Intimacy 2.0: The Dress That Knows When You’re Aroused

We all want to know what others are really feeling and what better way to find out than to have their clothes turn transparent when they’re aroused?

Dutch designer Daan Roosegaarde created a clothing line called “Intimacy 2.0,” a series of barely-there dresses made of black or white strips reminiscent of the look of opaque frosted glass.

In an interview last month, he stated that each “dress contains certain sensors which can measure the heartbeat of the wearer. When a heartbeat is captured the smart foils will be activated and become transparent.”

It sounds much more effective than those mood rings from your childhood. He calls his high-tech fabric “smart opaque e-foils” which consists of “wireless technologies, electronics, LEDs, copper and other media,” according to the Studio Roosegaarde website.

It’s an avant-garde twist on X-ray vision except that the wearer wants you to see what’s underneath her clothing. As a wearable technology, one of these futuristic get-ups may make the wearer feel like a lusty heroine in a sci-fi adventure. Perhaps an updated Barbarella in clothes even more unwearable than the plastic and metal dresses of Paco Rabanne’s Space Age fashions.

Which brings us to the question— who’d wear these dresses? Certainly those who want an extra helping of titillation in the bedroom— if they can afford it. It certainly isn’t for the faint of heart. One wonders: what if you’re running late and you need to make the sprint of your lifetime? What if you get mugged on a street corner? The time you least want to be naked will only leave you feeling embarrassed and even more vulnerable.

It would be a good fit for people with exhibitionist tendencies, such as some celebrities, who’d most likely to wear it on the red carpet. It’d certainly give rise to a field day for perverts and peeping Toms who’ve always wished to have one of Superman’s powers. On the public nudity scale, you’d be somewhere between a wardrobe malfunction and indecent exposure but at least you’d be the talk of the town for days to come. Publicity, anyone?

Introduced in 2012 and exhibited at various museums, the dresses will soon be joined by their male counterparts. Roosegaarde states in a recent VICE interview that Intimacy 3.0 is in “in development” and with the help of his team, he “started the Intimacy suit for men—it’s a perfect fit for the banking world, [because] it becomes transparent when they lie!”

Will we all be naked truth-seekers in the future? Will we all wear our hearts— and quite literally, our body parts, on our sleeves? It remains to be seen.