in a movie, I think, as far as raising popular awareness and excitement.

[swestrup]

Yeah, I would completely love to see something like that in a movie. Someone once asked me for advice on doing a just pre-singularity play, and I told him it would be murder, since I would expect the clothes and props to be steadily morphing themselves as their blueprints were wirelessly updated.