Based on the feedback we receive on talk2myShirt and my personal experience, illuminated textiles, be it for clothing or interior design, never fails to trigger instant, highly emotionally charged reactions from everyone around when seeing textile objects suddenly light up, changing their color.
I am not talking about blinking, cheaply made decals, I am referring to ascetically sophisticated designs using soft light effects to emphasize the softness of fabric.
Technological developments into light emitting textiles are mostly at their early proof-of-concept stage and there is no reliable, commercially available product on the market for designer to use.
Nevertheless, many companies spend considerable resources to crack the technical difficulties and each new development is a potential step forward to unleash the powerful magic of textile illumination.
One such effort, more suitable for interior design than clothing design is coming from Japan’s Tsuya Textile Co., in cooperation with the Fukui Engineering Center. Their collaboration project ‘Delight Cloth‘ is a light emitting textile made from thin optical fibers measuring just 0.25 to 0.5 mm in diameter.
These optical fibers are woven to fabric sheets which can be used to cover ceilings, walls or furniture to provide a soft flowing and soft illumination for interior decoration.
I keep on mentioning interior because the ‘Delight Cloth’ will need a 100W to 150W light source connected to the fiber-optic ends of the woven cloth to send light, which could have any color, over the whole length of the cloth.
Not really a portable, wearable solution but for interior decoration an almost perfect technology to spread some soft and surprising magic around a room.
If you are planning to add some sparkle to your next fashion collection maybe Luminex could be your choice as they are offering a very similar fiber optic woven textile which seems is more suitable for a portable, wearable solution.