Meet Wearable Tech Designers Lighting Up the Fashion Scene (Literally)

Chromat and CuteCircuit are two fashion designers with a twist. They both create clothes with technology, at the heart of their designs.

For Chromat, innovative design is used to empower women. Alongside their advanced swim and athleisure ranges they also experiment with garments in their lab. Their SS17 lab project saw the brand collaborate with interdisciplinary artists Pussykrew, dancer Mela Murder, 3D body-modelling team Body Labs and 3D printers Formlabs to create a vision of a utopian universe that combined human, nature, and machine using CGI, body scanning and 3D rendering.

Previous projects have included their Adrenaline Dress – designed to mirror the human fight or flight mode – and the Laser Chakra dress, bra and harness. The latter was shown at NYFW in 2015, where the lasers were almost pulled from the catwalk for fear of blinding the audience!

Though undeniably sensational to look at, the Laser Dress is more complex than it might seem. The lasers are positioned at seven chakra points on the body, representing energy vortexes – the design imagines a world in which humans are bionic, and garments function as enhancements of the human form.

Cutecircuit is another brand revolutionising the wearable tech game, creating items that are truly wearable, as well as innovative. ‘While the whole world has become digital, fashion has lagged behind,’ they say, and are on a mission to change this. Highlights include their mirror handbag, an interactive accessory that can display tweets and messages controlled remotely via an app – the ultimate in glitzy accessories.

They’ve also taken this technology into clothes, with a Twitter dress that changes colour depending on the volume of hashtags being used. Their Galaxy Dress, embroidered with 24,000 full colour pixels, is the largest wearable tech garment in the world. With fans such as Katy Perry, the future looks unbelievably bright for these wearable tech stars.