In the early '90s the world was under the spell of Hypercolor, a line of clothes that changed hues by reacting to body heat. In a commercial for the garments, you see a couple rolling around in bed, green handprints streaking down the man’s blue shirt where the woman had just groped him. Another shot shows a woman blasting her purple shirt with a hairdryer---as one does---creating a bright pink line down the front.
For a flash of time, the color morphing clothes were wildly popular, but they quickly revealed a crippling limitation: “The technology wasn’t well adapted,” says Maddy Maxey, co-founder of wearable startup The Crated. “People could tell when you were sweating.”
The technology she’s speaking of is leuco dyes, a type of biphasic dye that can change colors depending on environmental inputs like heat and light. This same phase-changing technology is the basis for The Crated's most recent project, Photochromia, a line of clothes that reveal patterns when exposed to UV light.
Maxey and her Crated co-founder Mari Kussman focus on textile wearables like soft circuitry and chemical-change clothing like you see in Photochromia. For this recent project, Maxey and Kussman partnered with online design shop Print All Over Me to create a series of products---a hat, t-shirt, sweatshirt and backpack--that harness the phase changing power of leuco dye.
You could almost consider Photochromia the modern, sweat-proof follow-up to the Hypercolor shirt. Except instead of using heat to change a shirt’s color, it uses light to reveal hidden patterns. The patterns are digitally printed onto the textiles before being screen printed with the Leuco dye. In an environment without UV light, the dye remains clear, but as soon as natural light hits the dye, the chemical begins to change in structure, allowing more light to be absorbed and ultimately changing the color from clear to black. The brighter the light, the darker the dye.
The patterns you see are all a play on STEM concepts---a graphic translation of Schrodinger’s Cat, ASCII prints and algorithmically-generated vector art. The project is equal parts fashion and science, a true melding of what Maxey believes wearables need to be in the future. “We want people to say, 'Wait a minute, there’s a physics reference in there? Wait a minute these were made using javascript?'” she says.
The Crated is investing in the idea that the future of wearables is not miniaturized wrist-worn computers, but rather technology that’s woven straight into the stuff we put on every day by necessity: our clothes. Light activated t-shirts might not be the most sophisticated example of what’s to come, but it’s all a part of what Maxey refers to as the "Cambrian explosion" of wearables. “This is just a way to contribute to that explosion and see what really takes hold, what people like, what they care about,” she says. “It’s all about evolution from there.”
