"Wear your heartbeat on your sleeve" ... If some dream of it, the fashion tech designer Anouk Wipprecht did it with her emotional HeartBeatDress, unveiled today in the music video of the singer Chrystabell, Suicide Moonbeams.

By Ludmilla Intravaia

Creating a dress that would capture and project to the world such an intimate facet of your emotions, the beating of your heart, "as a provocation to be true to your feelings", such is the bet that the designer Anouk Wipprecht took in her new emotional HeartBeatDress.

The singer Chrystabell wears the HeartBeatDress of the electronic couture designer Anouk Wipprecht, in her music video Suicide Moonbeams, unveiled on December 17, 2021 (© Yanni De Melo)

A dress so fashion tech, as it combines 3D printing, electronics, sensors and LEDs to follow, in real time, the heartbeat of the person wearing it. In this case that of the singer Chrystabell who sports it in the music video of her song Suicide Moonbeams, released today on the web.

The HeartBeatDress is the fruit of Anouk Wipprecht's reflection on "the emotional connection between the heartbeat and the crystal", in this specific case Swarovski crystals, indicates the Dutch designer, in her press release sent to Le Boudoir Numérique.

Anouk Wipprecht’s HeartBeatDress (©Criss Gomez)

Using the electrocardiography (ECG), the technique consisting in recording the electric signals accompanying the contractions of the heart, the crystal jewel of the dress captures the activity of the heart and transmits its rhythmic evolution, in light form. A visual display of feelings “making you wear your heartbeat on your sleeve", poetically explains Anouk Wipprecht in her note of intent.

The dress was imagined using digital design software and manufactured by 3D printing, using the selective laser sintering process, in collaboration with the American 3D printing company Shapeways and the Italian architect Niccolo Casas. The shape of the dress, evoking the human spine, indeed questions "the relation between architecture, fashion, the body and technology", a research ground dear to Anouk Wipprecht.

Anouk Wipprecht is a fashion tech pioneer, passionate about how the fusion of fashion and technology can help "express who we are, what we feel and how we interact with the outside world," she said in 2015, in a Boudoir Numérique interview.

HeartBeatDress - Anouk Wipprecht x Swarovski || 'Wearable Emotions' from Anouk Wipprecht on Vimeo.

She has created many dresses based on cerebral activity signals, muscle contractions or different levels of stress, in the exploration of her art which she describes as "electronic couture". Among these, the Pangolin Scales dress which can also be found in Chrystabell's Moonbeams music video, alongside a third silhouette that we invite you to discover below.