Electric Runway Podcast

Fashion tech journalist Amanda Cosco takes you inside Fashion Tech Berlin, THE conference on the future of Fashion. Our episode begins with Lisa Lang, the founder of Fashion Tech Berlin and the stronghold of the fashion tech community in Berlin and beyond. Amanda then takes you through the show floor to meet exhibitors and designers bringing fashion tech products to market, from robotic dress kits...

Up until this point, a lot of the fashion tech products we've seen are costume and concept pieces—meant strictly for the stage, the runway, or for photo shoots. How do we move fashion tech forward from prototypes to products that truly touch consumers lives? In this episode, Fashion Tech Journalist Amanda Cosco interviews Fredrik Timour of Neue Labs, the company responsible for Automat. Autom...

Fashion tech journalist Amanda Cosco interviews JJ Wilson of Kit and Ace, a fashion brand pioneering high-performance fabrics for a full-contact life. After spawning the athleisure movement with their first company, Lululemon, the Wilsons have launhed a second family company. Amanda and JJ's conversation touches on high-performance fabrics for a new generation of consumers and the importance...

The space race is on to forge the future of fabrics, and Canada is emerging as a key player. In this episode, fashion tech journalist Amanda Cosco interviews Thomas Ducellier, Executive Director of the Printed Electronics Flagship Program at the National Research Council of Canada (or NRC for short). Recorded in Oulu, Finland, Thomas and Amanda discuss the NRC's initiative to push fabrics int...

FashTech Journalist Amanda Cosco shares conversations from the show floor at Augmented World Expo (AWE) 2016, one of the largest events in North America looking at augmented and virtual reality + wearable technology. Amanda explores how the digital is penetrating the physical in conversations with Metaverse Nails, SubPac, Machina, Nuheara, Myant, Octagon Studios, Athos, and Augment. AWE 2016 took...

Fashion tech journalist Amanda Cosco interviews Al Linke of Cat Clutch, an acrylic and LED handbag you can customize with your smartphone. Al explains his journey from creating a one-off concept piece for his wife to creating a viable consumer product.

Fashion tech journalist Amanda Cosco speaks to Randy Rubin, the founder of Crypton and CEO of Crypton, a company that has been pioneering smart fabrics for almost 30 years. Crypton has made a name for itself in the upholstery world by developing high-performance fabrics for furniture that are both stylish and stain-resistant. Now, through the recent acquisition of Nanotex, the company is turning i...

We speak with Zach Pearl, artistic director of Subtle Technologies, a maker meetup turned art tech festival. For its 19th year of festival programming, Subtle Technologies has honed in on the future of fashion with a festival entitled "Seamless Visions: New Textiles + Wearable Technologies." Alex touches on fashion's new multimedia component, and how textiles are one of the oldest t...

You may have heard of smartphones and even smart rings, but what about smart earrings? Today on the show, fashion tech journalist Amanda Cosco sits down with Ashlyn Bird, co-founder of Ear-O-Smart, the world’s first smart earring. While Ear-O-Smart may have started as a direct-to-consumer product, they’ve recently pivoted to focus on offering a universal backing that’s comparable with almost any p...

In this week’s episode of the Electric Runway podcast, fashion tech journalist Amanda Cosco sits down with Nancy Tilbury of XO. When it comes to fashion tech and wearables, Nancy is a visionary, with more than 20 years experience creating content worn on the body. Under the name Studio XO, Nancy along with her team have developed a reputation for making one-off costume and performance pieces for t...

Imagine a future where your clothing comes out of a 3D printer ready-to-wear, no assembly required. This is the dream, and while it’s still a ways away, it’s a dream Aaron Rowley is helping to make a reality with his company Electroloom.

What if you could literally wear your heart on your sleeve? While fashion has always been a form of communication, new advancements in sensors and technologies worn on the body are enabling new forms of human expression. On today's episode, Amanda Cosco sums up MakeFashion before speaking with Kristin Neidlinger of Sensoree. Sensoree is a design studio that focuses on creating wearable bio me...

This weekend we're heading to MakeFashion, a high-tech, high-fashion runway show taking place at the Telus Spark Science Centre in Calgary, Alberta. Models will walk the runway wearing one-of-a-kind wearable art pieces that incorporate emerging technologies, including 3D printing, EEG brain-sensing, and projection mapping. Attendees can expect a spectacle of style—from a cocktail dress that c...

On today's episode, Amanda Cosco speaks with Alex Semenzato, the founder of FashTech, a group with a mission to cultivate community and create a shared language between fashion and technology. Amanda and Alex's conversation touches on everything from biochemically engineered clothing to interactive mirrors. They discuss the different definitions of fashion tech, and how the common denomi...

Fashion and technology are having a moment, and it's not just us noticing. Museums—those vaults of history and culture—are clearly paying attention to the impact of technology on fashion. On today's episode, Amanda Cosco speaks with Michelle Finamore, Senior Curator of 20th and 21st century fashion arts at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, to learn about #TextStyle, their newly opened e...

Electric Runway founder Amanda Cosco takes you inside Silicon Valley to the Poshmark headquarters to meet co-founder Tracy Sun. Poshmark is a leading platform for buying and selling fashion. Poshmark invites you to shop the closets of women across America, and gives you the opportunity to sell items from your closet. While the company may have emerged as a pioneer of recommence —that is, the resel...

If you think wearables are just about counting steps, wait until you meet my guest today. Kate Greer is the Chief Evangelist at Oura Ring, a wellness computer disguised as a ring designed to help you sleep and perform better. Oura differentiates itself from other smart rings on the market by giving you a better picture of your physiology through the lens of sleep. As wearables that count our steps...

This morning CODAME, a non-profit organization with a mission to forward technology and the arts in San Francisco, announced a new venture called CODAME Labs. The lab will focus on cross-discipline collaboration between the fashion and tech industries and help foster relationships between brands and designers. Some of the artists involved include Lisa Lang of ElektroCouture and Behnaz Farahi, who...

Behnaz Farahi is a multidisciplinary designer breathing new life into fashion. Her headline-grabbing garments aren’t just beautiful, they also interact with the world around them. Farahi shares thoughts on Caress of the Gaze, the art project that made her famous, as well as thoughts on the relationship between architecture and fashion design.

He’s computers and she’s couture. Technologist Eric Boyd and fashion designer Wendy Ng have been collaborating on concept pieces for the runway that blend technology and fashion. You may have seen their work at Fashion Art Week Toronto, Cirque-It, Futuera, or even Electric Runway’s launch party in July. Their next collaboration will be for Make Fashion, a high tech, high-fashion runway show taking...

This week on the Electric Runway podcast, Amanda Cosco’s conversation with Parham Aarabi, Founder and CEO of ModiFace, a skin analysis and facial visualization company aiming to change the way we see ourselves. The ModiFace mirror, which made waves at CES this year, allows users to virtually try on new looks via photo-realistic colour rendering technology. The proximity-based user interface means...

On today's episode of the Electric Runway podcast, Amanda Cosco touches on #FashionTech Berlin, a conference on the Future of Fashion organized by Lisa Lang, Founder of ElektroCouture. We also look at VR in fashion, including an innovative new initiative to democratize fashion by Fashion Week Stockholm. AND—she's the founder and executive producer of Startup Fashion Week and a Notable no...

Amanda shares thoughts on CES 2016 from a fashion tech perspective and sits down with two companies reinventing the friendship bracelet to empower young girls in different ways. Gemio is a social wearable inviting girls to connect to one another through technology. Jewelbots is a friendship bracelet for the smartphone era that teaches girls to code.

How long will it be before we're all decked out in 3D printed shoes and self-heating jackets? Friend and colleague Tom Emrich sheds light on the future of fashion and technologies worn on the body. Tom and I also play with a few wearable light garments, including the GER mood sweater from Sensoree, and athletic apparel from Toronto-based Vagalume Visible.

As we wrap our presents for the holidays and wrap up 2015, it's time to look back on the year that was. To help me remember the year in fashion tech, I invited Anna Crooke and Benjamin Tang, co-founders of Raw Finery Studio. RFS is a wearable tech-focused co-working space focused on supporting local fashion tech designers. Our conversation touches on everything from New York Fashion Week to D...