With “SKIN,” ANREALAGE imagines garments that can change their appearance without being replaced. The experiment opens a broader question: how will our relationship with fashion change when newness can exist within the same object?
By Nicolò Di Stefano
A dress changes color while the person wearing it stands before us. Its surface transforms, one configuration giving way to another. For a moment, the qualities that seemed to define that garment—its color, its pattern, its recognizable appearance—become temporary.
It is easy to remain caught in the spectacle. To follow the transformation on a screen, try to understand the mechanism, share the video. But ANREALAGE’s Spring/Summer 2027 collection raises a question that outlasts the surprise: if a garment can take on another appearance, where does the need to buy a new one begin?
Presented on September 29, 2026, during Paris Fashion Week, “SKIN” includes six dresses incorporating E Ink Prism 3, an electronic paper technology that enables their surfaces to change color. Designer Kunihiko Morinaga brings a material into fashion that allows appearance itself to become variable.
The result offers a starting point for reconsidering the relationship between technology and clothing. When innovation helps design, produce, or sell a dress, it operates along the path leading to the object. When it enters the garment’s surface and enables it to transform, it also intervenes in the relationship we might build with that object over time.
Technology Already Belongs to Fashion’s History
To discuss technology as a newcomer to fashion is to overlook how profoundly it has already shaped the discipline.
In 2016, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology examined the relationship between handwork and machine production. Through haute couture and ready-to-wear, it questioned a familiar hierarchy: the hand as the guardian of uniqueness, the machine as the instrument of repetition. The garments revealed how closely those practices were intertwined.
The presence of a circuit, then, does not automatically place a garment outside the culture of craftsmanship. It asks us to understand the expressive possibilities it introduces and the skills it requires.
Morinaga has worked within this territory for years. Born in Tokyo in 1980, he founded ANREALAGE in 2003, moving from patchwork constructions toward experiments with geometric forms and reflective materials. His Paris debut followed in 2014. Throughout his practice, technical innovation becomes a way of questioning what we see and the conditions that allow us to see it.
With “SKIN,” that investigation enters a particularly intimate space. The changing surface is the one we choose to present to others.
A Skin We Can Rewrite
The collection’s title connects two seemingly distant experiences: the skin of living organisms, which can shed and renew itself, and the skins of digital avatars, through which we modify an onscreen identity. Morinaga imagines clothing as a renewable surface, even as the person within it remains.
The comparison matters because we are already familiar with changeable appearances on a screen. In a physical wardrobe, however, change often requires another object: a different shirt, another print, a new combination.
“SKIN” brings these conditions closer through distinct processes. Scales 3D-printed using SEKISAI’s Effective Skin technology change their appearance according to the viewing angle. In the six electronic dresses, approximately 1,000 to 2,000 scales per garment are individually controlled to alter colors and configurations. Electronic paper does not emit light like an LED; the surface itself changes.
That technical distinction has a visual consequence. Movement can emerge from the encounter between material, body, and viewpoint, or through a controlled transformation of the material itself. Decoration acquires a dimension of time. The dress encompasses what it can become.
For the designer, this means creating a succession of possibilities. For the viewer, it means accepting that a single image can no longer fully describe the garment.
The Desire for Newness Within the Same Object
Here lies the collection’s most compelling cultural proposition.
A transformable garment could, at least in principle, allow us to distinguish between two desires that fashion consumption often brings together: wanting another object and wanting another image of ourselves.
Some purchases respond to necessity, fit, or the pleasure of a particular fabric. Others answer a desire to interrupt familiarity. We seek something that produces a different feeling, accompanies a new phase, or makes a change visible.
If that variation could occur within the same garment, newness would take a different form. We could continue to recognize an object while discovering another expression of it.
Six runway dresses do not establish the end of seasonal replacement. They do, however, make a different relationship between continuity and transformation imaginable. The object remains; part of its visual identity renews itself.
That possibility also touches clothing’s emotional value. A garment can become important because it accompanies us, holds the memory of an occasion, or falls across our body in a way we know by heart. The ability to change its appearance could add further chapters to that familiarity.
Who Will Design the Possibilities?
When a garment’s appearance becomes changeable, the field of creative decisions expands.
The designer must determine which transformations belong within the project, how they unfold, and how much freedom they leave to the wearer. A restricted palette can preserve a precise vision; greater flexibility can invite more personal expression. Both choices will influence the object’s character.
Authorship also becomes more layered. The presentation of “SKIN” describes a network of connections beneath the electronic scales and the use of artificial intelligence to map the circuitry. Here, AI participates in the realization of a physical system, helping organize the complexity required for visual transformation.
Creative value then depends on the ability to give different areas of expertise a shared direction. Textile, electronics, construction, and programming must contribute to an experience that makes sense on the body.
Technical precision becomes persuasive when it supports an aesthetic decision. A possible change must also be a desirable one.
Longevity Will Have to Be Designed
The prospect of obtaining multiple expressions from one garment invites questions about sustainability, but it does not establish an environmental benefit.
Assessing an electronic garment would require understanding the lifespan of its components, its maintenance requirements, its repairability, and how its materials are handled at the end of use. Transformability describes a function; environmental value requires an assessment of the entire object.
There is also a question rooted in everyday experience. Will we be able to keep, repair, and continue wearing these garments with the same independence with which we now take a coat to a tailor?
If innovation is to accompany its wearer for longer, care must be part of the design from the beginning. Accessible components, understandable instructions, and the possibility of repair will influence a garment’s value as much as its capacity to surprise.
Otherwise, the ambition to extend its life could encounter a limit within the very technology that makes its transformation possible.
The Future After the Surprise
In Morinaga’s vision, the phoenix connects the collection to rebirth: color disappears and returns, the surface passes through an ending to find another beginning. The reference allows transformation to be understood as part of the garment’s imagined life.
The runway gives that idea a few minutes. A wardrobe would ask it to last for years.
That distance is where technology’s significance for fashion will be tested: in our ability to live with an object, understand it, care for it, and continue to desire it after its mechanism has ceased to astonish us.
ANREALAGE opens a question that already belongs to the present. How much of the newness we seek could emerge from a richer relationship with what we own?
Perhaps the next dress will still be waiting to be bought. Perhaps, one day, it will be the one we already possess, at the moment it reveals another possibility.
Editor’s Note
Living in an era increasingly shaped by technology and artificial intelligence, I find myself drawn to what these developments mean for the way we create, express ourselves, and give things value. As an editor, I want to understand these changes and share the questions they raise for me, including those I cannot yet answer.
ANREALAGE’s “SKIN” captures both my curiosity and my unease. I am fascinated by the possibility that a garment could evolve with us, offering new expressions while remaining part of our lives. Yet I also wonder what happens to our freedom of choice when the things we wear begin to depend on systems we may neither understand nor control.
My fear is that we might become so absorbed by what technology makes possible that we stop asking what we actually want from it. Where do the designer’s intuition, the maker’s knowledge, and the wearer’s personal connection find their place?
Through QEditorial, I want to keep exploring that uncertainty with openness and a critical eye. I can admire an invention and still question the future it proposes. For me, that is where this conversation becomes worth having.
QEditorial Magazine
Image credits: ANREALAGE Spring/Summer 2027 “SKIN,” Paris Fashion Week. Images sourced from the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode (FHCM) collection gallery. Photographer credit was not specified in the source.
Images accompany this article solely for editorial commentary and reporting. All rights remain with their respective copyright holders. For credit corrections or image-related inquiries, please contact QEditorial.
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