The Dutch fashion tech designer Anouk Wipprecht became world famous with her bizarre robot dresses. The main themes in her work are connections between people and between people and technology. Interfacing she calls it. We talk to Anouk about the slow evolution of fashion technology.
Originally published at ideas.bright.nl by Miranda Hoogervoost
My first encounter with Anouk last summer in Berlin at the event Fashion Tech. It’s still difficult to catch her; her phone number is unreachable. Later when we were in a low-noise plastic talking bubble she admitted she threw away her phone. “It is an experiment because I am sometimes tired. When I open my phone and see two hundred unread emails I get a heart attack! We have the technology to make our lives easier, but it causes stress because it is not consistent with how we feel. It would be great if your phone knows that you are too busy for an interview and saves the incoming call for a later time. “
Spider Dress
Anouk Wipprecht studied fashion and interaction design and has been experimenting with technology because they wanted to give her clothes more features than warmth and comfort. “My idea of fashion has always been that clothes should be able to respond to our needs and moods. Spider Dress for example, is about fear and social issues. When people come into your personal space than the dress reacts to protect you. I find it very interesting to design from those basic human emotions.”
The Spider Dress was developed in cooperation with the Austrian hacker Daniel Schatzmayr and the first version appeared in 2012. During the Consumer Electronics Show early last year launched Anouk version 2.0. The dress has spider legs — ok, there are six instead of eight, but that’s creative freedom — and is based on a proximity principle by Edward T. Hall. The dress has 12 states or behavior: from friendly and encouraging to avoiding and aggressive. All parts are 3D printed and she uses chips from Intel, a partner she’s worked closely with for years.
Her 2012 Smoke Dress also responds to changes in personal space. Anouk made the dress with Aduen Darriba, with whom she studied. Sensors trigger a mechanism that can create a smokescreen so that the wearer can “hide”. The inspiration for this dress came from how the squid protects itself.
Unfriending
In late February, Anouk was a guest at the two-day design event FITC Amsterdam. On the first day, we met her informally in the back of the room at English illustrator Mr. Bingo’s presentation. We talked about the clash between College Tour and Daan Roosegaarde and the head-above-the-ground-climate in the Netherlands. She responded diplomatically but crisply: “Here there’s a lot of stiffness you might say. If you do something good, you can just be taken down again. This really played into in my decision to go to the US — I left the Netherlands in 2009. [In America] there are interesting opportunities for me, of course. There’s not very much room for challenging projects in the Netherlands, and I think America is really forward-thinking. That’s why tomorrow I’ll announce big news.”
Our official interview was scheduled for the following day, so I had to wait for the news. While we watched more of the hilarious “Hate Mail” clip of Mr. Bingo, in came an American lady from a New York fashion tech consultancy. She was struck by Anouk and asked if she was available for a day of brainstorming in New York: “Mail me your price and quickly please because I need it to know 16:00 this afternoon.” Anouk: “Jeez, what should I ask for?” They make the deal around with an amount where I should write articles for ten Bright-and I note in Evernote: “course programming search.”
Anouk is world-famous in the fashion tech world. She travels the globe for lectures, exhibitions and collaborations. Additionally, she curates avant-garde events where she invites geniuses from the world of technology, design and fashion shows to collaborate with her. Yet we see her surprisingly little in the Dutch media. “They approach me often but usually without seriousness. [They just want] purely audience ratings and sensationalism — I don’t want to be a part of that. I’ve worked with Humberto Tan, because he was really interested in my research. I joined him on the RTL Late Night show in the Spider Dress. I also think that’s why I like Ivo Niehe. This area deserves a lot more respect than is currently portrayed in the Dutch media. It’s important to keep pushing fashion tech.“
Brain Scan
The next day at FITC Anouk rapidly (and energetically) presented her famous dresses. They also showed a sneak preview of her latest work for the Audi A4 Collection — her fifth dress series. “We have this dress for this series of motors, and there’s something else but I can’t remember right now” The new Audi dress will come in the second half of this year.
Also impressive is the Unicord brain scanner used in children’s neurological research (see the photo at the beginning of the article). It’s a playful place of terrifying head sets that the children now get on their head: “The children now get to wear these terrifying headsets playfully”
A New Collaboration Between the Netherlands and Silicon Valley
After the presentation we met up in the media space. We ask directly to the big news that she has forgotten to tell. Laughing: “Yes, sorry, the presentation went quite differently than we planned it. Anyways, yes, the important news! I’m in cooperation with CODAME from San Francisco to organize a large tech design event from 5–8 October at Fort Mason. The theme is INTERFACE, so it’s wider than just fashion. I also invited many designers and engineers from the Netherlands and linked to designers, engineers and Silicon Valley companies. We want to try to create the next generation wearables.”
“I want to build a bridge between Netherlands and San Francisco because I think there are many more cool ideas in the Netherlands than what we see now. I also think that the Netherlands can learn from these initiatives and hope that this event will lead to more innovative entrepreneurship between the two places.”
In the next few weeks Anouk will be working with CODAME founder Bruno Fonzi to curate the artists and technology companies, who will then go to work in the lab on new projects. In October, all the projects created will be displayed.
The lack of collaboration between fashion companies and technology companies is currently the bottleneck in the fashion tech industry. “The tech sector really does its best to get things off the ground, but the fashion industry does not show much interest,” Anouk observes, “even though it’s clear we need good conversations around washability, power, maintaining electronics as well as designs for bandwidth and networking of the wearer.”
“There is a big communication problem. The average fashion designer finds it difficult to work with a classical engineer, because fashion is focused on tactile and visual experiences instead programming and mathematics is rather abstract matter. Not all developers are very open to the extravagant ideas of fashion designers. I often hear developers looking down at design technologies. Technology in their eyes much more value than what something looks like. While there should be a perfect balance, a symbiosis.”
The Fashion Industry Needs to be Overhauled
The biggest problem is perhaps the fear of the fashion industry to change. When fashion is ready to support the demands of fashion tech, then we’ll have the important pillars in place to allow the fashion industry to change. Like a scaffold. A dress with sensors requires interaction with the public; no static front row catwalk. “The fashion system is based on what’s hot and what’s not, and it’s always presenting new designs. The next generation of tech fashion designers will work with digital updates and upgrades. Moreover, the conventional fashion industry is highly polluting; the cotton processing alone is extremely harmful. Fashion Tech clothing is certainly not disposable fashion; it lives and changes with the carrier. You would not just discard it.”
An influential fashion institute that could generate a lot of attention to fashion tech is the Metropolitan Museum of Arts. The Met gala on May 2 in New York — sponsored by Apple — has been a major media event and is also the start of the new exhibition Manus X Machina, or “Hands Versus Machines”. There you can see the work of Iris van Herpen and Anouk has also been approached by the museum.
“They asked if they could borrow something from me for the exhibition, but I’d rather make something new in their theme. Never do something twice is my motto. It’s nice if I can do something for them, but I do wonder what it now is really tech fashion. It seems they are mainly concerned with the creative process and not the wearables, e-textiles and other technology-infused ideas. That would be unfortunate, but we’ll see.”
Whether at the gala or not, Anouk will generate a lot of international media attention for fashion tech with CODAME Labs: its participants list includes impressive names in design, fashion and other creative disciplines. The Dutch names she already has told us: Local Androids, Maartje Dijkstra, Aduen Darriba, V2 Labs and Ricardo O’Nascimento. Make sure to put the @CODAME ART+TECH Festival in your calendar this year, stay tuned for more more announcements coming up…
Main Photo: Marije Dijkema // by Marije
Originally published at ideas.bright.nl by Miranda Hoogervoost
