Attention Whore Concept

Attention Whore Concept

For this assignment I wanted to create a piece of wearable technology that reflects present youth culture and the obsession of drawing attention to one's self. While the tactics used to call attention have changed over many generations, using sex or visual sexual stimulation have remained a constant. While it has always been a part of our culture, it seems that flaunting one's sexuality, as well as one's body, has become a wide-spread fashion trend.

I recently visited a club and took the chance to watch people and look at what they were wearing. Most everyone in the club was at the least well groomed (or it seems that they at least started that way), and I would say that over half were wearing clothes that were revealing or sexually inspired.

Witnessing a growth of these trends throughout such a small period of time made me wonder what the next step in fashion would be for our sex-hungry generation. While our generation may be obsessed with sex and fame, our generation is also obsessed with new technologies.

Our generation, commonly referred to as the Me Generation, is filled with hungry consumers with a strong desire to have every aspect of their lives personalized to reflect their individual style. Whether our style is reflected through the clothes we wear or the songs that we have on our iPods, we are making a statement about who we are in relation to those around us.

Using the trends of our generation, I wanted to create a piece of wearable technology that not only was personalized to the wearer, but a garment that reflected our overwhelming desire for attention. In a time where each successive piece of clothing further stretches the boundaries of acceptability, I wanted to continue on with this trend and take it to the extreme.

Creating an evening dress that was covered in two layers of organza (a shiny semi-transparent material), I installed LED displays on the breasts that act as a music visualizer. Each display (which was made to reference a nipple) consisted of eight blue LEDs arranged in a circle with their lights shining towards a center point.

The two layers of organza were used as a diffuser for the light that gets emitted, creating a soft display that moves and flows with the garment. I chose the color blue because it is a color that I commonly associate with youth. I specifically stayed away from red as I felt that the lights on the chest would be more than sufficient attention grabbers and that using a color such as red would be more of a distraction than an enhancement.

Conductive threading was used to connect the LEDs to the Arduino, which were all able to be hooked up to the same PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) slot. The setup also includes a headphone splitter wherein one of the jacks is used for a wire that inputs the electrical signal from the music device into the Arduino.

While the current design only allows with audio from a computer, the goal is to get the system to work with a MP3 player or any other portable music device.

The dress is designed to allow the wearer to listen to their favorite music and have their breasts display their individual music style.

The organza as well the dress design allow for maximum fabric movability; because of this, the light display not only mimics the music that is being played, but it also moves in time with the wearer's movement.

The name "Attention Whore" was chosen as the title of the piece after its completion and while acting as a pun, I chose it because I felt that it summed up the essence of my work.

I plan on continuing working with wearable technology in the future, but other than attempting to make this piece work with a portable music device, I will not be making further changes to the piece. While an advantage of using technology is its ability to be easily updated, I feel that changing any other components would be changing the dress itself. Instead I plan on taking my other ideas and iterations of this dress to create new pieces.