As part of her Wearable Design project, Emily Steel, a student at New Zealand’s Victoria University of Wellington’s School of Design, created this technologically modern take on the classic Little Black Dress.
With LED lights, slide film, and an Arduino Lilypad (“a microcontroller board designed for wearables and e-textiles”) as her materials, Steel’s “Little Slide Dress” draws inspiration from classic movies and the ‘magic of film’ to create a wearable piece of technology and art.”
The dress is constructed out of individual slide film images that are backed with LED’s. An Arduino Lilypad connected to a light sensor controls the brightness of the LED’s. The sensor reads the how much ambient light there is and uses this value to determine if the LED’s will be off or on. When there is lots of light the LED’s are off and it looks like a shiny black dress with small hints that something else is going on. Once the sensor determines there is the right amount of light for LED’s to be seen in their full brightness it turns them on. When the dress is on the lights slowly pulse and the images on the dress come alive.