Urban Armor: Fashion that Functions as a Creep Repellent

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Kathleen Marie McDermott is an artist working out of Hong Kong whose latest project has the internet all abuzz. Combining electronics with fashion, she is in the process of developing a little series called Urban Armor.

Urban Armor consists of playful, yet functional pieces of clothing that are meant to protect women's privacy and assert their presence.

The goal of the project is to help make women feel more comfortable and encourage them to own their personal space in public settings.

It makes both a feminist and fashion statement, addressing the treatment of women's bodies in patriarchal societies while bolstering their confidence.

"The series arose partly out of my concern over the persistence of ideologies asserted at women in public space through advertising, architecture and socially normative behavior," writes McDermott.

"I wanted to explore how wearable technology could impact a person's physical world, and help the wearers augment their personal expression and agency in public space...As I develop the series further, I hope to draw from a broader range of perspectives.

[I want to see how] women of different ages, races, and economic groups experience public space differently, [and] how would they use technology to augment their experience of public space, given the opportunity."

The pieces were designed using open-source prototyping platform, Arduino, and incorporate devices like sensors, which gauge the distance between the wearer and approaching strangers.

The first piece in the series is "The Auto Filter":a scarf designed to cover the face of the wearer when urban pollutants like alcohol, car exhaust, and cigarettes are detected.

The Auto Filter

Also in the series in "The Personal Space Dress": a dress whose skirt is designed with a plastic armature and sensor which detects the proximity of other human beings. When someone comes too close, the skirt expands, creating a kind of circle of defense around the wearer.

The hope is that the stranger will be alarmed and move away.

The Personal Space Dress

The third piece in the series is the "Miss-My-Face": a hat designed to protect the wearer's privacy by making it impossible for cameras to read their features. The hat features a veil lined with infrared lights that interfere with cameras' abilities.

The hat only works when worn with the matching purse, which contains a CCTV detector. The CCTV detector picks up radio frequency waves emitted by cameras and other wireless devices, thus activating the infrared lights.

img src="http://www.kthartic.com/files/gimgs/49_landscape.jpg"border="0"style="border:none;mac-width:100%; "alt="Miss-My-Face"/>

You can see these babies in action below: