Kingdom of Sport
Series Kingdom of Sport connects the reference to the traditional renaissance portraits and modern sport culture. It was inspired by the classic portrait painting and the greek mythology, especially visible in the short film. Each model demonstrates their constructed ‘royal’ character with one type of sport specialisation. Sport equipment is cleverly integrated into the styling, fashion accessories and set design.

MIT Media Lab, Stanford University
This work explores a dynamic future where the accessories we wear are no longer static, but are instead mobile, living objects on the body. Engineered with the functionality of 18 robotics, this “living” jewelry roams on unmodified clothing, changing location and reconfiguring appearance according to social context and enabling multitude presentations of self. With the addition of sensor devices, they transition into active devices which can react to environmental conditions. They can also be paired with existing mobile devices to become personalized on-body assistants to help complete tasks. Attached to garments, they generate shape-changing clothing and kinetic pattern designs–creating a new, dynamic fashion.
It is our vision that in the future, these robots will be miniaturized to the extent that they can be seamlessly integrated into existing practices of body ornamentation. With the addition of kinetic capabilities, traditionally static jewelry and accessories will start displaying life-like qualities, learning, shifting, and reconfiguring to the needs and preferences of the wearer, also assisting in fluid presentation of self. We envision a new class of future wearables that possess hybrid qualities of the living and the crafted, creating a new on-body ecology for human-wearable symbiosis.

The Unseen Collection
Experimental fashion studio The Unseen has produced a range of accessories that alter in response to environmental changes using inks developed from its colour-shifting wearable sculptures. Bowker has previously embedded her specially developed ink into feathered, leather and gemstone-encrusted headdresses. The Unseen also presented a sculptural jacket that changes colour depending on the wearer’s mood.

フセイン·チャラヤン
ЧАЛАЯН
후세인 샬 라얀
Intel connected accessories
Designer Hussein Chalayan partnered with Intel to bring wearable tech to his spring/summer 2017 fashion week show. Five models walked the runway alongside visual projections that showed their stress levels on the walls. All of it was made possible by vital information sent through the wearable tech they sported on the runway.

Inlaid Skin
Studio Andreea Mandrescu Ltd. is a design company specialising in textile, material and surface design with various applications. The textile collections are an exploration of different materials that include faux fur, rubbers, leather and veneers on a variety of base fabrics. The fabrics are versatile, made to fit pattern garments for fashion design to being wrapped around the body as accessories.

[…]Her first collection reflects her inspirational playground of sculpturing leather by moulding it to the body, twisting buckles, leather straps creating volume, a fabric made out of medical bandages and all over ruffled silk. This fashion statement comes along with a high level of quality and handcraft. A lot of the pieces are fully studded by hand and profoundly processed. The vegetably tanned leather is hand painted and one dress consists out of more than 100 meters auf silk strips. By adding accessories such as leather headpieces and armcuffs, she balances a striking inspiration to a high level of contemporary fashion.

Fiber Optic Dress
At the intersection of fashion and digital innovation comes wearable tech. Giving analog clothing and accessories a futuristic upgrade, it promises to completely redefine their form and function. One of the most stunning examples of the tech-chic trend is a headline-making dress dubbed the “jellyfish.” Created by designer Richard Nicoll, it appeared to float down the runway at London Fashion Week exuding the same phosphorescent glow of the eerily gorgeous sea creatures that inspired it. (Except his dress used strings of fiber optics—no stinging tentacles here!)

Ephemeral and ethereal

Ephemeral and ethereal, the work of artist Rein Vollenga is particularly notable in his ‘wearable sculpture’. Vollenga’s unique and visceral work is darkly seductive, and his creations have been embraced by many of fashions forward thinkers as they continue to venture into darker, more fetishistic territory that celebrates a deeper, animalistic sexuality and revels in individuality and fragmented identity. Vollenga is a native of Berlin, reflected in the Teutonic avant garde nature that pervades his work, as is a dangerous, slightly sinister and hedonistic sense that harks back to pre-war Berlin’s days of decadence and ‘voluptuous panic’; his creations conjure all the allure of the decadence of a futuristic Ball Masque. Renowned for his wearable art, which takes form in sculptural headwear and accessories, the artist is now gaining the attention and patronage of the fashion industries elite; a more severe and gothic, 21st Century Dali if you will. Chasseur sat down with Rein himself to discuss his work; its origins and nature, and what drives the man behind the masks.