Anouk Wipprecht joins immersive dining experience featuring 3D printed garments

Thu, Jan 5 - Sun, Dec 31  2023

Journey NYC - New York Consulate Region

If you are tired of your meals sitting next to a flickering light and want a more interactive experience, then you’re in luck. Dutch “FashionTech” designer Anouk Wipprecht recently took to social media to announce Journey 360, a new immersive dining experience, which opens to the general public January 5th in NYC.

The dinner is a five course prix fixe meal and comes alive with interactive storytelling, 360° video, and Broadway performers. It’s an innovative combination of food, fashion, and technology and could change the way we interact at the dinner table.

Anouk is no stranger to innovation and has become well-known for her engineered fashion over the years. If you haven’t seen her spider dress yet, google it immediately. It’s amazing. This time, however, she had a new challenge in mind: to collaborate with Broadway producer Marc Routh. The collective wanted to create a truly immersive dining experience, spending the last several months collaborating with chefs, designers, and performers to bring this idea to reality.

The dresses that are walking around in the restaurant are electronic, robotic and 3D printed. The designer 3D printed them once again at Shapeways in New York. Anouk used once more Selective Laser Sintering (SLS), a robust process that solidifies material layer-by-layer, TPU parts are durable and can include interlocking features, to create her designs.

This time she also printed in TPU Rubber over the HP Multi Jet Fusion Printers which made the pieces both flexible and comfortable, while integrated with technology and electronics. ‘TPU has a rubber-like flexibility, good impact, and is resistance durable so it’s perfect for this kind of designing’ says the designer.

“With electronics becoming smaller and smaller, the possibilities became endless at the beginning of this century. What I have been trying to do for the past 20 years is connecting our bodies to electronic and robotic (fashion) design. However, what does it mean when we can connect technological-expressive garments to our bodies, body-signals and even emotions? What dialogues can we trigger? This is what I am exploring with designs like these.”

Experience Journey for yourself: https://journeyexperience.nyc

About Anouk Wipprecht

What does fashion lack? “Microcontrollers” according to Dutch based Hi-Tech Fashion Designer and Innovator Anouk Wipprecht. As she is working in the emerging field of “FashionTech”; a rare combination of fashion design combined with engineering, science and interaction/user experience design. Producing an impressive body of tech-enhanced designs bringing together fashion and technology in an unusual way: she creates technological couture; with systems around the body that tend towards artificial intelligence; projected as ‘host’ systems on the human body, her designs move, breath, and react to the environment around them.

Strangely ahead of her time; Anouk combines the latest in science and technology to make fashion an experience that transcends mere appearances. Sensors embedded in the design monitor the space around the wearer, and body-sensors check in on stress levels as comfort or anxiety. Her Intel-Edison based ‘Spider Dress’ is a perfect example of this aesthetic, where sensors and moveable arms on the dress help to create a more defined boundary of personal space while employing a fierce style. “This robotic dress attacks when you come too close” she mentions. Facilitating and augmenting the interactions we have with ourselves and our surroundings in an bespoke manner. Other than handheld devices, Wipprecht researches how we can interface in new ways with the world around us through our wardrobe.

Partnering up with companies such as American multinational technology company INTEL, software producer Autodesk, internet giants Google and Microsoft, car brand AUDI, crystal creator Swarovski, and leading 3D printing innovators amongst others – she researches and develops how our future wardrobe would look as we continue to embed technology into what we wear.

She works/travels between NYC, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Miami and Amsterdam.

About Journey

Journey brings dining and theatre to NYC in a whole new way. Dinner IS the theatre! Your plates will come to life with interactive storytelling from Broadway performers and 360-degree videos, creating a multi-sensory culinary experience that will bring you and your guests around the world and beyond.

Journey 360: Journey 360, is a five-course prix fixe meal at communal tables that seats you and your guests in the middle of it all – with entertainment and videos happening all around you! A wholly original culinary and entertainment concept, it combines fine dining with an immersive digital experience.

Journey Odyssey: Guests to this ticketed event will be able to participate in this multisensory culinary journey in smaller groups – at tables accommodating 2 to 6 people. Broadway’s most talented performers bring to life a series of comic vignettes to introduce each of the five courses. Have your appetizer in Lisbon, your salad in the South of France, and your entrée in Rio de Janeiro with equal measures inventive cuisine and diverting humor.