In 2014, Jony Ive, then Apple’s design director, went to Paris Fashion Week with his big new product, the Apple Watch, to convince fashion lovers that wearables were the future of fashion. . That turned out not to be exactly true (at least style-wise), but it hasn’t stopped two former Apple designers, Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, from returning nine years later to try again.
This time, the product is the ai Pin, a standalone smart assistant that attaches to clothing using a magnet and can therefore be worn virtually wherever you want, which made its runway debut on jackets and pockets of men. Coperni pants. The brand’s founders and designers, Sébastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillant, became known during fashion week for their technology-based tricks: spray painting fabric on Bella Hadid to make a dress, setting robot dogs loose on the track.
Compared to those antics, the pin seemed relatively subtle, especially since the models didn’t actually interact with it, making it impossible to judge except by its aesthetics. What could be summed up as “chic employee ID card” (the kind employees never want to use), albeit without a photo. Or, said one observer, “an Apple watch on your lapel.” Another thought it looked like a glucose monitor for diabetics.
In any case, the pin did not add any type of design element to the clothing; More interesting were Transparent’s flat speakers, built into leather jackets like boobs, a fun, if juvenile, visual gag that created a theme that included metal triangles, zipper-edged ruffles, and sportswear elements.
They could learn something from Anrealage’s Kunihiko Morinaga, who doesn’t just slap technology on clothes, he incorporates it (that’s a big difference). He recently registered what he calls his Anvisual photochromic technology, in which transparent PVC (polyvinyl chloride) garments are transformed by ultraviolet light into multicolored suits, like a rainbow exposed in real time. Or a crochet patchwork shirt and cape, a stained glass apron dress: piecework of the future.
Of course, it’s not clear how anyone can carry their own lighting effects with them, but Morinaga’s use of new technology forces a rethinking of old ways and assumptions (What is color? How do we perceive it?) which is useful in the best way. Just as Junya Watanabe’s exploration of three-dimensional geometry through prismatic and tubular forms for his eponymous brand was literally transformative.
Their work (you couldn’t really call it clothing) looked like a toy railroad or a pile of blocks had been thrown into the air, and the pieces had been dropped into a pile of shapes sewn together in neoprene, denim, leather. and tweed.
Playing angles has never been so fun. Even if all of that wasn’t exactly, well, wearable.
