Hotel Babylon fans will recognize Donna Air, who recently made news with her LED dress at the BAFTA Television Awards at London’s Covent Garden. You can check out more photos on DailyMail.com. The LEDs appear to be NeoPixel strips that have been draped in convenient areas across the chest and waist where they don’t incur sharp bends. The gown was custom designed in association with House of Fraser and Rebecca Street. More research pulled up an interesting video showing how the dress came to be. Check out the cool programming going on!
Like most splashy fashions, the dress received both positive and negative comments. The color of the NeoPixels becomes a bit washed out in the nude color of the fabric, but I think it is a welcome change from more obvious LED work I’ve seen. I also like the trailing strips that lead down the front of the gown accentuating the movement of the skirt. The neat part about this dress is that it is a good example of how you can get a lot of illumination with minimal sewing by using strips. If you want to hack your own formal dress, check out our Sparkle Skirt which uses a FLORA, NeoPixels and an accelerometer. Your movement causes the NeoPixels to light up. You can substitute NeoPixel strips and stitch casings for them in the underskirt of your dress. If you use the strips out of their weatherproof casing, they are quite lightweight, too. Have fun creating a flurry of LED magic on your dress, and don’t forget to send us some awesome pics.
Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!