Fairytale Fashion Collection by Diana Eng

This week Diana Eng presented the Fairytale Fashion Collection, fashions that use technology to create magical clothing, at Eyebeam.

The collection consisted of fashions that illuminate, change colors and transform shapes. My personal favorite was the deployable hoodie whose hood expands and collapses as a result of its origami structure.

The Research and development for the Fairytale Fashion collection can be found online at FairytaleFashion.org.

Images of the collections below:

Inflatable Dress

Cream silk chiffon, draped over plastic inflatables and white silk flowers.

Twinkle Skirt

LED circuits are hand embroidered with silverized thread and a custom sewable circuit board Twinkle Pad, developed specially for the Fairytale Fashion Collection.

EL WIre Dress

Aqua silk chiffon organically draped dress edge with electroluminescent wire controlled by an accelerometer. Circuit boards are housed in 3-D printed neck piece.

Twinkle Dress & Twinkle Cardigan

LED circuits are hand embroidered with silverized thread and a custom sewable circuit board Twinkle Pad, developed specially for the Fairytale Fashion Collection. Twinkle Dress's removable grey silk chiffon twinkle pad circuit overlays washable black cotton American Apparel dreww. Twinkle Cardigan's removable black wool melton shoulder patches overlay a cotton sweater.

Deployable Hoodie

Red wood silk hoodie with Miura Ori structure pleat pattern to help the hood collapse small and open big.

Puff Sleeve Jacket

Lavender cotton canvas jacket with deployable structure pleated sleeves.

Cameo
Cameo

Peach silk organza edged with electroluminescent wire. Circuit boards are housed in 3-D printed Cameo.

Tags: Fashion and Technology

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Comment by Rebecca Grabman on February 26, 2010 at 12:43pm: I love that Diana Eng is such a talented, enthusiastic, visible face for wearable technology, but I'm a little bit let down by this collection. The strongest pieces for me are the puff-sleeved jacket (which is a beautiful piece that looks well thought out and integrated) and the white dress with the circles on it (which is displaying some kind of flocking motion when she places her hands on her hips, but I'm not sure what the control criteria are). Both of these seem to take the elements she's been highlighting in her vlogs and find cohesive, elegant ways to use them. Most of the other piece just feel a bit... under-designed? Over-thought?

For example, I like the cameo as a clever solution for housing the electronics, but I think she sacrificed a bit of fashion integrity in order to play up just *how* hidden it is, by using entirely sheer fabric for the top. It pushes the sweet, playful, feminine, oversized concept into something a bit more cliched. But since we all know the cameo is providing the "magic" here, and the ELwire is clearly awesome, I wish she'd made the shirt itself more of a design element or a focal piece. It seems to me that many of the pieces don't quite find the balance of conceptual fashion and conceptual technology use.

What do other people think? Overall it seems like a nice collection, but I'm way more intrigued by her fabric engineering experiments than the tech use. (Note: the book she shows in one of her vlogs, The Art of Manipulating Fabric by Colette Wolff, is awesome!)