Fashion: Emotional Skin
Deirdre Crowley
06 August 2002
The expression ‘wearing your heart on your sleeve’ may soon become a fact of life.
‘Fashion’, writes JG Ballard, ‘is a recognition that nature has endowed us with one skin too few, and that a fully sentient being should wear its nervous system externally.’ The jewellery of Sompit Moi Fusakul takes Ballard’s insight at its face value.
Moi, a PhD student in Goldsmithing, Silversmithing, Metalwork and Jewellery at the Royal College of Art, London, has over the last four years developed prototype jewellery that does not merely ‘exist beautifully’ on the body. It also ‘interacts dynamically’ with the wearer by indicating emotional changes in the wearer’s mind.
In collaboration with leading Cybernetics expert Professor Kevin Warwick of Reading University, Moi has produced three ‘interactive ornaments’, which she describes as fashion pieces created with the aid of technology.
‘In the first year’, Moi says, ‘I researched the technology available and I was shaping a concept. I wanted to make jewellery that interacted with human emotions. I analysed how humans could possibly express themselves in a more effective and beautiful way. I was inspired by the idea of transformation in nature because in nature everything interacts with something else. This was my starting point. If you look at architecture or fashion, this involves interaction with the environment also’.
Vein 2 is a fibre optic necklace which changes colour as the wearer’s heartbeat increases to reflect their mood – blue indicates calm and red excitement. In order for it to work, the wearer has a jogger’s heart-rate monitor strapped to the chest. This sends a radio signal to a receiver and circuit board in the jewellery. A custom-made microchip counts the heartbeats and has been pre-programmed to command certain LEDs to light up in sequence.
Anemone is a shoulder piece, which wraps around the body. Light pulsates from flowers plated in Thai rose gold in rhythm with the beating heart. The third design, Aliform, meaning ‘a structure with wings’, consists of nine elliptical shapes cut from iridescent film. In response to five heartbeats, the elliptical shapes swell in sequence as instructed by the microchip embedded in the piece.
For Aliform, Moi used a ‘shape memory alloy’, a material that can remember shape once it has been trained by the microchip. British designer Hussein Chalayan’s Aeroplane Dress # 1, designed in 1998, uses the same shape memory alloy found in Aliform.
‘As the designer, I do not have extensive knowledge of electronics. I cannot do the programming myself’, explains Moi. ‘The microchip has to be designed to perform a certain function. Professor Kevin Warwick’s assistant Iain Goodhew programmed the chips for me for each piece. Kevin’s department designed the controls of the jewellery. I first became interested in the technology I use when I was in the States. I looked at a lot of information from the MIT lab but their research is for practical not aesthetic reasons’.
Now aged 30, Moi will continue to develop her concepts when she takes a teaching post in Thailand after graduating from the Royal College of Art in September 2002. Moi would like to see her conceptually complete, aesthetically beautiful, couture-like pieces worn in a fashion context, while functioning as an aid to social relations. In the future, the ‘interactive ornaments’ could, she hopes, become a poetic means of human communication.
