Colour-changing AI textile used in fashion brand’s Milan show and developed in Hong Kong could ‘revolutionise the way we approach design’
- Anteprima’s February show at Milan Fashion Week featured colour-changing garments and a glowing handbag made with an AI textile developed by Hong Kong’s AiDLab
- A new feature released in June allows wearers to extract colours from photos on their phone to be displayed on the fabric
When Hong Kong brand Anteprima showed four glowing, colour-changing knitted garments and a glowing handbag at Milan Fashion Week on February 23, it was a sign another industry was ready to embrace artificial intelligence (AI) to offer customers something new.
The innovative material used, developed by the Hong Kong-based Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence in Design (AiDLab), is the world’s first contactless gesture-recognition illuminative textile and has a patented structural design made of polymeric optical fibre.
The textile, which has an integrated camera that processes images using AI algorithms to produce different coloured illuminations, can be controlled via hand and body gestures, Bluetooth, or remote control.
Its incorporation in a knitted material that is soft and tactile allows it a wide range of applications.
“Conventional textiles are passive. We wanted to create a material that adapts to the fast-evolving needs of today’s consumers,” says Dr Jeanne Tan, associate professor in the School of Fashion and Textiles at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and the assistant director of AiDLab, who leads the research team behind the textile.
