Chalayan And His Digital Show

It is  well known what British avant-garde fashion designer Hussein Chalayan can do with technology and clothing—we’ll never forget that feeling of fascination when we first saw his S/S 2007 line of animatronic dresses (which zipped, flipped and reconfigured right before our eyes), or the pixelated LED dresses from F/W 2007 and the laser dresses from S/S 2008, the latter two of which were made in collaboration with Creator Moritz Waldemeyer
The designer’s spring 2012 digital fashion show was no exception—he teamed up with The Creators Project to bring life to a collection inspired by, “crafts and the old way of thinking, but on minimal shapes.”The presentation, which took place during the September shows in Paris, featured a wigged-out Chalayan playing butler to his bevy of models who sipped champagne from glasses equipped with concealed cameras. “There’s something quite primal about it,” Chalayan said in a just-released video that chronicles the road to his spring show, where the inside of each model’s mouth was projected onto a runway backdrop.

Chalayan’s inspiration centered around the idea of self-image, so his engineer Robert Davis rigged tiny battery-powered wireless cameras with tilt switches inside champagne flutes, which when tipped 15 degrees, would light up and capture the inside of the models’ mouths. The voyeuristic audience watched the models become the focal point, in a sort of unexpected way, as their lips, teeth and throats were projected onto the canvas behind the runway in real time.

With this collection, made up of mostly monochromatic, structured garments with curved asymmetrical silhouettes, Chalayan blurred the line between art and fashion, giving us a runway presentation that could have been confused with performance art. “Technology is really the only thing through which you can do new things, everything has already been done,” as Chalayan carefully explained. 

http://thecreatorsproject.com