Designer Zac Posen lit up his 2015 New York Fashion Week kickoff show on Tuesday by debuting a gorgeous and tech-savvy coded LED dress that blinked in different, dazzling pre-programmed patterns down the runway.
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Housed in the Industria Superstudio in New York’s West Village — with attendees including Rumer Willis, Orange is the New Black‘s Dascha Polanco and First Lady of New York Chirlane I. McCray — the ZAC Zac Posen show first showcased the designer’s Spring-Summer 2016 collection before introducing the brilliant, flickering gown modeled by muse and “best friend” Coco Rocha.
In coordination with Google’s non-profit organization, Made with Code, which inspires girls to pursue careers in tech coding, Posen teamed up with 30 girls (all between the ages of 13 and 18), who attended the show, to introduce the flashy dress — which was designed by Posen and coded by the young women.
“This is the future of the industry: mixing craft, fashion and technology,” the 34-year-old designer told PEOPLE. “There’s a discrepancy in the coding field, hardly any women are at the forefront, and that’s a real shame. If we can entice young women through the allure of fashion, to get them learning this language, why not?”
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Through a micro controller, the gown displays coded patterns in 500 LED lights that are set to match the blues and yellows of Posen’s new collection. The circuit was designed and physically built into Posen’s dress fabric by 22-year-old up-and-coming fashion designer and computer science enthusiast, Maddy Maxey, who tells PEOPLE she was nervous watching Rocha make her way down the catwalk.
“It’s exactly as if she was carrying a microwave down the runway,” Maxey said. “It’s an entire circuit on a textile, so if one connection had come lose, the dress wouldn’t have worked. But, it did! And it was so deeply rewarding.”
Rocha, looking gorgeous in the futuristic ensemble, told PEOPLE the two worlds of fashion and technology “should have met a long time ago.”
“Fashion would talk about how we don’t need tech, and tech would talk about how fashion isn’t necessary,” Rocha, 26, shared. “It’s only been in the past few years that the people have decided the two need to combine in order to have a truly successful future.”
The new mother, an advocate for more women in the technology industry, hopes Posen’s Google partnership will inspire young girls to explore the not so complex world of coding.
“I used to think you had to be really smart or love math or sit behind a computer all day to code,” she said. “But that’s not the case. The girls who coded this dress are obsessed with fashion and they’re already thinking of ways to mix the two sectors and to inspire others. Hopefully that will excite others about coding.”
What do you think of the dress? Sound off below.
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–Rose Minutaglio
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