Mechanical couture

Fri, 15 Oct 2010 | By Laura Snoad

As Future Beauty, a celebration of 30 years of Japanese fashion, takes over the Barbican from today, the Design Museum Holon in Israel has taken classic Japanese label Issey Miyake in quite a different direction.

In its new exhibition, Mechanical Couture, the museum exhibits an unlikely collaboration between Issey Miyake creative director Dai Fujiwara and our own James Dyson. A-POC, or A Piece of Cloth, is an industrial knitting machine, which can be programmed by a computer to make various shapes and patterns, allowing for a hybrid between mass production and customisation. The results have been hung on cute robot models, made from scraps of Dyson vacuum cleaners.

The exhibition aims to show how couture, which is traditionally known for its painstaking hand craft, is developing to embrace groundbreaking technology. Even if handsewing goes out of fashion, I don’t think catwalk models will have anything to worry about if these clunky kooks are to be their replacement.

Tweet

Have your say

Please do not complete the following form field for security reasons.

Name

E-mail

Comment

Post as

Anonymously

Display name

I have read and agree to the terms and conditions