Light in Future Fashion: From video dress to glowing tattoos.

Philip's Design, a Dutch-based global design firm specializing in healthcare, lighting and consumer products, creates "probes" as part of a dedicated research program into far-future lifestyle trends, that may evolve to have a significant effect on business and society. The "Bubelle" dress featured in the video,created by self-styled "body architect" Lucy McRae, was designed to be an emotion sensing garment and is the result of one of those probes.  The dress is illuminated by patterns that are changed dependent on contact with the skin, and "Fission" a body suit that reacts to being blown on by lighting tiny LEDs. ( Philip's is currently also garnering attention from the press for its fantasy future-world Robotskin £13.5 ad campaign featuring a sensual futuristic femme-bot  shaving her master) 

Katy Perry in a LED fabric dress at the  Met Museum of Art

From incorporating  LEDs into existing traditional fabric designs, or creating designs in woven luminescent LED fabric; light-up fashion is rapidly going mainstream. Designer and innovator, Hussein Chalayan, already known for his morphing dresses, is experimenting in video dresses that have moving scenes,  such as swimming fish, traveling across the the fabric.  There are also forays into clothing with lights that respond to music and other sounds, as well as self-adhesive post-mastectomy breast forms with moving patterned lights that respond to touch.

Black light tattoo now, sub-dermal LEDs soon

Black light tattoos are currently available and LEDs  are slated to be available for implantation under the skin for personal body art that will glow in normal darkened conditions shortly. Color-changing tattoos that respond to changes in blood sugar to provide an easy visual measurement for diabetics have been spectacularly successful in animal trials and are expected to be released to market in two years, pending human trials. It seems very likely that this technology will find cross-over into personal body art, which could be mixed with luminescent ink for an even wider range of expression.

Hussein Chayalan's video dresses