This issue contains writing by: Bruce Sterling, Ian Watson, Rudy Rucker, and Kathleen Ann Goonan, among many others.

The chapter from Yarn is A Peculiar Fashion Business.

Wigs by Kate Cushack

Lady Gaga and Marie Antoinette eat your hearts out.

Actually, eat just half your hearts, wrap the rest, and store it in your chill chests because your wigs are… wait for it… made of Saran Wrap!

Artist, creative thinker, jewelery maker Kate Cusack has created completely sustainable and environmentally… hmm. Strike that. Clever, beautiful and oh, so wrong wigs of plastic wrap! You’ll never look at leftovers the same.

There is an exciting “a-ha” moment when someone realizes that there is more to the design they are looking at–from sponges to saran-wrap to zippers.

Link: Kate Cushack

It fuses traditional arts, digital electronics, interactivity, and data scraping with contemporary art. It is a new media canvas, woven from information, using fiber optic thread to carry information and data from the internet in the form of light.

Our inspiration came from the idea that the Jacquard loom was the first computer using punch cards. We wanted to expand on this to marry traditional hand-woven crafts with information technologies. The element of the hand is a critical factor through all stages of this project: from weaving on a loom, to the way the electronics are integrated with the fiber optic threads.

Some unusual if mighty uncomfortable looking clothes!

Vanilla “k” from Alexander Reeder on Vimeo.

via fashioningtech.com

Directed by Galen Summer

A great movie about a tailor. In my upcoming YARN, is narrated by Mr. Cedar who is the tailor from GREY. There’s a section where he’s talking about shaping the men who come to him. The same idea here, only with President Clinton!

M.I.T. researchers say they’ve developed a fiber that would allow clothing to eventually do those things like record or produce sound with piezoelectric fibers.

vis Scientific American

The New Dystopians

Jon Armstrong, author of Grey (Nightshade, $14.95)

Paolo Bacigalupi, author of The Windup Girl (Nightshade, $14.95)

and Scott Westerfeld, author of Leviathan (Simon and Schuster, $19.99)

Dystopia has been a popular genre since before the word existed. There is little more powerful or indeed more darkly gleeful object of imagination than a ruined corrupted vision of the world as we know it. If the form has seen something of a resurgence in popularity recently, it’s only the possibilities for dissolution inherent in our own lives that are to blame. Well, that and these three authors.

Jon Armstring’s debut novel Grey gives us a brutal, often hilarious future too easily recognizeable to those of us living in chic downtown Manhattan. His America is fractured into vastly wealthy cliques, defining themselves by their allegiance to different fashion magazines. Their decadence, naturally, is built on the back of a viciously poor and despoiled lower class. This was one of our favorite SF books of 2007, and rumor has it that we can expect a sequel later this year. If we plead hard enough maybe we can get Jon to give us an advance listen.

What Would Holden Caulfield Wear?

John Jannuzzi of Textbook pulls together fresh-off-the-runway, high-fashion looks for fictional characters and historical figures, answering that eternal question: What Would Holden Caulfield Wear?

Via MetaFilter