This Dress Turns Transparent When You Tweet

Another day, another weird dress that makes you look naked. This time, it's not about eroticism but about technology. x.pose is a dress that gradually becomes transparent as you interact with social media. The idea is to remind the wearer of how vulnerable we are when we overshare on the Internet.

As Jezebel explains, the dress was created by Xuedi Chen and Pedro Oliveira as part of Interactive Telecommunications, which is their thesis project at NYU, and is made of a flexible 3D mesh layered over reactive displays. x.pose connects to your smartphone and pieces of the display become see-through as you go about your day tweeting and Facebooking. The more you tweet and "like" and update your status, the less opaque the x.pose dress will become. x.pose is divided into sections corresponding with neighborhoods and so far only appears to work in New York.

Despite the erotic nature of a dress that essentially disappears, Chen and Oliveira insist that x.pose is a political, not sexual, statement. According to The Daily Dot, "With the tagline, “In the digital realm, we are naked all the time,” x.pose is a reflection of the idea that while we wouldn’t be caught dead naked in public, we not only allow ourselves to be naked in cyberspace, we enthusiastically consent to it."

However, I'd like to know why they made a dress instead of a more androgynous piece like a jacket or shirt. Women aren't the only people who expose too much online, so it seems unnecessary to design a (generally) female-specific article of clothing, especially since women are so blatantly sexualized in ways men don't experience as often.

Think of x.pose as a wearable art project and not a functional piece to add to your wardrobe (although the dress is sort of cute — maybe Rihanna can pull it off). Learn more in the official video below.