"And These Are My City Clothes..."

AuthorByron 14 January 2010 Comments

French artist Elisabeth Lecourt prompts a curious phenomena of way-finding fashionware, deftly folding urban maps into quaint dresses and button-down shirts.

Making her way from France in the mid-90's, Lecourt graduated with a Masters of Art from the Royal College of Art, London in 2001, and has since exhibited through Europe with her first solo show in 2006. Aside from clearly being an accomplished worker of craft, the conceptual possibilities of the work are worth teasing out.

Thinking back to some post-graduate work I saw coming out of the MIT Media Lab (I think this is it here) which was exploring the fine crossroads of textiles and technology -such as weaving thermal responsive or light-sensitive LED's directly into fabrics- they posited that eventually clothing and fabrics might be able to express any number of things about their environments or even about the person wearing them -something I found slightly disconcerting as a fairly rampant phenomenologist ("If my shirt expresses everything about me, what do I do with my Body?").

All-fabric capacitive Keyboard. E. Rehmi Post & Maggie Orth, MIT Media Lab.

So with Lecourt's contribution, I begin to ask how way-finding and urban navigation might be improved with smart-clothes... could they drag us in the right direction, or something as simple as a GPS blip of our current location -information which is already ubiquitous in most advanced cellphones or other hand-held devices. Maybe they could track your friends in their own Smart-Dress, lighting up a little swarm of activity... which would be creepy, and I'm starting sound like Geoff Manaugh, which would be unoriginal of me.

Poetically, I think the project works wonderfully to, as a civic reminder of how we interact with the City, or even the country, how we literally 'wear the city' or is it wearing us? I'm thinking how the City might rub off on us, leave a trace -whether its gum, spilled wine or desert sand- so the shirt or dress -in this case very literally- becomes a drawing surface.