Fashion designer Hussein Chalayan collaborated with technology giant Intel for his Spring/Summer 2017 runway show at Paris Fashion Week. “I have been working with wearable technology for many years. Throughout this time, it has been very important for me to work on ideas that will be as close as possible to a real product while challenging myself at the same time. The team at Intel’s years of experience, out of the box mentality, commitment to innovation and level of perfection has made this project one of the most valuable and exciting collaborations for me in recent years,” Chalayan said.
Chalayan’s SS17 collection and runway show at Paris Fashion Week featured connected, wearable accessories powered by Intel technology, including never-before-seen glasses and belts.
Powered by the Intel CurieTM module, a tiny, low- power hardware product, the glasses gather biometric data from the wearer, using sensors that monitor brainwave, heart rate and breathing data to infer stress in real time.
During the presentation the wearer’s biometric data was then sent to the model’s belt using Bluetooth, which using the Intel Compute Stick, a tiny computing device, captured the data from the glasses and translated the information into visualizations that interpret the wearer’s stress level. These visualizations are projected by the belt onto a wall as the models move down the runway.
The projected visualizations then remind the wearer to try and reduce stress levels where needed, with the imagery changing in real-time to correspondence with the body’s response.
Intel and Chalayan showed five studies of the unique glasses and belts, which following Paris Fashion Week will be on display at the Design Museum’s “Fear and Love: Reactions to a Complex World” exhibition in London starting in November.