Dresses That Change Colour In The Sun - UV Reactive Clothing
An American fashion brand has gone viral on TikTok after user @izzipoopi posted a video to the site wearing one of their dresses and people are…well, speechless. If you’ve ever wished your clothing could change colours then you are frankly going to adore this concept. Izzi begins the video inside a building with the knitted dress on her body a classic cream colour, however, as she ventures outside onto the streets of New York City the dress suddenly turns into a delicate shade of pink in the blink of an eye!
UV reactive clothing isn’t necessarily a new concept, but it has often been a bit of a kitsch idea used mostly for raving and partying and New York-based brand PH5 is changing this. Established in 2014 by Wei Lin and Zoe Champion, PH5 is a knitwear brand blending traditional knitwear with advanced and contemporary technologies. The brand’s name itself perfectly sums up the brand's approach to its designs, stating on its website that “PH5’s moniker is based on the numeric pH scale, which ranges from 0 to 14, with 7 as neutral. If 7 represented androgynous unisex labels and 1 represented the extreme feminine or sexy brands, PH5 would be a brand that's leaning more towards the edgier side while keeping a touch of femininity.” In an interview with I-D, founder Wei Lin said “I think of PH5 as a knitwear laboratory,”. “When PH5 started, we thought, ‘Let's do something that nobody has done before.’”
The real question everyone has though is ‘how on earth does this work?’ The dress worn by Izzi is the TikTok (which currently has 6.6M views) the ‘Sponde UV Reactive Reversible Maxi Dress’ and retails for $555. The dress, made from 80% viscose and 20% nylon, seems to be coated with a special reactive coating that allows the piece to react to the sun’s highly powerful UV rays, in turn changing its colour.
PH5 isn’t overly clear about the actual technique that they use to achieve this, however Science Daily explains in an online piece that Chloresteric Liquid Crystal Elastomer (say that 5 times quickly), or CLCE for short, is a structurally coloured polymer system that can change its colour by mechanical deformation. ‘Prof. Jan Lagerwall, Dr. Yong Geng and Rijeesh Kizhakidathazhath at the University of Luxembourg created colour-changing CLCE fibres that can be easily sewn into the fabric.’ While this may not be used by PH5, it’s still a fascinating insight into the marriage of fashion and technology.
While at first this may all seem like a silly gimmick, TikTok users have taken to the almost magical aspect of this clothing with many agreeing that “Imagine this as a wedding dress!!!!!! It’ll be such a cool concept (@ellesancz)”.
