My goal was to redesign a past fashion project in order for it to be shown during Boston Fashion Week 2015. I worked on a conceptual dress designed for a world with little oxygen. A worldwide drought could kill all of hte oxygen producing plants on the planet, forcing humans to conserve oxygen. People could fill up external lungs on the dress with oxygen and then they would be able to live without more air for a lot longer than if they did not have the dress. Since I worked on a project that had already been started I was not creating a completely new piece, but instead redesigning the original. I started off by sketching out what I wanted the dress to look like, and then began to create the dress.

The lung dress is made of silver painted would with two moving acrylic lungs, and two non-movable lungs. The main part of the dress is made of silver wood strips and pentagons that are attached to create a tube-like structure. Elastic is strung on the pieces to create the outer shape of the tubes. There is a movable lung on the front of the dress, as well as one on the side. Both of the lungs have servos inside of them that allow them to expand and contract. On the back of the dress there is a non-movable lung that houses the battery and Arduino to control the servos, and on the other side of the dress is another non-movable lung. When the lungs expand, the elastic stretches out, bringing the whole dress to life. When the wearer of the dress walks, it appears as though the lungs move less than they do when the dress is stationary. The change in speed is just an illusion, but it makes it seem as though the dress is reacting to movement. The lung dress is not completely finished, but it shows what the final dress could look like.

This project was begun during NuVu's Futuristic Fashion Studio (themed around Science Fiction) by Adriana Hrabowych and Zoe Zelleke, and continued by Myles Lack-Zell during the month preceding Boston Fashion Week.