Electric Corset: an approach to wearables innovation

One criticism of electronic textiles and wearable technology is
that instead of being integrated into the modern wardrobe, the electronic
garment is perceived as the ‘other’, as an ‘unusual’ item within the
wardrobe. Contemporary fashion is a field of play in which individuals
constantly manage personal expressions of social belonging and
transgression, at the same time as it closes down the potential for new
forms as a result of increasingly fast fashion supply chains. The Electric
Corset project proposes that the uptake of wearables is compromised
when development is based on modern categories of dress/dressing, and
proposes that designers look to obsolete and ‘in-between’ items of dress
to rethink the foundations of wearables development. In collaboration
with 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 embodied
experimentation. The paper describes some of the barriers to innovation
in wearable technologies, and frames our approach through the twin
concepts of deconstruction and reconstruction in fashion theory. It
reports on our experiences of embodied responses to the toiles within
the making process, and presents early findings from a pilot study using
improvisation.