This week was a particularly busy one for London’s Somerset House. As well as playing host to London Fashion Week Nick Knight’s new exhibition, SHOWstudio Fashion Revolution would be opening. For more information about the exhibition you can read Loz’s post but for now, I want to draw your attention to a piece at the exhibition called Naomi.
It features a 3-D polystyrene sculpture of Naomi Campbell’s body triplicate and had been produced using complicated 3-D scanning techniques and sculptural rendering technology. Whilst the sculpture itself is more than impressive, it’s main objective is surely to explore the idea of interactive design and the creative process, a theme concurrent throughout the exhibition.
Light is projected on to the sculpture whilst viewers can use light boxes with a basic Paint like program to draw their designs that are simultaneously projected onto the model’s body. I found this interactive approach to be rather fun and much less conventional than the traditional idea of what you would expect a fashion exhibition to be. It would seem that this use of technology is being adapted for similar purposes by high street store Nike.
Just the same afternoon Nadia and I found ourselves exploring the shops around Covent Garden when our attention was drawn to Nike stores window display complete with a video and touch screen. When presented with a touch screen your immediate reaction is to do exactly that! Similarly to the Naomi at the Nick Knight exhibition shoppers could choose colours themselves for various Nike clothing and footwear items and be presented with their choice and colour options straight away on the video screen.
Whether this is a gimmick from Nike to merely occupy small children whilst their parents do the shopping, or a genuine design tool, I cannot argue with the fact that it made me want to get involved.
It is a fact that fashion designers are influenced by exhibitions and in turn the high street is essentially led by what major designers are producing. So could it be that Nick Knight is paving the way for an interactive British high street where shoppers are designing for themselves? Who knows? In the mean time check out our video and picture and decide for yourselves!
Hannah. xx
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