CLOTHES THAT MOVE YOU: Designer Anouk Wipprecht uses technology to explore how human beings can connect with one another through what they wear.
Human beings spend years building up defence mechanisms that keep others from knowing how we really feel. Anouk Wipprecht has spent years devising ways to destroy them through clothing and technology.
Wipprecht's "zoomorphic e-costumes" communicate emotions like anxiety and fear through light and movement. Behold the Spider Dress that reaches out its animatronic tentacles when the wearer feels her space is being invaded. The Smoke Dress demands an equally wide berth, exhaling a smoldering smokescreen when approached much like an octopus that emits a wave of ink in defence. "The clothing can sense when our heart rate is rising even better than we can ourselves," says the Amsterdam-based designer. As creepy as they sound, her garments – tricked out with skin sensors and mini computer boards called micro controllers – puts her at the forefront of a movement to combine fashion and technology in a way that aims to change the way people relate to their wardrobes and each other.
"If humans acted more like animals, our interactions would be less challenging," she says. Humans put on a poker face when they're uncomfortable or provoked, "but animals express things without a filter. They defend themselves in an intuitive way, and that's something I try to design: systems that behave intuitively." Trusting your gut is a trait Wipprecht claims is very Dutch. That honesty, combined with a knack for exploration and discovery in design, helps drive innovation in Holland, particularly at the intersection of fashion and technology.
Thanks to cutting-edge colleges like the ArtEZ Academy and V2 E-textiles Workspace, The Netherlands is a world leader in e-fashion, a branch of the 21st-century fashion/function mash up better known as wearable tech. In addition to Wipprecht, its most prominent proponents include Iris Van Herpen, who shows her 3D-printed collections in Paris, and Pauline van Dongen, who integrates solar panels for charging mobile devices into luxury garments.
Wipprecht began studying fashion in her early teens. At 16, she discovered microcontrollers and began looping them into fabrics to make them move or emit light. At university in Utrecht she expanded into "interaction design" and then engineering, advancing her fluency in computer languages. Since launching her brand professionally 10 years ago, microcontrollers have remained "the heartbeats of my designs," she says.
Today, she eschews complicated programming languages like C++ for
Arduino, an open-source circuit board with a microcontroller that allows her to enter a command ("light up," for example) that produces a physical result. She compares the process to making a phone call. "The input is your finger pressing a number; the output is the cellular connection; the microcontroller is the technology in your phone that makes it happen." If she wants a garment to illuminate, Wipprecht affixes a microcontroller that has a battery at one end and an LED light at the other. To make it move, she replaces the light with a motor. To channel an emotion, she adds a sensor that sits against the skin.
To Wipprecht, each dress is a case study. Getting her wearables into production will require years of problem solving. How do you update software embedded in a skirt? How do you recharge it on the go? How do you launder or mend it? These are still questions Wipprecht is working to address.
She will soon be in San Francisco where she will spend three years running CODAME, a lab that teams up designers and Silicon Valley technology companies. Finding the right scanning and projection software will move her closer to bringing her ambitious ideas to market. After she jumps those hurdles, it's anyone's guess what her work can achieve, though a new sense of sustainability seems inevitable.
"Traditional fashion is in style for a month, a week, a day. Then it's out," she says. "Wearables would never allow that. My designs are like robots – they get upgrades. And that's good for business."