Newest fashion: wear a dress that changes itself on you while you wear it

Techno Fashion -- by AMANDA FORTINI/NY Times

In his most recent collection, shown in Paris in October, Hussein Chalayan, the fashion world’s mad scientist, featured a parade of mechanized dresses. These techno frocks, which zip, unfurl, expand, contract and generally shape-shift until they transfigure themselves into entirely new creations, signal an ambitious new technical direction for Chalayan — and, arguably, for the field of fashion itself. These pieces are neither art installations nor digital renderings but actual wearable dresses brought to life by their own internal mechanics.

In the show, each of five dresses morphed through the iconic styles of three decades and in this way encapsulated slightly more than a century of fashion history. The models stood soldier-straight and comically expressionless, their arms held rigidly at their sides in anticipation, while the technological wizardry played out on their bodies. The wedding-cake tiers of a 1920s column dress folded into one another to form a basic ’40s shift with a self-zipping neckline. The slats of a ’40s A-line skirt opened outward, umbrella-style, to become the full, New Look silhouette of the ’50s; the skirt then released and rose to mod mini-dress proportions while decorative metal plates dropped from hidden pockets in the bodice. As a final grand gesture, a gauzy sheath retracted into a model’s wide-brimmed hat, leaving her naked. Remarkably, the transformations were as fluid and elegant as the dresses. Movements that could have been convulsive or cartoonish seemed organic, calling to mind hypnotic time-lapse films of flowers blooming.

Rob Edkins, director of 2D: 3D, the London-based design company that collaborated with Chalayan, explains that the metamorphoses are enacted through a series of tiny pulleys (“half the size of a pen”) that initiate a specific action — say, pulling up a hemline. Each dress but one contains a corset embedded with cables connecting to the pulleys and a “bum pad” housing a battery pack and controlling microprocessor. Edkins insists the corsets and fanny packs are “pert little numbers” that are lightweight and easy to wear. Which could mean that animatronic fashion may someday be a practical option.