Electric Corset:an approach to wearables innovation

One criticism of electronic textiles and wearable technology isthat instead of being integrated into the modern wardrobe, the electronicgarment is perceived as the ‘other’, as an ‘unusual’ item within thewardrobe. Contemporary fashion is a field of play in which individualsconstantly manage personal expressions of social belonging andtransgression, at the same time as it closes down the potential for newforms as a result of increasingly fast fashion supply chains. The ElectricCorset project proposes that the uptake of wearables is compromisedwhen development is based on modern categories of dress/dressing, andproposes that designers look to obsolete and ‘in-between’ items of dressto rethink the foundations of wearables development. In collaborationwith Nottingham Museums and Galleries Costume and Textiles Collection,we have reproduced a small selection of such items, and recast them as‘sacrificial’ toiles to provide a non-precious basis for embodiedexperimentation. The paper describes some of the barriers to innovationin wearable technologies, and frames our approach through the twinconcepts of deconstruction and reconstruction in fashion theory. Itreports on our experiences of embodied responses to the toiles withinthe making process, and presents early findings from a pilot study usingimprovisation