Today we’re talking about technological innovation and fashion, a pairing that we always keep an eye out for here at So Catchy!. And the occasion is the recent SXSW festival in Austin, Texas which finished up last weekend. This year’s edition found room for fashion in the form of The New School + #SXSW: Parsons Presents Wearable Tech for Social Good event that took place at TheCurrent Mansion. Designers, artists, artisans and other creative types presented their innovative designs uniting fashion with the latest in technology.
Among the artists present was Yuchen Zhang, a prolific designer who has collaborated with clients as big as MIT, Zac Posen and Loomia, among others, working in collaboration with Jingwen Zhu and Hellyn Teng. The goal of their designs was to integrate tech in different fashion products that would be functional. The result was Project Ceres, a proposal that will first leave you with your mouth open, then make you think, reflect, stop and before finally allowing yourself to be carried away by the infinite possibilities that tech brings to the fashion world.
The design connects to NASA’s asteroid database, Asteroir Neo-Ws RESTful API, which collects and catalogues asteroids that orbit or pass close to the earth in real time. This database has grown considerably over the last decade and the data it contains was used by Yuchen to make his clothes shine or vibrate in real time whenever an asteroid passes by the planet.
Yuchen, Zhu and Teng wanted to connect wearers with the celestial bodies. According to Yuchen, Ceres is an exploration of the expansion of our abilities as humans, elevating our sense of tact and our relations ship to the cosmos, diversifying the human experience within the macro, and micro cosmos.
We’ll be following these amazing artists’ work more closely from now on and you should, too. She’s currently looking for interns!
Translation and layout by Michael Padilla
