KREPP-À-PORTER
Working in the tradition of transcending figures like Hussein Chalayan we explore how technology can change peoples relationship to clothes. If the clothes are self-adapting, how does that change the way we feel about them? In the intersection between several disciplines such as art/design, fashion/technology and research/innovation lies the work of Anders Mellbratt and Nils Wiberg. This time all of them coincide in the groundbreaking project Krepp-à-porter; a dress that automatically adapts its length according to the stock exchange. Fashion is changing at an ever increasing rate – so is the economy – sometimes in a way that has massive repercussions such as the recent global financial collapse.
Do people really have time to worry about fashion in such situations?
Or is it even more interesting in volatile times?
There are very few truths within fashion but one of them is claimed to be the so called “Hemline Index”; the proposition that skirt lengths adapt to the stock market. When the economy is good, skirts are shorter, and in economic downturns the skirt lengths increase. Pioneered in the 1929s by George Taylor who observed that skirt lengths not only followed the stock market, but even could predict it. Two weeks before the stock market plummeted on the collapse of 1929 the Paris runways premiered dresses that went all the way to the ground. This predictive quality is the basis for this dress presented at IASDR2009 in Seoul, Korea.
The concept of the shape changing dress was also present at the New Media Meeting in Norrköping, in a performative exploration of mechatronic fashion done simultaneously between Sweden and Iceland.
Movement by Filippa Rudström, garment crafting by Sally Ståhl.