Dress by Maria Orduz, Photo by Kelly Hofer
MakeFashion is happening again! This year it's on April 2, 7:00pm at Telus Spark.
This is the world's largest wearable tech fashion show and you're invited to come.
I'll be making a really colorful, really feature packed men's suit that you'll want to see.
Kimono by Erina Kashihara, photo by Kelly Hofer
Dress by Maria Orduz, Photo by Kelly Hofer
If you don't already know from my social feeds, I have a new creative outlet. Wearable Tech Fashion.
Virtually Vogue. Created by Kelly Hofer, Catherine Hazin, Dianne Gibson and Dan Damron
Working with the group called MakeFashion, With some 42 engineers, seamstresses, programmers, and other makers, we work together to create interactive fashion.
Ever since leaving my hutterite culture, I have been craving a community and culture of people that think collaboratively, work together and most of all, create things with their hands. The MakeFashion Community here in Calgary is that to me.
It's a perfect soup of creative types. We have electrical engineers, fashion designers, programmers, corsetieres, 3D designers, metalsmiths, jewelers, and countless other types of artists contributing what they know to make each other better.
As for myself, I can use my mixed bag of skills that I learned on the colony to create these complex pieces of interactive fashion. I have some electrical engineering background, some 3d design skills from my days of being a waterjet operator, lighting design derived from my photo experiments and lamp making and I may have picked up some sewing skills from watching my mother do it all these years.
Since starting this I've gotten two fashion shows under my belt, for which you can see the resulting pieces here. And the next step is China.
Our incredible sponsors Seeed Studios have asked us to come to Shenzhen, China to create wearable tech fashion at their studios and then show it at Shenzhen Maker Faire one June 20. However we have audacious plans and are bringing more designers, engineers and a videographer and that isn't covered by our sponsor.
This is where you come in.
We have created an Indiegogo Campaign where you can help us reach our goal of $6000 (and you get sweet kickbacks for doing so).
If you'd like to help out follow the link below.
I thank everyone that will help us reach our goal!
Well this appeared in my life rather suddenly.
While attending an EL-wire workshop at Endeavour Arts, Catherine asked me if I'd like to team up and create a dress for Make Fashion, and without much comprehension of what that meant, I agreed.
We spent the next two months researching, prototyping, sewing, building, and programming my design into existence.
Dianne Gibson [Corsetière] created the corset to fit our model Katherine E Mandolidis perfectly. Catherine Hazin [editor of Luxe, by Calgary Bride] created the dress and spent countless hours sewing on feathers. And Lia Golemba hand cut the leaf pattern for the bustle.
I started out by researching on methods for manipulating light and I found fiber optics to be rather beautiful. They mitigated the need for having wires run all over the dress, but instead pumped light through almost invisible tubes.
I had to create 3D enclosures that aligned the fiber optics to the RGB LED's. That was done using a Formlabs 3D printer. It uses two UV lasers to cure resin that slowly rises out of a liquid bath as a solid object. [really cool shit]
The LED's had to be programmed to emanate a pulsating pattern created from the heartbeat of the Bride. A gentle wave of light washed down the dress with every beat of her heart. That pattern was triggered by a Pulse sensor, processed using a Xadow Arduino computer which lit up 90 individual LED's to light up the fiber-optics.
The making of the dress was supported by Make Fashion which were sponsored by OnConference, SparkFun Electronics, WestJet and Seeed Studio.
-It has over a kilometer of fiber optic.
-It takes 10, 3D printed enclosures to hold the LED's and fiber optics.
-There are several thousand feathers hand-sewn to the dress.
-The corset was hand made to fit the exact measurements of our model.
-300+ man-hours were required to conceptualize, prototype, and create this dress.
-one tiny computer is responsible for making everything run
- 3 batteries are required to keep all the lights lit up, and it will run for several hours.
We had many design challenges. Key among them was working with fiber optics. Finding ways to align them and ensure maximum light transmission took days to trial and error. There were simply no guides online that showed how to mate the ends of the fibers with lights without requiring expensive lens assemblies.
Our biggest challenge was time. We had ideas aplenty, but time so little. I wanted to include wireless charging capabilities, make it water resistant, use fiber optics in entirely different ways, use better feathers like those of ostriches, bleached pheasants, and other assortments of white fluffery. I would also love create a housing array for the lights that is beautiful enough to have entirely exposed, in a different location, and beautiful in itself.
We plan to keep on producing similar dresses for brides, made to order. Contact me at kellyhofer@gmail.com if you have questions or would like to discuss how you can get one for yourself and how you'd like your's to be unique.
Video and better photos will come within a month. And more exciting projects and dresses, possibly mens-wear as well, within a year.
Click thumbnails below to view large.
Photo by Jeff McDonald
