Hasta La Ideas

Dezeen and MINI Frontiers: micro-robotics and 3D-printing are poised to revolutionise fashion, says the designer of Lady Gaga’s bubble-blowing dress, in the second part of our interview with Studio XO.

Despite a conservative fashion industry, rapid changes in technology will transform the clothes we wear, says Benjamin Males, of London-based fashion and technology company Studio XO.

“We believe fashion is quite antiquated,” he says. “While everything around us becomes intelligent, becomes more computational, our clothes are still very old-fashioned”.

This will not be the case for long, says Males, who believes that advances in micro-robotics and transformable textiles will soon make their way into everyday clothing, helping create clothes that can change shape using small motors.

“We believe in the next decade we’re going to see some pretty amazing things happen around transformable textiles and mechanical movement in our clothes: we are looking at introducing that in the next five years,” he says.

He points to the ubiquitous use of smartphones as evidence that people are becoming increasingly comfotable with having sophisticated technology on or very close to their bodies.

Moving up and down a clothes size may soon be possible without having to buy new clothes, predicts Males.

“We [will soon be able to] change the fit of our clothes at the push of a button, or our clothes could form new architectures around us,” he says.

Males is one of the founding partners of Studio XO, whose work includes dresses for Lady Gaga: Volantis, a flying dress powered by 12 electric motor-driven rotors, and the bubble-blowing dress Anemone, which is documented in this movie.

Males describes Studio XO’s Anemone as a provocation and a commentary on the future of textiles.

Anemone is a dress that blows large and small bubbles, the small ones creating a foam structure around the wearer and the large bubbles flying away.

Males calls the mechanisms that create this effect bubble factories. These are small, 3D-printed jaw mechanisms. When they open, a fan blows out large or small bubbles depending on the size of the mechanism’s aperture.

The dress was unveiled in 2013, when Lady Gaga wore it to the iTunes festival. It is the second so-called bubble dress which Lady Gaga has worn, the first one being a nude leotard with plastic transparent globes attached to it.

The music featured in the movie is a track by Simplex. You can listen to his music on Dezeen Music Project.

Dezeen and MINI Frontiers is a year-long collaboration with MINI exploring how design and technology are coming together to shape the future.

The post Clothes will shrink to fit “at the push of a
button” within five years appeared first on Dezeen.

News: Lady Gaga wore the world’s “first flying dress” at the launch party for her latest album last night.

Lady Gaga was strapped into a white fibreglass suit shaped to look like a haute-couture gown and flown by six battery-powered rotors at the event in Brooklyn.

The rotors lifted the singer half a metre off the ground and propelled her forward several metres – as shown in the video below.

The high-tech outfit named Volantis was designed by the popstar, London company Studio XO and TechHaus, the technology division of the star’s Haus of Gaga creative team.

Its rotors are surrounded by white cylinders arranged hexagonally and connected to a central node above the suit, which rests on the ground using a circular stand when not in flight.

Lady Gaga unveiled the project at the ArtRAVE party for the launch of her third studio album ARTPOP.

“I wanted to make today about something even more important to me,” she told attendees at the event. “That something is the youth of the world. Benjamin and Nancy [the dress’ engineer and designer] are here with me today. Their minds are just so boundless. I will be a vehicle today for their voices… Youth all over the world.”

Photograph from Getty Images.

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“first flying dress” appeared first on Dezeen.

Andrew Kolb ha illustrato il brano Telephone di Lady Gaga con un pizzico di sapore vintage.
[Via]

This is one of the most horribly wonderful things I’ve ever seen. It’s kitch at it’s most brilliant. This is what happens when you let artists design your clothes. Apparently Lady Gaga has a team of artists that help design her wardrobe. She wore this wonderful thing for an interview in Germany recently, she walked into the interview as if she is wearing a mink jacket. Remember those mink jackets from the 1930’s-40’s era – that actually had mink heads on them? Made me wonder what Ms. Piggy would have thought about this – yikers. Imagine the possibilities though,Lady Gaga could start a spoof of Hermes, and call it “Kermes”.