Moritz Waldemeyer
Widely recognised as one of the most innovative and exciting designers of his generation Waldemeyer, aged 34, was born in East Germany. He moved to London thirteen years ago where he trained as an engineer at Kings College and completed his Masters degree in 2001. Since then, he has collaborated with many of the world’s top architects and fashion designers including Ron Arad, Zaha Hadid and Hussein Chalayan. His work is a fusion of technology, art, fashion and design.
Airborne
The Video dresses are created by 15000 LEDs embedded beneath the fabric. One dress displays hazy silhouettes of sharks in the sea whilst the other shows a time-lapse sequence of a rose blooming then retracting. The effect is mesmerizing in its ambiguity: the loose white fabric covering the LEDS blurs and distorts the images so that they seem to pulsate in and out of existence.
Twice named “British Designer of the Year”, Hussein Chalayan is one of the most innovative, experimental and conceptual fashion designers of the present. By teaming up with engineering mastermind, Moritz Waldemeyer, he was able to turn even his most outlandish concepts into a reality.
The design brief was to create two video dresses that would show video sequences across the entire surface of the dress. There were just 4 weeks from the go ahead to the show, demanding a very pragmatic approach: no exotic components or materials, just off the shelf components and standard manufacturing techniques.
Given the inherent simplicity of the design, maybe one day in the not too distant future, we’ll all be wearing our favorite videos on our clothes!
The video dresses are now on display at the 10 Corso Como gallery in Milan, along with the mechanical dresses from Paris Fashion Week.
One Hundred and One
Where most designers may take one era as inspiration for a collection, Chalayan subsumes them all. In fact, the metamorphosis of fashion over the last century was the subject of his Spring / Summer collection 2007 consisting of 6 pieces that magically evolve through two decades from 1900 to 2007. Despite the dramatic time span covered in a just a few minutes, the transformation of each piece is incredibly subtle. They twitch, ravel or unravel, zip up or split open with fluid movements, enhancing the sensation that one is watching magic happen. Each piece seems alive, gently unfolding like the petals of a flower: a high necked Victorian gown reconfigures itself of its own accord, the top splitting open and the hemline retreating until, as if by miracle, she is left wearing a crystal embellished flapper dress.
Twice named “British Designer of the Year”, Hussein Chalayan is an internationally regarded fashion designer renowned for his architectural tailoring and progressive use of technology. His spring 2007 collection took his integration of new technology to an entirely new level, made possible by Waldemeyer’s engineering genius.
The different effects in the show were achieved through six months of experimenting with servo-driven motors, pulleys and wires that are fed through hollow tubes sewn into the dresses. The real challenge lay in keeping the integrated technology lightweight yet strong enough to manoeuvre different fabrics and materials.
We get a great sense of Chalayan’s playful irony at the end of the show where a sheer white dress winds itself into a hat, leaving the model completely nude.
The mechanical dresses are now on display at the 10 Corso Como gallery in Milan, along with the video dresses from the Milan Design Fair.
U2 Laser Stage Suit
U2’s 360 tour opened with a spectacular show at Barcelona's Camp Nou Stadium, using the Waldemeyer-designed jacket in the encore for a truly memorable grand finale. The jacket offsets the tradition of the spotlight, which alienates the performer from his crowd, as Bono is able to project his own light onto thousands. It provides an interactive and personal element to the show whereby individual members of the audience are literally connected to Bono for an instant through a single laser beam. This creates an electrifying sense of the performer reaching out to his audience audibly, visually and spiritually.
Readings
Furthering his technological trend, Chalayan unveiled the collection entitlled Readings, on screen, eshewing the conventional runway. The dresses themselves are highly structured, creating bold silhouettes from which the laser beams radiate. They are embellished with Swarovski crystals that either deflect the lasers, or take in their light, depending on the angle of the laser. The effect is hauntingly beautiful; where lasers shine directly into Swarovski crystals, they resemble glowing embers, yet where they are deflected the laser beams project into the surrounding space, evoking phantasmagorical new-age sun gods.
Twice named “British Designer of the Year”, Hussein Chalayan is an internationally regarded fashion designer renowned for his architectural tailoring and progressive use of new technology. His spring 2008 collection Readings was inspired by themes of ancient sun worship and the contemporary phenomenon of celebrity, illustrated by pieces that literally emanate light. The extending laser beams represent the relationship between audience and icon. Waldemeyer’s engineering genius made this challenging vision possible.
Hundreds of lasers were integrated into each piece, attached by custom-designed, servo-driven brass hinges. This allows the lasers to move, transforming the dresses from static objects to living, ephemeral forms that constantly change, interacting with the space around them. The result is one of the most dynamic examples of a new fusion, where fashion and design meet, each enhancing the other.
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