Disco Dress

Sewing | Arduino Programing | Arduino Integration | Fashion Design

Design

This dress is perfect for a whimsical, future forward look. Traditional fashion concepts and LED technology it is brining us tomorrow’s trends today.

I designed this dress to follow a whimsy fairy aesthetic with the purple chiffon overlay and long off-shoulder sleeves. The navy base fabric gives a down-to-earth contrast that adds a tension between the two aesthetics and provides a dark background for the lights to shine. The patterning was done by hand and the sewing was done with a Singer electric machine.

Process

The original design of this dress included an Arduino Lillypad and accelerometer to control the fiber optic lights in the skirt. After I patterned and sewed the garment I worked to integrate the light components. The Lillypad programing took XYZ movement from the accelerometer and translated it into the RGB concentration output from the tricolor LED lights. the Lillypad, accelerometer, and LEDs were connected with conductive thread sewn around the waistline of the dress.

While the Arduino circuit did function before it was sewn into the dress, when it did get attached I discovered many difficulties. The conductive thread that I was using was too resistive to allow enough power to reach the LEDs and the weight of the battery in the pocket of the dress pulled the wires out of their connection points.

I worked to redesign the circuit with wires to replace the conductive thread and tried a different type of thread. However, the circuit was unreliable and occasionally heated to uncomfortable temperatures for the user during testing.

These issues lead to the decision to replace the fiber optics and ‘Smart’ circuit with pre-made LED light strips. The LED strips allowed for remote control from the user, rechargeable batteries, user set lighting patterns, and consistent comfortable use. With the LED strips the dress can be reproduced in a full size line and scaled production.