Lasts week, we lost iconic avant-garde fashion designer, Kansai Yamamoto. Yamamoto is best known for this long-term collaboration with David Bowie, especially the costumes for the Martian rocker's Ziggy Stardust tour.

On the Fashion United website, there's a piece about the 2018 Brooklyn Museum evening with Yamamoto, done in support of the David Bowie Is exhibit.

Here, Yamamoto describes his collaboration with Bowie:

“Unlike me, Bowie was quiet, shy, but on stage he flips a switch and becomes David Bowie,” says Yamamoto. “Me, I’m always that way.” But they shared a love of what the designer calls “radical appearance,” and when asked what they learned from each other, he replies that through Bowie he developed his understanding of Western dress while he helped Bowie interpret Eastern clothing. He agrees that he sees a direct line between what he created in the 70s for Bowie and the current conversation on gender and dress. “I approached Bowie’s clothes as if I was designing for a female,” he admits. “Notice there is no zipper in front.” But he feels proud seeing how the younger generation attending the “David Bowie Is” exhibit can express themselves when compared to the societal restrictions he encountered in Japan 50 years ago, as a self-taught, broke, designer launching his career at the age of 21. A photographer had snapped a picture of him walking along London’s Kings Road and it was featured on the cover of Life magazine. “I felt every day I was the model in a fashion show and everyone around me were members of the audience,” he says.

Experimental fashion designer Anouk Wipprecht—most famous for her Robotic Spider Dress from a few years ago—has now created the Proximity Dress to help with physical distancing during the pandemic. The 3D-printed electromechanical dress poofs out when triggered by proximity and thermal sensors detecting someone getting too close to the wearer. From 3D Printing Media Network:

Each dress extends itself using a robotic 3D printed hip mechanism, built into the dress, and a resin 3D printed transparent collar with integrated sensors. The dress also works as a perfect application case study for 3D printing. The hip mechanisms that are holding the servos to the mechanic hip parts are 3D printed using SLS (Selective Laser Sintering) nylon PA-11 to endure more stresses. The 3D printed transparent collar, which has a more aesthetic use, is 3D printed using an Objet Connex 500 multimaterial polyjet 3D printer and the VeroClear material from Stratasys.

“I haven’t made dresses for myself in a long time,” Anouk posted, “and I got a bit fed up with people in public not considering the current distancing suggestions, so this one I’m keeping…”

Boyd Clopton was a clothing designer and illustrator who created funktastic fashions in the early 1970s for Stevie Wonder and Syreeta Wright (above), The Jackson 5, Aretha Franklin, The Supremes, and many more soul and rock stars of the era. See more of his incredible illustrations over at Dangerous Minds.

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Susan Brennan won the $10,000 first prize in a toilet paper wedding dress contest where the entire garment had to be constructed only from toilet paper, glue, and tape (or it can be sewn).

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