As you could probably tell from my piece about the very weird outfits sported by Sam Smith and Harry Styles at this year’s Grammys and Brit Awards, I’m not a fashionista. And I still remember Punk fashion designer Vivienne Westwood getting very narked on Wogan back in the 1980s when the audience started laughing at her extremely bizarre creations. ‘Why are they laughing?’, she wailed, followed by ‘Well, it went down very well in Milan’. Which it probably did, but I suspect that most ordinary Italians probably have no more patience for bonkers and unwearable clothing than we Brits or anyone else in the world.
But I am interested in robots and in art and music that includes them. And there have been a number of fashion designers who have included them in their shows. Alexander McQueen had this performance as part of his spring/summer 1999, where two industrial robots spray paint the model’s dress while an operatic aria wails in the background. The video is from the CoutureDaily channel on YouTube.
Then there’s this video of ‘Rock Meets Robots at Philippe Plein Fashion Show’, posted seven years ago on his YouTube channel by linearnetworkslive. This has the models gliding along a conveyor belt while industrial robots also move about the stage. You’ll also see the robot band Compressorhead, and the music for the show includes Kraftwerk, natch.
Plein also had another fashion show with a similar theme. This had Titan the Robot walking about the stage talking, before a giant UFO descended from the ceiling and a glamorous woman in a black catsuit walked out. Titan took her hand, and the two walked around the stage a bit more while Frank Sinatra’s ‘Fly Me To The Moon’ played in the background.
A female robot also made its debut at Tokyo Fashion Week as shown in this video, also from YouTube, put up by AP Archive. It’s interesting as a spectacle, but I’m afraid all the dialogue is in Japanese and their are no subtitles, so I have no idea what they’re saying.
I also found this interview posted by Dremel on their YouTube channel with the international fashion designer Anouk Wipprecht. Wipprecht describes herself as a fashion technician, who includes technology in her creations. She says that fashion is analogue, so she wanted to make it digital. One of her creations is a spider dress, which has little robotic spider legs about the neck and shoulders. It has motion sensors, which activate the legs as if they’re attacking if you come into the wearer’s personal space. Which is a bit scary. Wipprecht describes some of her techniques and tools, which includes Dremel’s 3-D printers, so the video’s a bit of an advert for the company. It reminds me a little of the short-lived vogue for wearable computers that briefly appeared in the ’90s before fizzling out.
These Wipprecht and the McQueen and Plein fashion shows are all very much in the aesthetic style of the Futurists, an aggressive Italian artistic movement that celebrated the novelty, speed and excitement of industry and the new machine age. In his ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’ of 1909, the movement’s founder, Filippo Marinetti, raved about how the movement would sing of workers toiling beneath electric moons, cars and aeroplanes and stated ‘we look forward to the future union of man and machine.’ I despise the Futurists’ aggressive nationalism, their militarism and ‘scorn for women’, but do like their exploration of the machine aesthetic in their art and music. One of the pieces they composed was entitled ‘The Agony of the Machine’, while another was an opera about the love a steam locomotive had for her driver. They were also interested in fashion, and reacted against tasteful, dark clothing demanding colourful attire that positively screamed at you. These fashion shows and Wipprecht bring this aesthetic into the 21st century and the age of AI and real robots.
But back in the ’70s before the technology had emerged to incorporate real robots into pop music, we had Dee Dee Jackson singing ‘Automatic Lover’ accompanied by a robot on stage, well, a man in a suit playing a robot. It was briefly mentioned in an episode of ‘Robusters’ in 2000 AD when the band plays it in an underground robot bar. Here, for fans of 70s disco, is a video I found of it, again on YouTube, on bchfj’s channel.
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