LED clothing has been around for a while now. Glow fur coats, LED tops, bra – we have seen it all. Though I am not sure as to who would love to wear them in public except for the wannabe’s, teenagers or those suffering from attention deficit disorder, there are designers like this London-based duo from CuteCircuit, who earlier won the Best Inventions of 2006 by Time Magazine for their Hug Shirt, and has now designed a dress embroidered with 24,000 full color LEDs to make sure this hi-tech fashion trend equally gets noticed among the elite. The Galaxy Dress is claimed to be the largest wearable display in the world. Made from silk, this glowing gown embeds full-color LEDs, is flat like paper and measures only 2 by 2 mm to maintain the comfortable feel of the dress. “The circuits are extra-thin, flexible and hand embroidered on a layer of silk in a way that gives it stretch so the LED fabric can move like normal fabric with lightness and fluidity,” say designers Francesca Rosella and Ryan Genz.
The dress is designed to run on many tiny iPod batteries hiding in the crinoline, says Rosella. And the charge is enough to keep the wearer glowing for a period of 30 minutes to an hour. The dress also adorns more than 4000 hand-applied Swarovski crystals to give it a glowing sheen even when the charge runs out. The Galaxy Dress will be the center piece of an exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, which means it has not been displayed on the ramp till now, but with that whimsical design it truly belongs to the ramp.
"That's DOPE"
