Electricity and Clothing – Is The Future of Fashion Electric?

 

Forget charging your iPod – could your t-shirt one day store your music? Image source

 

Recently we blogged about the revolutionary new discovery of a ‘super thread’ made by coating spider silk in gold, which has the potential to be used in everything from micro-scale electricity components to smart fabrics that could adapt to temperature or changes in the surrounding environment.

This however is just one of many exciting developments happening right now that are combining electricity with fashion, creating novel fabrics of the like that previously only existed in science-fiction movies!

In Surrey, Intelligent Textiles have already created a new yarn that can conduct electricity, which is currently undergoing military field trials in the form of clothing that can recharge batteries and store data. Even more amazingly, the vast network of threads in fabric means that the soldiers’ garments have been programmed to automatically re-route in case a thread breaks!

That’s not all – researchers at the University of South Carolina have discovered that when a cotton t-shirt is soaked in a fluoride solution, the cotton’s cellulose becomes converted to activated carbon without changing the flexibility or wearability of the fabric at all.

Add to that some manganese oxide nanoflowers and you’ve got yourself a t-shirt that doubles as a supercapacitor, with the potential to be used to charge electrical products such as your mobile phone or iPod!

It’s unlikely that we’ll all be wearing ‘electronic fashion’ within the next few years, but long term the possibilities are breathtaking. Just think of the way nylon, originally invented for military uses, completely revolutionised the fashion industry some decades back – will electricity now do the same?

Imagine charging your laptop on train to work using your t-shirt, or installing curtains that can detect the sunlight outside and open themselves in the morning. It sounds impossible, but when you look at the discoveries made already it seems like it’s more just a question of time than ability.

What would you use electronic fabric for?