Wearable tech has been polarising the fashion world significantly for nearly a year now but practical and effective experiments in the field have been well underway for over 10 years or so, does that mean it’s about time for fashion to bite the bionic bullet and take heed from tech? It’s been said that they are worlds apart but the fashion industry and the world of computing each have something to gain from integrating as the world’s preoccupation with technology grows day by day.
While critics have been hot-footing it to point out the flaws in Google Glass recently, many are tipping the Apple Watch for a market takeover via sheer sales records alone when it debuts in a couple of months – so perhpas it’s about striking the right balance?
Internet entrepreneur, Forbes 500 regular and Google Glass developer Sergey Brin may have thought associating a name such as Diane von Furstenberg to the device back in 2012 was a fashion forward step to wider acclaim but as it turned out, he was rather sorely mistaken and the bright idea slowly but surely fizzled out.
Enter CuteCircuit, East London’s wearable tech pioneers who specialise in developing concepts concerning how to incorporate their pieces into the modern wardrobe.
Already being celebrated across the globe for thinking ahead the design firm have been involved with the Ericsson Initiative, jumping on-board to enable the growth of the Swedish group’s “networked society”, and have had their designs worn by people such as Katy Perry and more recently Nicole Scherzinger at the special launch of EE’s 4G mobile network at Battersea Power Station, London.
We speak to Francesca Rosella, CuteCircuit’s Chief Creative Director and co-founder about their brand of wearable tech in the increasingly tech-literate world.
Designers have been attempting to intermingle the worlds of high-tech and highfashion for many years now, but why do you think 2015 is the right time to do so?
At CuteCircuit, we believe that wearable technology integrated into a garment is definitely the future of fashion, some people might think it is not, but these would be the same people that when washing machines came onto the market said that women would keep washing their clothes by hand.
There is a need for having our devices or disconnecting from our devices that can be brought about and satisfied more beautifully and intuitively by wearing a garment that has special functionalities. The more complex garments can be seen as art installations that are worn on the body, and then their components can be translated to daily life through the ready to wear line.
People are more reactive and more interested in this idea. At our office in London we receive requests every day and this is a great sign of how much wearable technology now attracts people from all over the world. It’s so amazing to see this appreciation from such a large and varied number of people: celebrities, journalists, agencies, investors, retailers… everybody seems to want a piece of this avant-garde fashion to wear.
The world of haute couture is still a mystery to the masses, so how would you define “interactive haute couture”?
The world of couture is not as mysterious as it seems. Haute couture simply means a garment completely hand sewn and decorated using very specific techniques for fabric manipulation. This in keeping with a traditional tailoring process that differently from high street fashion aims at creating one-of-a-kind garments for a very special occasion and fitted to the client rather than mass manufacturing.
This is because when making one garment the tailors can focus on a myriad of details and when mass manufacturing a garment factories streamline the design, standard the sizes to fit many body types, and the making process to simplify it and make it more rapidly available. It is like a comparison between fast food and slow food. Making these garments interactive means including a magical micro-technology that can allow the wearer of the garment to do something expressive and unique.
Dresses like the Twitter Dress, Katy Perry’s Dress for the MET Gala, the Stripy Dress, the Duchesse Dress or the Aqua Dress, have the amazing power of enchanting people. The elegance and the innovative technology embroidered into the dresses made these garments exclusive unique pieces that cannot be seen anywhere else in the world. We have garments that illuminate with thousands of high density full color LEDs and they are able to display images, photos, texts and animations.
Wearing a CuteCircuit’s garment a person could show on her dress anything she could think of, changing hundreds of patterns and colors and creating every time the effect of a brand new dress.
CuteCircuit was established in 2004 and as you celebrate your tenth anniversary, what would you say has changed when it comes to the wearable tech landscape?
When we first started CuteCircuit many of the materials that we use today didn’t exist: we had to invent lots of these materials. Today we have conductive ribbons and fibers, micro LEDs and processors, smartphones and tablets. All of these technological advances were not available 10 years ago, so out of a great frustration with not being able to find anything remotely fashionable to make a garment like we wished it to be, we just had to convince manufacturers that creating a special component or ribbon just for us was going to be a good future investment.
We were very excited when all of our garments could be manufactured completely without wires, so that they felt like normal clothing, but they were also clothing that could do amazing things. We like the idea of bringing magic and delight to everyday life; after all fashion makes people happy and technology should make life easier, so the two combined together are fabulous. Today everyone has embraced a more digital lifestyle so it seems an extension of this lifestyle to wear interactive fashion.
Where do you begin when it comes to designing interactive garments and what limitations do you face at the preliminary stages when working with such unique textiles?
It all begins with a challenge. Integrating fashion and technology is not an easy thing to do and you’ll occasionally find that people imagine we send a garment out on the runway with a gigantic car battery and thick electric wires inside.This is not the case fortunately.
There are no wires inside any of the CuteCircuit garments and the batteries are tiny (like a 50 cent coin for example). The only difference between a CuteCircuit garment and other garments is that CuteCircuit’s garments bring magic and fun into your wardrobe! Resolving all the attachments between the smart textiles and the microelectronics is always a fantastic challenge, it really pushes us to improve on what we do and create the next innovation rather than wait for it to come along. The garment is designed first, like in any other fashion house, we just think “wouldn’t it be amazing if the garment could do something?”, rather than just look pretty.
Being such an up-and-coming niche brand you have taken every opportunity to get involved in a number of cross-medium special projects that stress the importance of innovation. Could you expand on some of these and describe some of your most recent projects?
Our favourite garment is the iMiniSkirt from the CuteCircuit’s Fall Winter 14/15 Collection, the first ever completely interactive fashion collection presented on schedule at New York Fashion Week. The show featured fashions that include advanced wearable technology, seamlessly integrated in beautiful ready-to-wear.
The Bluetooth low-energy enabled dresses and accessories allowed the models to control what their dresses would look like on the runway, via the dedicated Q by CuteCircuit App, in realtime! This was a genuine first in fashion’s history! Via the Q smartphone App the wearer can change the colour of their iMiniSkirt at any time, this is because the garments are made of Magic Fabric a special fabric covered in thousands of micro LEDs, designed and developed by CuteCircuit. Magic Fabric is perfectly smooth and comfortable like other fashion fabrics, but is is also magical, as it can change colour, play video (at 25 frames per second), connect to the internet and social media to display Tweets in real time!
Finally, seeing that you are already getting to grips with possibilities that the future of fashion holds, where do you see your brand in another 10 years on its 20th anniversary?
We need lots of interactive Tuxedo jackets. I like the idea of going from morning to night with a garment that over the course of the day becomes alive and creates a new way of self-expression. Fashion has always been a form of self-expression and integrating digital functionalities is the next step in its evolution. As Alan Kay once said “the best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
At CuteCircuit our vision of the future is that all the devices we need to carry with us today, such as cameras, phones, trackers, etc; will disappear in favour of micro technologies embedded into the fabric of our garments that will be able to have some of the same functions but with an added intuitive and emotionally engaging interface. So, unless the whole world decided suddenly to go around naked, the ultimate frontier will be the body and our clothes which will become a second skin, a true interface to the people and places around us.
by Liam Feltham
Images courtesy of CuteCircuit
See CuteCircuit’s involvement with the Ericsson Initiative here.