London Fashion Week 2014 had already started on Valentine's Day. Guess what, designers Fyodor Podgorny and Golan Frydman has brought something unusual to this year's show - a Lumia skirt was given its catwalk debut.
Nokia has partnered with the designer duo, who are popularly known as Fyodor Golan, for London Fashion Week, to create the world's first interactive skirt made up of 80 of Nokia Lumia 1520 and 1020 smartphones. The innovative skirt, created by Kin, by uses static pictures captured by the phone, or live feeds on the 80 screens that adorn it - allowing it to change around the wearer and their day.
Images on the screens change colour as the skirt moves, creating a shimmer effect simulating the realistic tactile character of actual fabric. This affect is achieved through a purpose built app that utilises global positioning, to ensure the shimmer happens in line with the models movement. It is believed that this is the first time a skirt of this kind has been created.
Nokia creates world's first interactive Lumia skirt with help of 3D printing
"This is exciting new territory that pushes the boundaries of what is possible in fashion, designing and programming," Matt Wade, who was part of the team at Kin, said.
To build the skirt, Kin worked interactively with a combination of software such as Python and C#. Initial drawings were sketched along side Fyodor Golan. The sketches were then developed using engineering tools and rapid prototyping tools such as 3D printing and laser cutting to evolve the initial design. To get all the phones on the skirt, the team created special custom clips using 3D printing.
Of their new collection and working with Nokia, Fyodor said: "This A/W 14 season we toyed with tradition against technology. We believe that you can create almost anything that isn't influenced by gravity. The colour changes as the skirt moves and the idea of making the screens react to the word around it via photographs and video is something that we do not think has been done before."