The fascination of wearable illumination just got another twist by illumination fashion designer Moritz Waldemeyer who created a pair of illuminated sneakers for ‘Step Up 3D’, for the world’s first dance movie in 3D.

Over the past years we have seen shoes and sneakers upgraded with illumination ranging from kids shoes with blinking light in the sole to more stylish looking party sneakers using LED or EL elements.

Moritz has like in his other illumination clothing designs, raised the bar of how light elements in shoes can spice up otherwise dull and static looking shoes.

LED panels are placed around the sneakers. Integrated motion sensors create waves of light across the shoes depending on the movements of the dancers.

‘Step Up 3D’ will be released on August 3rd where the LED Sneakers will be at the spot light of action.

I don’t think this type of shoes will make it any time soon to retail, they might be too fragile to be beaten up on our city streets but for partying – LED sneakers would serve as a cool outfit.

Cute Circuit seems to have found a bright spot in the showbiz by designing gorgeous looking, illuminate stage wear for artists.

The latest design from Francesca Rosella is a gorgeous looking illuminated dress worn by singer Safura, representing Azerbaijani at the Eurovision 2010 song contest.

The deep blue chiffon dress is equipped with small LEDs creating a multicolor display by amplifying the concept of the live scenery of the ‘Drip Drop’ stage act. A fabulous example how to include a performers dress into the light show on stage.

The theme of the song, which is visualized via the stage light design, is the element of water, from lonely drops to a powerful rainfall to a stormy ocean in line with the lyrics of Safura’s song ‘Drip Drop’.

The color play of the LEDs in the dress is activated via a wireless signal in sync with the deep blue hues symbolizing the living flow of the ocean at one point to a hot red glow visualizing the emotions in the song.

Get captivated from the mystic of the ocean and the LED dress  – watch the video below and see the full sparkle of this dress towards the end when Safura walks down the catwalk.

A BIG Thank You to our talk2myShirt fans, especially in and around Europe, we got over 200 emails since late Saturday pointing to this fabulous dress seen by a multi-million Eurovision audience in and outside Europe.

Although Safura didn’t win the contest she definitely won the talk2myShirt Best-Dress award at the Eurovision 2010 together with Francesca Rosella and Cute Circuit for the Best Dress Design.

With all the hype surrounding illuminated clothing, especially among artists on stage, I thought to beam up the illuminated Tuxedo Michael Jackson would have worn on the ‘This is It‘ if things in his life would have turned out for a better.

Fashion designer Zaldy who created outfits for the likes of Gwen Stefani, Britney Spears or Jennifer Lopez designed for Michael Jackson’s ‘This is It tour’ his complete stage outfit including a illuminated Tuxedo for the ‘Billie Jean’ performance.

A line of color exploding light would have run along the side starting from the ankle socks up the tuxedo pants, jacket into a single white glove that would light up as well.

Check out this video which shows the illuminated ‘Billie Jean’ outfit on a mannequin.

‘Light is important for performing. Normally the light comes up from behind the singer, but it creates a very special and emotional effect when the singer himself is lit up.’ said Zaldy.

I couldn’t agree more with this statement – it’s expressing the emotional, the magical effect living light on a performer that captivates people around.

Michael was very happy with the results: at one point during rehearsals he looked into the mirror and said: ‘This is everything I ever wanted!’

Unfortunately, the tour never happened, and the outfit was not brought to life.

[source: Lumalive]

The list of top artists performing in illuminated stage outfit is growing rapidly, representing a trend that might swap over from the stage to the streets one day.

Rihanna and Moritz Waldemeyer did it again, lighting up the stage with a gorgeous looking LED dress for her ‘Last Girl On Earth tour‘ which kicked off last month in Belgium and will come to US in July and August.

Last year Rihanna’s Laser shoulder pad dress was a revolutionary, SciFi inspired stage outfit using laser beams to captivate the fans.

Moritz Waldemeyer, a pioneer in developing technology for haute couture with Fashion icons like Hussein Cahalayan, is pushing the boundaries between cutting edge technology and traditional textiles, challenging ‘old views’ by demonstrating the possibilities wearable technologies can add to stage wear but ultimately also to the fashion world.

Naturally the showbiz is always wide open for innovation, having the privilege of almost unlimited budget to create stage outfits and the advantage to use materials and technologies not yet ready for the general public.

But once we, the fans of these idols spot such cool outfits we do almost everything to get one at least in a scaled down, more affordable version. This in turn will trigger higher interest by designer to be more exploratory in creating light animated garments.

The dress and jacket design comes from Paris based couturier Alexandre Vauthier incorporating ‘… a unique combination of compressed gas systems and video capable LED circuits‘ as stated on Moritz’s Website.

I couldn’t find more specifics on that statement, sounds like another innovative leap in Moritz Waldemayer’s technology inspired fashion creations.

While the wearable electronic business community is scratching their heads in search of the killer application highly creative and innovative designer seems have no problem to come up with pleasantly exiting designs in the clothing market.

Clothing does not always mean what we wear everyday or evening. There is a wide range of professional, specialized clothing which might be more suitable, might benefit more from wearable technology integration.

Marina Polakoff at ShowOfLight, creator of the Light Dress we covered earlier, designed a ‘Light animated figure skating costume‘ bringing textile technology to the ice skating arena.

The light animated costume was on ice last weekend at the Crystalline Figure Skating Competition 2010 in Santa Rosa, CA.

Marina’s textile light design reacts to the music by using beat and pitch recognition technology and motion sensor to bring the animation in sync with the performer.

The integration of dynamic light effects into the costume allows the choreographer to add a visual dimension to figure skating, complementing and extending the visual experience we all appreciate when watching figure skating.

Marina plans to expand this concept with a Costume Light Choreography on multiple ice skating costumes at the same time. This would allow for large scale lighting effects and patterns.

The ultimate goal is to participate in a sophisticated skating program with multiple illuminated costumes using lighting techniques which truly express the artistic intentions of choreographers and performers.

What a great example of using active, dynamic light effects integrated into clothing.

Lady Gaga is not only famous for her hit songs like ‘Poker Face‘ or ‘Paparazzi‘ she is equally famous for her love to fashion experiments so it was only a matter of time until the Lady showed one of the most sophisticated stage outfits, the ‘Living Dress‘, while performing ‘So Happy I Could Die‘ at the Liverpool Echo Arena last week.

The ‘Living Dress’ magically parts at the front, revealing Lady Gaga’s legs.

The concept of shape altering clothing is around for some time, designer like  Hussein Chalayan, Di Mainstone, Kerry Jia Yi Lin, Ying Gao or recently Diana Eng have explored different concepts with various technologies to animate clothing.

Lady Gaga, like a growing number of artists, make use of technology enhanced clothing to add a new, visual dimension to their stage shows.

From the wearable electronic community point of view this trend is very welcome as it helps to communicate, to visualize the possible potentials of technology infused clothing.

We all know that whatever super stars are doing or wearing is hot and will one way or the other show up at fashion shops around the corner.

But there will be a catch: unlike textile illumination, shape changing clothing requires complex mechanics and electronics putting the challenge to wearable electronic designer and engineers to work out solutions usable for the hard world of fashion reality.

The first 70 seconds in the video below show the Living Dress in action:

I have used the word ‘magic’ frequently when introducing illuminated clothing or other illuminated textile objects but after watching Marco Tempest, a new age magician and Techno-illusionist performing his light magic which includes light spots jumping between his hands and jacket, magical illuminated clothing got a new dimension.

While illuminated clothing on stage has found it’s followers among top artists, Marco is the first magician who includes his stage outfit into his magic light performance.

Marco’s jacket interacts with a light sphere where the light jumps from his hands to the front of the jacket, runs up his sleeves and escapes the jacket and is fetched again by Marco.

A interactivity with clothing only a great magician can envision.

You will be interested in the video segment between 1:10 and 2:35 minutes where Marco gives his stunning performance including the magical jacket.

No matter how I look at illuminated clothing, it has a magical power. Why else would people use it for special occasions like weddings, musicians to create a special effect on stage or many others to have some fun at a party.

Light is magical in every aspect but if textiles, which we are used to see only in colored variants suddenly light up, showing different colors, it’s truly magic.

Hannah send me a link to the video below which painted a smile on my face while watching. Seeing David Hasslehoff on stage singing ‘I am locking for Freedom’ in an illuminated jacket is just what I needed to cheer up a bit while struggling with one of my projects.

Seeing D.H. performing in an illuminated jacket only contributed to my enjoyment – literally. Have wearable electronic in my DNA, the illuminated jacket got my full attention, much more than the song. I wonder who was the creator of this illuminated jacket as the performance was way back in 1989 at a time wearable electronic was hardly known to more than a very few people.

I can’t imagine Moritz Waldemeyer was involved in that project unless he did a student project. Interesting in any case as it confirms my ’suspicion’ that performing artists are attracted towards light animated stage wear like moths to light.

I hope this little post can light up your day as it did for me. If you know who made this jacket, I would be grateful if you can share it in the comments.

Gloves with integrated sensors, adding various functions to the finger tips have surfaced over the past few years in large numbers but to my amazement I found a sensory enhanced glove, created by Laetitia Sonami,  a composer, performer and sound installation artist back in 1991!

Created for a performance at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria her Lady’s Glove must be the first glove featuring integrated sensors on such an advanced level for the use as musical performance enhancing instrument.

In 1994 the Lady’s Glove got a major upgrade from Bert Bongers to enhanced the look and performance.

The Lady’s Glove version 2 has five Hall effect transducers glued at the tip of the fingers and a magnet on the right hand: by touching the fingers on the magnet, signals were generated and fed to a electronic which converted them to MIDI signals.

Resistive strips, taken from an early gaming glove by Mattel, the Power glove for Nintendo NES, sewn along the fingers and wrist generate streams of data when bent. A pressure pad sewn on the inside of the index finger and an ultrasonic transmitter inside the palm, with one receiver located on the right arm and one on the left foot. This setup calculates the distance between both hands and the height of the left hand.

Additional sensors of the Lady’s Glove include five micro switches, a mercury switch on the top of the hand and an accelerometer which measuring the speed of motion of the hand.

The signals from all these sensors are send to STEIM’s Sensorlab which conditions them and convert the signals into MIDI format to feed into various synthesizers and samplers.

The intention in building such a glove was to allow movement without spatial reference (there is no need to position oneself in front or in the sight of another sensor), and to allow multiple, parallel controls.

Through gestures, the performance aspect of computer music becomes alive, sounds are «embodied», creating a new, seductive approach.

I am amazed to find such an sophisticated, sensible glove as far back as 1991/94. It seems musicians are ahead of the time when it comes to innovative, wearable instruments.

[Source: sonami.net/lady_glove2]

U2 started yesterday their 360° Tour 2009 in Barcelona’s Camp Nou with an explosion of great tunes and light.

For the song ‘Ultra Violet (Light My Way)‘, Bono wears a laser light radiating jacket, making him visible across the entire venue.

The creator of Bono’s laser jacket is Moritz Waldemeyer, confirming his leadership in illuminated stage wear design by integrating 240 lasers along the silhouette of the black leather jacket to make Bono’s every move clearly visible to the audience far away from the stage.

The show biz is literally living from light effects and I wonder why not more illuminated stage wear made it on stage. It is a great area for wearable (light) technologies to explore and show off what soft, wearable technologies can achieve.

Watch the video and see this illuminating jacket in action:

For U2 fans: until end of August U2 will tour across Europe and then heading to US for another 2 month of great music and illuminated stage wear show.