Power couture: The new machinery of fashion

Holon, Israel – Countering the notion that luxury goods are exclusively the products of painstaking handcrafts, a new exhibition explores how machines and mechanisation are reinterpreting the rarefied world of haute couture. Mechanical Couture, which opens this week at Design Museum Holon, features interactive, responsive garments by Beijing-born, Montreal-based designer Ying Gao. The show also includes programmable, customisable fabrics by Issey Miyake creative director Dai Fujiwara in collaboration with vacuum cleaner brand Dyson, rapid prototype shoes by Dutch designer Marloes ten Bhömer, and sonic fabric – audio tape woven into a new textile – by US designer Alyce Santoro.

‘These designers are as inspired by machines as concepts, turning to the machine as collaborator in the design process,’ say Ginger Gregg Duggan and Judith Hoos Fox, the Curatorsquared founders who organised the exhibition.

Turning machine-enabled mass production on its head, Mechanical Couture cuts a new pattern for luxury fashion.

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