TRANSFORMATIVE TECH-STYLES
Discover the garments that reveal the possibilities of science between the stitches
Synthetic fabric innovations, or ‘tech-styles’, are continuously evolving, from printable plastics to graphene dresses. However, one company is taking a traditional material and rewriting its origins. Leather has been a staple in the clothing industry since its infancy and has been used to create a wealth of products, but the fact that it is an animal-based product is inescapable. That’s where the biological engineers at Modern Meadow come in, for they have grown a bioleather called Zoa to replace traditional practices in the industry. Biofabrication is the ability to grow natural products using cells from a living creature as opposed to the animal itself. By editing animal DNA, Modern Meadow can utilise the cell production of collagen, which can group together to form a network of fibres. These fibres can then be intertwined to form a material structure that can be tanned and finished. The possibility of homegrown materials could revolutionise the way we source our clothes. Technology in fashion doesn’t have to exist as a functional improvement on what we wear. Sometimes wearable technology can be created simply for its aesthetic appeal. Designers at Cutecircuit have taken technology’s wearable potential and applied it to couture fashion. One of their most advanced offerings is the graphene dress. In collaboration with the University of Manchester, UK, designers at Cutecircuit have created a couture dress that can capture breathing patterns and displays them through colour-changing LED decoration. Graphene is the strongest material ever produced and the thinnest at an atom thick. LEDS have been placed on a transparent and highly conductive graphene element and a stretch sensor recorded contractions in the element, displaying the light changes on the surface. A shallow breath results in orange to green light and a deep breath moves the dress from purple to turquoise. This isn’t Cutecircuit’s only technological venture, with a host of examples in their collections and stand-alone pieces. Back in 2012 they created a Twitter dress, where LED lights embedded in the dress reacted to real-time tweets.