Wearing air and light: experimental fashion, New York style
Fashion designer Diana Eng is bringing her left field ideas to Auckland this week, hosting a series of “Geek Fashion” workshops and exhibiting her own works at ST PAUL St Gallery. Eng, who began her fashion career as a contestant on Project Runway in 2005, is teaching the fashion-minded how to make inflatable clothing, garments that light up, and “deployable” shirts that mimic origami.
The exhibition that showcases Eng’s “out of the box” creations is running from 25 January to 5 February at ST PAUL St Gallery One. This visual feast includes Eng’s stunning inflatable dress, a “jack frost” scarf incorporating a snowflake that grows when the temperature drops, and garments that light up in reaction to movement and sound. Images of these and other exhibits can be viewed on the CoLab website listed below.
On Project Runway, Eng became notorious for her efforts to combine fashion and science. Since then she has worked for Victoria's Secret research and development, helped to establish the hacker collective NYC Resistor, authored a book on geek fashion and attracted a lot of attention for her beautiful and unusual creations, even making it to the cover of ID Magazine.
Striving to integrate fashion and technology, she hopes to make the fashion-minded more interested in the research process and the scientifically-minded more interested in fashion as a form of self-expression.
Eng’s visit is part of the January 2011 Summer Workshop Series on creative technologies run by AUT’s interdisciplinary creative technology centre, CoLab. Also on offer are sessions on becoming online savvy, the creation of interactive creatures and environments, virtual reality and motion capture.
Links
More on Diana Eng's exhibition
More on Diana Eng: www.fashionnerd.com