Noted fashion photographer Bill Cunningham once said, “Fashion is the armor to survive the reality of everyday life.” It seems the designer Anouk Wipprecht has taken that quote literally with her Robotic Spider Dress.
Wipprecht created the dress to “ward off threatening social behavior,” by waiving it’s arachnid appendages at anyone who approaches. The designer tells the Creator’s Project,
“The dress provides an extension of the wearers intuition,” Wipprecht told me over email. “It uses proximity sensors as well as a respiration sensor to both define and protect the personal space of the wearer.”
“Approach the wearer too aggressively and the mechanical limbs move up to an attack position,” she continued. “Approach the system under calmer circumstance and the dress just might beckon you to come closer with smooth, suggestive gestures.”
But the projection of creepy vibes doesn’t stop with outsiders, Wipprecht has built-in features that might disturb the dresses owner as well:
“It knows when you are focused or distracted,” said Wipprecht. “It knows when your heartbeat or stress level rises and it records with a camera when your brain activity is highest to provide a sort of mood or attention map of your day.”
“This gives an interesting interplay between co-control and education of your own body and mind,” Wipprecht told me. “If you wear a design that you partly control and it partly extends your agency through its autonomous actions, you start to question where you end and my system begins.”
The teaser video embedded above can give you an idea of what the Spider Dress is like but we’ll have to wait until it debuts at CES in January to see all the features in action.
(Photo: Anouk Wipprecht)
