The 5,200 visitors at the Hynes Veterans Memorial Convention Center in Boston last week were hardly slaves to fashion. They're mostly scientists and engineers, in town for the annual fall meeting of the Materials Research Society.
But for 20 minutes last week afternoon, the only materials that interested them were made into tight dresses, short skirts, and abbreviated tank tops, shown off by attractive models who know far more about chemistry than camisoles. It was a fashion show for geeks, a display of clothing made from exotic new fabrics.
The models were male and female students from Carnegie Mellon University, Boston University, Rochester Institute of Technology, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, most of them engineering or materials science majors.
And their outfits were nearly as smart as they are. One dress featured a logo at the hip that changes color with the wearer's body heat. A short skirt used a shape-shifting fabric that, with a few tugs, transformed it into a floor-length dress. Tank tops were woven with optical fibers that enable them to glow in the dark.
Active fabrics
"Smart fabrics" is the catch-all phrase to describe the growing area where the textile, fashion, and scientific industries converge to produce either more durable or more multifaceted materials. From sewn-in electronic gadgets to fungus-resistant materials, the fabrics have found broad new applications in sports, military, medical, and public safety fields, among others.
"There's this huge demand for active fabrics. There's a gold rush coming," said Alex Pentland, who directs the human dynamics research group at MIT and attended Tuesday's fashion show. He said clothing makers are hungry for new fabrics that will let them deliver attractive new products to consumers.
Though a spectator Tuesday, Pentland modeled his own high-tech design: a jacket with an electronic light display woven into the back, and a sleeve-mounted keyboard to control it. The display showed a message promoting "wearable" computers, and had the effect of transforming Pentland into a walking electronic billboard.
Skin
Trying to evoke the atmosphere of the more famous runways of Milan and Manhattan, the organizers of the show added flickering spotlights and thumping rock music to accompany the collegiate models who took a cue from leggy professionals and showed a bit of skin here and there.
Not all the clothing on display was designed to dazzle the eyes. Some items were purely practical. A firefighters' outfit used special nonskid pads on knees and shoulders -- to make it easier to kneel in wet environments or carry injured people over the shoulders without slipping.
A Spanish company, Avantex, displayed an emergency poncho made of aluminized heat-resistant fabric that a firefighter can drape over a victim in seconds, to provide protection during a rescue. A German-made fabric called Padycare uses fibers embedded with silver to fend off skin infections.
Tank tops
And while there doesn't appear to be much practical value in glowing tank tops, they nonetheless got a warm reception from several hundred spectators at last week's show.
Developed by German company ITP, the tops were made of a fabric embedded with optical fibers. A battery powered light source at the back of the shirt shines a beam of light; the fibers distribute the glow throughout the fabric.
RSS