London-based fashion brand Auroboros has designed a dress made from recycled plastic and salt crystals that changes colour and shape in real-time, mimicking the growth of a flower.
The gown, called Biomimicry, was worn by the artificial intelligence (AI) robot Ai-Da at London Design Festival earlier this year at an exhibition inside the Victoria and Albert Musuem, London.
Top: AI robot Ai-Da wearing the Biomimicry dress at London Design Festival. Above: the dress mimics the life cycle of a flower
Auroboros designers Paula Sello and Alissa Aulbekova were inspired by the concept of biomimicry, which is defined as "a practice that learns from and mimics the strategies found in nature".
'The design of the gown seeks to envisage how a plant would appear if it were to grow on a body, depicting how it would mould to the shape and silhouette of a figure," the designers told Dezeen. Auroboros' dress changes shape and colour over time
To create the sleeveless dress, the designers used digital programming. This enabled them to cut the pattern, decide on the size and ensure the correct fit. Once these details were established, they began sculpting the gown's understructure using recycled Perspex ? a solid transparent plastic ? sourced in east London.
The crystals that adorn the middle layer of the dress were hand-grown from salt crystals that had been incubated and heated over several weeks. These were then tinted with dark green dyes and embedded on the interior of the...