See Adobe’s Wild Interactive Dress Change Patterns With The Push Of A Button

One second the dress has a solid pattern, the next a shimmery crosshatch design. Prefer to wear a garment that looks different depending which way you’re facing? The frock can pull that off too.

The interactive dress is a product of Project Primrose, a smart material designed by Adobe researchers that’s made of reflective light-diffusing modules that can turn entire surfaces into content displays. Designers can layer the low-power, non-emissive technology into various objects, such as furniture, handbags or apparel. It could also be used for billboards.

“Unlike traditional clothing, which is static, Primrose allows me to refresh my look in a moment,” Adobe research scientist Christine Dierk said at last week’s Adobe MAX 2023 conference in Los Angeles. During the event, the software company presented sneak peeks at what its researchers are working on, partly to gauge public. The Project Primrose dress had the audience oohing, aahing and applauding loudly as Dierk modeled it on stage.

“Red carpets are going to be way sassy,” said actor and comedian Adam Devine, who co-hosted the segment of the conference that focused on technologies that could one day work their way into Adobe products.

At the press of a button, Dierk was wearing what appeared to be four different dresses in the span of a minute. The modular fabric has embedded sensors that respond to movement, and as Dierk turned from side to side, undulating designs swept across the scales on the surface of the outfit.

“But can it run Doom?” one YouTuber user commented on the video below.

You probably won’t see Project Primrose purses and dresses on Nordstrom racks anytime soon, however.

While next-generation textiles can do everything from change colors to adjust with the temperature to keep you comfortable and shapeshift according to your brainwaves, for now they’re mostly limited to labs and catwalks. Still, they offer endless possibilities for experimentation, and offer a glimpse into a future where clothing routinely taps technology for both style and function.

“Creatives are always looking for new canvases to play with and fashion has always been a place where consumers and designers alike can express their creativity,” Dierk, who specializes in human-computer interaction, said at the Adobe conference. Before presenting the dress, Dierk and her team published a research paper in 2022 on the potential of their reflective light-diffuser modules for non-emissive flexible display systems.

Watch Dierk model the dress in the video below. Now, please excuse me while I go stare at my uneventful cotton skirt, which will sadly feature the same pattern all day.

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