“Manus x Machina” on the Runways: How Fashion and Technology Fused This Season Inline
Photo: Yannis Vlamos / Indigitalimages.com1/9Chanel Fall 2015 Couture
Karl Lagerfeld’s love of technology is well known—Choupette has her own iPad, after all. His Fall 2015 couture collectsion at Chanel married the house’s traditional techniques with new technologies, the prime examples being the rich tweed suits woven through 3-D-printed lattices.
Photo: Kim Weston Arnold / Indigitalimages.com2/9Louis Vuitton Spring 2016
“We are all living with this new dimension,” said Nicolas Ghesquière at his Spring 2016 Louis Vuitton show. “We are all managing how to integrate these new notions of digital, virtual, and cyber with our real life.” Ghesquière’s solution was to infuse ready-to-wear with techno twists pulled from anime series and futuristic movies like 2046 and Tron: Legacy.
Photo: Monica Feudi / Indigitalimages.com3/9Miu Miu Spring 2016
Miu Miu’s candlestick illustrations were drawn by hand by Eri Wakiyama and transformed into digital patterns on dresses, shirts, and separates worn layered with Mrs. Prada’s whimsical creations.
Photo: Marcus Tondo / Indigitalimages.com4/9Loewe Spring 2016
At Loewe, Jonathan Anderson imagined high-tech fabrics like PVC and plastic as loose trousers and luxurious It bags. Mixed in with natural textures like leather and suede, those surprising materials took on a new highbrow life.
Photo: Marcus Tondo / Indigitalimages.com5/9Lanvin Spring 2016
A photograph that appeared in New York magazine was transformed into a digital print at Lanvin, which was then covered in sequins for an Instagram-ready effect.
Photo: Yannis Vlamos / Indigitalimages.com6/9Christopher Kane Spring 2016
Christopher Kane has long loved techno fabrications—remember those gel-filled collars from Fall 2011? For Spring, he spliced his bias-cut cocktail dresses with PVC inserts.
Photo: Yannis Vlamos / Indigitalimages.com7/9Paco Rabanne Spring 2016
Julien Dossena reimagined Paco Rabanne’s iconic—and machine-made—chain mail of the ’60s as a slinky dress fused with olive green knit accents. We’d say it’s a pretty happy marriage of the tech-savvy and the chic.
Photographed by Kevin Tachman8/9Iris van Herpen Spring 2016
She’s experimented with 3-D printing, techno fabrics, and fusions of the digital and the real her whole career, so it should come as no surprise that Iris van Herpen added a boundary-pushing element to her Spring 2016 show. In the center of Van Herpen’s venue, actress Gwendoline Christie played on a plinth as a dress appeared to unfurl and grow around her. It’s a pretty safe bet that either this piece or another of Van Herpen’s will appear in the Met’s exhibition.
Photo: Getty Images9/9Chalayan Spring 2016
Hussein Chalayan, too, has been one of fashion and technology’s standard-bearers. This season, he developed a proprietary water-soluble fabric that dissolved under a waterfall to reveal models in Swarovski-encrusted dresses.
