Dress for our time is a new project by Helen Storey exploring climate change through fashion and science. The above video is from beljacobs.com. The dress is on display now at St. Pancras International train station. From the project’s site:
The first ever physical embodiment of Dress for Our Time will be installed at St Pancras International train station at the end of November. As the gateway to Paris – the city hosting the United Nations Climate Change conference COP 21 – many of the delegates that will be passing through the station will come face to face with the world’s first digital couture dress dedicated to exploring climate change and its human impact.
Given the importance of the conference, where more than 190 nations will gather in Paris to discuss a possible new global agreement on climate change, this project will capture people’s imagination in a way that is both unexpected and beautiful. With the scientific community overwhelmingly* in agreement that a rise in temperature of over 2 degrees will cause catastrophic and irreversible changes to our planet, Dress for our Time asks us what we can do individually and collectively, and invites us to join the conversation that will shape our future.
The dress will digitally display data which will show the impact of climate change on our physical world. It will show our planet as it will be, if we don’t do enough. The dress has been developed in partnership with the interactive creative agency Holition, and the data has been extracted from a major study of the global risks of future shifts in ecosystems due to climate. The sample shown was selected to reveal the complexity, subtlety, and global nature of a changing, warming world and was developed by Dr Lila Warszawski (Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research). The study builds on the foundation of climate modelling projects in many countries including the Met Office Hadley Centre in the UK. The Dress itself is made from a tent (which was no longer in useable condition) gifted to the project by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). In giving the tent a second life it gives this public art installation an unbreakable bond to humanity and represents the importance of nurturing and protecting all people and safeguarding generations to come. It is a powerful symbol of what it means to be human and the precarious nature of our existence.
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