Interfacing with Anouk Wipprecht
The Dutch fashion tech designer [Anouk Wipprecht](/artists/anouk-wipprecht) became world famous with her bizarre robot dresses. The main themes in her work are connections between people and between people and technology. Interfacing she calls it. We talk to Anouk about the slow evolution of [fashion technology](/orgs/codame/events/workshop-fashion-technology). Originally published at ideas.bright.nl by Miranda Hoogervoost My first encounter with Anouk last summer in Berlin at the event Fashion Tech . It’s still difficult to catch her; her phone number is unreachable. Later when we were in a low-noise plastic talking bubble she admitted she threw away her phone. “It is an experiment because I am sometimes tired. When I open my phone and see two hundred unread emails I get a heart attack! We have the technology to make our lives easier, but it causes stress because it is not consistent with how we feel. It would be great if your phone knows that you are too busy for an interview and saves the incoming call for a later time. “ Hep Svedja Wipprecht and her [Spider Dress](/artists/spider-dress) Anouk Wipprecht studied fashion and interaction design and has been experimenting with technology because they wanted to give her clothes more features than warmth and comfort. “My idea of fashion has always been that clothes should be able to respond to our needs and moods. Spider Dress for example, is about fear and social issues. When people come into your personal space than the dress reacts to protect you. I find it very interesting to design from those basic human emotions.” The Spider Dress was developed in cooperation with the Austrian hacker Daniel Schatzmayr and the first version appeared in 2012. During the Consumer Electronics Show early last year launched Anouk version 2.0. The dress has spider legs — ok, there are six instead of eight, but that’s creative freedom — and is based on a proximity principle by Edward T. Hall. The dress has 12 states or behavior: from friendly and encouraging to avoiding and aggressive. All parts are 3D printed and she uses chips from Intel, a partner she’s worked closely with for years. Her 2012 [Smoke Dress](/artists/smoke-dress) also responds to changes in personal space. Anouk made the dress with Aduen Darriba , with whom she studied. Sensors trigger a mechanism that can create a smokescreen so that the wearer can “hide”. The inspiration for this dress came from how the squid protects itself. In late February, Anouk was a guest at the two-day design event FITC Amsterdam. On the first day, we met her informally in the back of the room at English illustrator Mr. Bingo’s presentation. We talked about the clash between College Tour and Daan Roosegaarde and the head-above-the-ground-climate in the Netherlands. She responded diplomatically but crisply: “Here there’s a lot of stiffness you might say. If you do something good, you can just be taken down again. This really played into in my decision to go to the US — I left the Netherlands in 2009. [In America] there are interesting opportunities for me, of course. There’s not very much room for challenging projects in the Netherlands, and I think America is really forward-thinking. That’s why tomorrow I’ll announce big news.”