Marina Toeters
Fashion Tech Designer, by-wire.net
Marina Toeters is a Red Dot winning Fashion Tech Designer. She operates on the cutting edge of technology and fashion design. Through her business by-wire.net she stimulates collaboration between the fashion industry and technical innovators for a relevant fashion system and supportive garments for everyday use. She advises – via prototyping and a research through design approach – on product development. She designs and develops concepts to inspire the world how fashion could be. As a teacher, coach and researcher, she works for a fashion department (HKU) and industrial design faculty (TU/e). In 2019 Marina edited the book Unfolding Fashion Tech: Pioneers of Bright Futures and opened the Fashion Tech Farm, a studio, incubator and small-scale production facility for innovative fashion, based in Eindhoven, The Netherlands.
Presentation Title:
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Unfolding Fashion Tech: About Prettiness, Medical Goods, Technicalities, Usability and Business.
Presentation Summary:
The fashion industry is famous for their ability to let consumers desire to change. However, the last material innovation widely accepted by the fashion industry is from 1953. If the vogue world would gospel innovation and collaboration ‘for the better’ they can make a huge change in just 3 seasons. Garments can support the wearer: E-fashion starts caring for us! Current E-fashion projects are mainly about research and show that it is possible to advance fashionable garments. It isn’t widely accepted and commercial yet. Marina will show and discuss how she tries to innovate the fashion industry via 3 approaches.
1) Fashion Tech product design: Via prototyping and an iterative research-through-design she supports for example Bilihome (www.bilihome.org) to develop a romper that enables jaundice therapy for newborns. For another project the Dutch government asked Marina to develop sustainable alternatives for medical gowns. Therefore her team developed Caring Clothing Tech, a product service system including UV-C disinfection that can be adopted by hospitals. The high quality gown reduces the current environmental impact of disposable gowns by over 90%. One locally made reusable gown replaces 400 disposables, which ultimately results in cost savings (www.by-wire.net/cct). Next to that Marina works a lot with printed electronics; Closed Loop Smart Athleisure Fashion, (www.by-wire.net/clsaf) is a good example of this.
2) Eco system creation: Marina started the shared working space Fashion Tech Farm to support and incubate fashion technologists, experimenting in this space about how the production facility can be designed so that it supports the local community by offering personalized, on the spot produced, innovative fashion for them. As the city of Eindhoven is developing into an ecosystem for complex design practice Marina just became one of the Design Ambassadors of the city of Eindhoven and strengthens the links between the tech and the design community.
3) Education and communication: Marina has a vision on how the fashion world could be and spreads this message in a wide variety of communities. During the presentation Marina will give examples of activities at the Lopec Printed Electronics fair, the VIBE museum experience last spring in Barcelona, coaching two groups on integrating technology in fashion and business development within WORTH and presenting sustainable approaches during the fabric fair Modtissimo in Porto.
E-Textiles 2023 