Sunday October 20th, we visited a company called Cute Circuit that designs wearable technology. Ryan Genz and Francesca Rosella started the company together to combine fashion and technology. In 2002, they designed there first item called the Hug Shirt. The shirt allows you to send a hug to anyone else in the world by recording the feeling. The shirt won one of the best inventions of the year in Time Magazine in 2006. The world wasn’t ready yet for a shirt with this kind of technology at the time, but now they have adapted it to have a low energy component and messaging with easier access to the Internet.
In 2006, they released the M Dress, which is a dress and a phone. In 2008, the designed the Galaxy Dress which is covered in 24,000 LEDs that are remote controlled and create different patterns based on an algorithm. Katy Perry, saw this dress and wanted them to design one for her, so they made a version with less lights called the K Dress. They have worked with other celebrities as well like U2 and designed four jackets for them. They wanted to design a shirt for everyone so they came up with the T-shirt OS, a shirt that does everything. Less than a year ago, Nicole Scherzinger wore the Twitter Dress. Her fans sent tweets and they would appear on the dress in real time. Recently they have worked with the ice cream company Magnum designing a dress to be worn at there new launch that changes to pink or black in real time based on votes of consumers favorite ice cream.
In the past two weeks they designed a mini skirt for Katy Perry for the iTunes Festival. The skirt changed patterns as she sang her new hit Roar and the light patterns went along with the song. This skirt is easily wearable and the battery is well hidden. The battery size in all of their clothing depends on the amount of lights and how long the lights need to last. The batteries are rechargeable as well. They have worked on a lot over the years and are becoming even for advanced and working to make things easy to be worn.
