Empress's New Clothes

My research provides a means of animating historical costume, bringing movement and narrative to an otherwise static garment form. It has significant potential for museum display and education. The scholarly recreation of costume in movement can replace surviving dress that is too fragile for display; it can be used as a teaching tool in the archive, as well as being taken out of the museum to new audiences; and it can attract new audiences to museums where engaging young people with textiles and dress is considered a particular challenge.

In consultation with the Museum of London I produced a 40-second animation of an 18th Century, Spitalfields silk, sack-back style dress, based on a real garment in the Museum’s collection. The resulting animation was exhibited with the original dress, Museum of London, February-March 2004.

In order to realise this piece, I achieved: successful collision detection of multiple ‘cloth’/undergarment layers linked to digitised body movement; generation of a ‘believable’ CG silk ‘cloth’ aesthetic using 2D/3D texture mapping procedures; unedited motion capture linked to the complex garment model (40secs); improved digital cloth, weight and movement dynamics.