High-tech fashion design

Anouk Wipprecht: Hi-tech fashion designer, engineer and educator

Below is a transcript of the Q&A session

Fashion has a political dimension, it expresses ideas, attitudes, et cetera. Can you tell us about what you think the politics of your fashion is?

I think, definitively, things like the spider dress have something maybe even feministic – keeping your personal space, although a lot of boys have been asking me to create a spider suit or a spider dress for them. I think we all have this notion of personal space and whom we want to invite there. Sometimes that is not always your choice because of certain reasoning, or maybe you are in a subway in New York, or whatever. But, I think, personal space is a precious thing, almost a feministic thing: you as a woman wearing a dress like that, we are all humans, and we want to have certain spaces around us. The proximity dress, I created it when I was in Florida, and people did not care about social distancing. So, I created a dress that was measuring people that came 1.5 metres in my space, and then the hip element bends up and it was not necessarily to scare them off, but more to let them question: “Hey why is this happening?”. I could say, “You are coming close at this moment”. So, definitively, I like to work with certain situations that I see in my environment which, I am not sure that they are political, but I do like to react to that. And I think that’s more from my artistic point of view, to see certain things, or be fascinated with certain things that are happening in the world or my direct surroundings, that I can address almost, that I can poke at by creating a design. So that’s definitely been the case with a few projects that I have. Other projects are not necessarily political, but are more trying to push this certain interaction and technology or something like that. But I think it’s an interesting way to use the notion of fashion as an expressive medium in and within this almost robotic nature, because of what we can find out about how you can express yourself differently. What I notice is that for some people the spider dress is too aggressive, and they really love the smoke dress because it’s a little bit more elegant. What you really see is that different people really have different tastes, of course. So, I am just trying to create these case studies, maybe it’s something that I would not like or wear myself, but maybe another person would, just to see those reactions is quite interesting. For example, EEG with children is my statement both towards the pharmaceutical industry by not downing these kids by giving them medication. But maybe we can create new kinds of brain-computer interfaces in order to not give them medication but teach them about the brain. So that’s a little bit of a statement towards the pharmaceutical industry. I think there should be much more regulations, especially with the use of certain medications in younger children. So, that’s definitely like a political statement right there. The cool thing you can do is interweaving it into your work, almost.

I was wondering, with all these really interesting interactive clothing pieces, how are the users experiencing wearing them? Do they somehow adjust their behavior to the clothing, or do they start interacting with it differently?

That’s funny, in the past when I worked with the models, I used to explain: you are going to wear this and it would get technical, and people would get overwhelmed. And also in the interaction, it’s a little bit different, so what I like to do now, for example, in an event setting is put it on their body and let them explore. And that works much better for me because the interaction that they have with my device is much more pure, almost primal. That’s a kind of funny thing that I started a few years ago, instead of the engineering side or the technological side, really explaining everything and showing them before they wear it. Just throw it on them and see how they react. Some people really like the noise that certain designs have, Modesta really likes the spider dress: all the motors when they go up and it creates this rawr sound. I know one girl, she has bad vision. She can only see 5%; she really loves the spider dress, because standing in a subway in New York, with the visibility of only 5% is really hard, so she would love to showcase to the world that she has that low visibility in sight. For her, the spider dress is really important and I think she is making a project around it for herself. So, there’s different people from different angles that have problems with regulating their emotions and they connect to certain projects. But for me, it was really interesting to go from explaining really everything to just throwing it on the wearer and seeing where that goes. I also learn from that because I see them in their natural environment. And I can always reprogramme and redesign some of the things. If it is something big then it becomes spider dress 3.0 or 4.0, but if it is something small, I can reprogramme that system and work with that. 

Is it different with kids and adults in terms of how they react, or is it more or less the same for everyone?

When kids see my dress they look at how it works, whereas adults like to embrace the magic effect of what it does and they don’t really want to know how it works. If you have a child and it comes up to the dress, they start challenging it: “Okay, where are the sensors? How does this work, where’s the battery?”. They always go for these technical questions, which, I think, is funny, because you’d expect that from a mature person and the mature person would be: “Oh, that’s just a magical device”. These days children are very keen, they might have some knowledge on what type of sensors can be used in this design, so that’s really fun. Showing children their own brain data is interesting for them, sometimes you see they make a click: this is how my brain works. They can physically see it because they have the device on, you make the sound, you call their name, you show something really colorful, red or blue. And they can see their brain signals spike and this is an interesting thing to see as a child. I am always surprised by the reaction of children.

Was there a moment for you where you realized: Oh, wow, I should use this or that thing more in my designs because of how people relate to it? 

One example that might relate to your question is another spider dress I had before. It was the black version, it was laser cut. It had twelve states of behaviour, so I thought it was smart in a way. But there wasn’t a good symbiotic relationship, the system would always react. If there was a friendly person in front of it, it would also react, so it was always in a pretty aggressive mode, but sometimes you want to converse with somebody. In this dress, I have a respiration sensor. When it is somebody that a wearer wants to converse with, instead of pushing a button to make the system go down, they can breathe in and breathe out, and the respiration sensor can see that. Adding that respiration sensor, you can almost say to your dress: “Shhh! Not now!”. And this created that more symbiotic relationship that I am looking for in a device or in a product like that: that you have a dress that can act on your behalf, but you can also converse with it and demonstrate some control on the system. This is ideally what you want. I went over that by making that first version to not have that control, the dress was in control at all times, and the wearer was not so. In this dress, because of the respiration sensor, you can create a dialog, it will always act on your behalf until you tell it to stop. It is more elegant in this version of the system because of having added a point of control.

Is it difficult to create that dance between a piece of technology and the person, like you say that you learnt this thing that it doesn’t have to show this one behavior?

A lot of people prototype, they make the thing and then the design is ready, and that’s it. But this is not how I see it. For me, that’s the start; then it goes into the public and I see the reaction. If I am educating, I always tell: ‘prototype early, make mockups, try them out in public, with yourself, really try it out in an early stage’. We are so used to making things, and at the end, it is presented and that’s it, then it goes into a box. No, that’s the moment when it comes alive, especially with things that are running on microcontrollers and sensors. For me, that’s the moment when it becomes alive and then it starts to live. That moment is really important, because that’s the first time that the system, which is almost similar to a baby, comes into the world and starts to explore. And if you use machine learning or AI, it can learn from the body, it is important that it is hosted on the body for a certain amount of time to take enough measurements. So, I think that that’s always my main point: even if it doesn’t do good yet, just throw it on the body and see how it can behave. You can design from expertise and think that it is all perfect, but you never see that until it starts to go around. But I think what is interesting with the spider dress, in America, people always stay in a gentle space, so it never really goes super aggressive. But if I take it to Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, people are very quick and close by, so you really see that the system is in a much more aggressive mode. I also presented it in Asia, and people there were so gentle and did not really want to come into the space at all, so you almost need to invite them in. This is what was interesting to see when travelling around with the dress and seeing culturally the things that really affect the dress in such a broad sense that I can say that the dress is much more aggressive in the Netherlands than it is in America. And these things, you think you know them, but until you see them be a reality, you cannot confirm them beforehand.

What do you think is the future of fashion? Do you think that in the future everyday clothing will also become more interactive and high-tech? Will we be 3D printing our clothes?

I think 3D gets to a state that it becomes more flexible. The pieces in the spider dress are pretty hard because I need to have accuracy in space, the spider dress is hard plastic. It is not something that you would wear every day. I’d make a different version if it would be for everyday use. But robotics often wants to have them hard, unless you do soft robotics. It needs to have that hard factor. Electronics and technology were so big before: 20 years ago when I started, my dresses looked nice from the front but when you turned around, there was this really big computer on the back. These days microcontrollers have become really tiny and they connect to whatever I want. Technology has become so fast, so small, and especially in the last 5 to 6 years it has become super easy to be integrated in garments, and that’s what you see and what you will see much more. But there are a few things that we still need to solve. One of the things is washability. You can’t throw the spider dress into a washing machine. I use a lot of things like leather or fake leather, because it has a more accurate connection between the 3D printed plastic and a leather or fake leather dress. They both can be cleaned, they don’t need to be put into a washing machine. Washability is a big problem because water is the biggest enemy of electronics. In the washing machine industry, they are producing washing machines that do not need water so that would spike up this field once they are really for production and they are commercially available. If we can clean our garments without having to use water that would be a big thing. But those things are currently still stuck in laboratories.  So there are a few things that are still problematic for wearables, and that we really need the help with from other fields, and other things like batteries. Batteries are not created for the body, they are not round, they are not flexible, they can even be dangerous when you place them on the body. What are the other possibilities, from solar to kinetic; we all move so how can you use that in there? My designs need a lot of power. They need 5 volt or 12 volt, I don’t use 12 volt anymore. They need up to 5 volt, almost like your mobile device. So there are some things that we still need help with from certain fields. But at the same time this is a pretty young field. For the last 6 to 8 years there really has been attention and the ask for this kind of stuff, but it’s still a young field. To sum it up, there is a lot of potential because our technologies are so small, the bodies are able to be sensed, you can do some many things that are so unexplored. So I do think that this will be a future, that we will be able to use these sensors and customize them to whatever we want. And this is what I am always pushing for and working on because it is super cool.

Talking about the future, have you explored virtual reality or any of this type of technology, perhaps augmented reality? 

Yes, a little bit. I have been talking with DRESSX, they do digital fashion. It is interesting to me but I don’t like the screen too much, I like when it pops out of the screen and becomes reality. But I think it is amazing work that they do. A lot of the textile and fashion industry is very polluting, from the cotton industry being almost poisonous to influencers. Influencers get the design shipped, they wear it one time for a photo. So DRESSX is addressing this notion of ‘why do you need it in real? Why can’t you have a virtual dress?’ And in that you can go really crazy, making organic shapes and all of that stuff. What I like is a real world application where you can work with sensors and I cannot necessarily sense the body from VR. I think sometimes the technology is also not there from the more immersive and interactive point of view, the things that I am looking into, the brain signals and neurotech. I think it is quite interesting if you were to combine non-neurotech and brain-computer interfaces to VR and all that stuff. There’s a lot of potential. I like to work with hardware I like to sew, I like to code so that just has been my interest a little bit more. But I am doing some things with the digital avatar and Viktoria Modesta, so some things will come out in that sense, and possibly, connected to her body as well.