The Little Slide Dress is a modern take on the classic Little Black Dress. It uses modern technology and blends it with a 100-year-old medium, film. The Dress draws inspiration from classic movies and the ‘magic of film’ to create a wearable piece of technology and art. With film light is so important in the creation and viewing of images and this was one of the driving forces behind the dress’s creation. With film only see what really going on once the lights go out. For this to work there needs to be a balance of projected and ambient light something the Little Slide Dress tries to emulate.

The dress is constructed out of individual slide film images that are backed with LED’s. An Arduino Lilypad connected to a light sensor controls the brightness of the LED’s. The sensor reads the how much ambient light there is and uses this value to determine if the LED’s will be off or on. When there is lots of light the LED’s are off and it looks like a shiny black dress with small hints that something else is going on. Once the sensor determines there is the right amount of light for LED’s to be seen in their full brightness it turns them on. When the dress is on the lights slowly pulse and the images on the dress come alive.