events and sightings:

Lumen Couture at the MakeFashion 2019 Show at Beakerhead Spectacle

We returned to our hometown of Calgary, Alberta to light up the runway for the seventh year in a row.

Designs from our collction, all available for rental. Photo by Larry Kwon.

We recently travelled to our hometown of Calgary, Alberta for the seventh annual MakeFashion event.

Our fashion tech journey started over 7 years ago, with our founder Chelsea Klukas co-founding MakeFashion when she lived in Calgary. After years of producing the events and curating the annual collection, Klukas was inspired to launch the Lumen Couture line.

The goal of MakeFashion is to elevate the intersection of arts, creativity, and fashion with technology and engineering. Our sister organization, MakeFashion Edu, introduces children to STEM through hands-on fashion workshops. This year we were sponsored by Calgary Arts Development, which allowed us to pay generous bursaries to all of our participating designers.

StarCode+MakeFashion (by Chenlin Zhang, Li Zeng, Shannon Hoover, and Maria Hoover. Photo by Jeff McDonald.

Erina Kashihara. Photo by Jeff McDonald.

Our line debuted our soft launch at last year’s event, so we were excited to return with our preview of 2020 designs. We showcased four new designs: the flame dress, stardust jumpsuit and hoop skirt, crystalline dress, and the ethereal tulle skirt paired with a gold corset.

The ethereal tulle skirt and stardust jumpsuit are available now for sale, and the other designs are available as rentals, to be debuted for sale in 2020. The stardust belt is available for pre-order to ship to customers in late October.

Our stardust jumpsuit with hoop skirt. Photo by Larry Kwon.

DICIB? – Does It Come In Black? (by Shae Barry, Dean Brennan, Simon Kowalchuk). Photo by Jeff McDonald.

Our crystalline dress, available for rental. Photo by Jeff Mcdonald.

Launched in June 2012, MakeFashion has grown into the world’s largest Fashion Technology community, having developed over 250 wearable tech garments and showcased at over 80 international events. We introduce fashion designers and artists to the exciting world of wearables through a series of informative, hands-on, designer-lead workshops. Our annual gala in Calgary, Canada debuts new collections of innovative fashion technology combined with theatre and performance. MakeFashion has showcased unique projects at fashion and maker events around the world including New York, Rome, and Shenzhen.

MakeFashion 2019 is presented by CADA.
Models: Structure Model Management.
Makeup Lead: Ivonne Arsenault. Hair Style Lead: Michelle Swalsh

Indi City (by Angel Aubichon, Alexandra Manitopyes). Photo by Jeff McDonald.

Our crystalline dress, available for rental. Photo by Vian Esterhuizen.

Details of the lineup. Photo by Vian Esterhuizen.

White Wolf Creations (by Sydney Pratte, Becky Pratte). Photo by Vian Esterhuizen.

About the Author: Chelsea Klukas is a serial tech entrepreneur and has worked as design leadership in several startups and global companies including Amazon and Facebook. She is currently a product Design Manager at Oculus, and her product leadership experience includes shipping the Echo Look, Amazon’s first fashion-focused AI-enabled voice assistant, BeauCoo, a social shopping startup that helped women find clothes that fit, and design lead at Poynt, a cross-platform location-based app that pioneered augmented reality features in the early days of iOS.. She is also a co-founder of FashionTech runway organization MakeFashion and founder of Lumen Couture.

Chelsea Klukas is an award-winning interdisciplinary technology artist, and was recent granted her Doctorate of Fine Arts (h.c.) in 2019. Her Lumen Couture projector hat, a hat that includes real-time projection mapping and visual inputs to display video on a dress, has gained international attention as the first of its kind.