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Techno frock
Fashion's future will swivel on advances in fabric technology, writes Janice Breen Burns.



That's it then. That's the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries good and plumbed for fashion inspiration. Where to now? We've done retro, vintage, collectable, derivative, and reflexive. We've dredged every original idea from pompadour crinolines to 1960s moo-moo minis. There's no frock left to reboot. They're all replicated or recycled in "new" fashion collections: "Inspired by the swinging '60s", "Reminiscent of the languid elegance of 1930s Hollywood", or "Cyber-chic - infused with the rigid hourglass corsetry of 1862".



No frock is left unpicked, no shoe, bag, hat or hairdo undisturbed in its original decade: "Dungarees! We haven't done dungarees yet!" So we liberate them from history's hicks and hippies. Hot-diggity, yessiree. "Bustles! No one's done bustles!" Actually, yes they have. But crank out a few, anyway. Why not? All's fair in war and the ravenous creative demands of mainstream fashion.



As an expressive medium, it's got to run out of things to say soon. Can you blame it? Who knew fashion would be the this voracious, sucking black hole of ideas, this modern mosaic of a million "individual" looks demanding seasonal refurbishment, and not the mixed vision of unisex minimalism and golden goddess gowns we fully expected after Star Trek - The original Series? I ask you.



Unless a decent-sized revolution in fashion design jolts us out of our regurgitative state, we will turn more to science and technology to shape fashion's future as an expressive craft. On many fronts, it's already happening.



At one end of recent advances we've got Fabrican, a British product still in its R&D throes, that could be your first spray-on frock. At the other, there is simpler stuff that is no less arresting: sheer sheets of milky "silk", for instance, fused by heat and with a random tracery of foetal "veins" in the middle. The creative possibilities - even for the average mass-productive, retro-recycling plodder of a frock designer - are self-explanatory.



Between Fabrican and foetal silk there is also a fast-evolving breed of knitted and woven fabrics with remarkable three-dimensional textures that weren't possible even a few of years ago.



This is where magic will reside in future fashion design: in its twisted warps and tortured wefts and mechanical manipulations in between. Ways have also been found to spin fabrics sheer as a web, and to make bolts of shattered, holey stuff such as pig's caul or cow's placenta.



Can you imagine the consequences for a frock?



Even silk is processed now in myriad ways Any haute designer worth her thimble must know them all now, as intimately as her own skin. Which mousseline can be sliced and frilled - as Alexander McQueen did for his "oyster" dress three years ago - in a dozen layers, each with the composite thickness of a single tissue? Which silks will tremble heavily from hip to floor as a woman walks? Which ones will sway? Which ones flutter? How should they be cut and draped for the maximum, heart-swelling kinetic effect?



In 1993, Issey Miyake's Pleats Please fashion label patented a technique of heat-treating polyester jersey to permanently retain washboard rows of horizontal, vertical or diagonal knife-edge pleats. It was a groundbreaking moment in a long history of rule-breaking by Japanese designers who grasped decades ago that there's only so much you can do with a frock without manipulating it into something gimmicky and stupid.



But, the fabric? Now, that's a whole other shooting match. Since Pleats Please, comparable fabrics have been sculpted like origami, or frozen in crushes or poured into permanent, watery ripples. And there have been related mini revolutions.



The use of gossamer-thin metal threads (gold has been used in Indian saris for centuries) in sheer, breathing sheets has been artfully refined. You can hug a bolt of all-metal "fabric", shot with two jewel colours, into a rough ball, and it will stay that way. The potential for light and shadow and glimmer all together in one frock makes my heart flip.



At Australian Fashion Week in April, a handful of progressive young designers showed they are also raring to exploit advances in laser-cut "lace" fabrics. Material Boy showed a sharp, repeating cathedral window pattern cut into smooth, boxy cotton drop tops for boys, and in women's wear, a jigsaw of white cotton peace doves, locked in a thousand precise cuts, cropped up in frocks and separates.



Dyeing technology has leapt ahead, too. Digital printing techniques have meant some remarkable passages of design and pattern, from art canvas to fashion cloth. In some good, some goofy and some god-awful effects, the use of photorealistic motifs have also had a dramatic impact on fashion as diverse as high-brow Prada to garage T-shirts.



Further into the realm of wearable art, there are also fabrics that will light up in the dark by a phosphorescent yarn from the same company that makes Lurex, and with nanotechnology and biotechnology, inroads are being made into cloth capable of changing colour, pattern, temperature or even texture on demand.



There have been practical advances, too, although in strictly fashion terms, most are take-or-leave side dishes. A new generation of "smart" and performance fabrics that are wrinkle, odour and stain-resistant for example, are already being used in some sportswear, men's wear and underwear brands. Bulletproof fabrics are being developed thin as lambswool jumpers.



And the University of Bath, with the London College of Fashion, is deep into development of a fabric that will respond instantly to the wearer's need to cool down or warm up quickly by a system of tiny "spikes" or vents 1/200-millimetre thick in its surface.

For the canniest fashion designers, fabric technology in all its forms is a thrill-a-minute science that can challenge the adage that has blighted their industry for too long: "There are no original ideas."



Bollocks. Even dungarees and bustles could be rendered "original" in phosphorescent. bulletproof metal mesh with an inherent nanotech heat/cool capability and digital photorealistic surface motif.
 
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