"maiin-maiin" was born in 2009, soon after Hanno (my partner and husband) gave me a sewing machine (which I had wished for) for my birthday. After working with video and digital media since the early 90s, I suddenly had the urge to work with my hands again. I began to make clothes for children based on bought patterns. And like all people who make, and there are a lot of them out there as we now know, especially through blogs and DIY communities - hello to my architect cousin Nik in Kuala Lumpur whose passion is making bags - I could not help but modify them to suit my own desires.
I became fascinated by add-ons and leave-outs, by creating change with very little and by interacting with clothes. As an interactive media designer, I just cannot get this out of my blood. Even my neighbour Uta, who is a part of a theatre group based in the neighbourhood, noticed this link.
Below the first maiin-maiin prototypes, dated November, 2009. Sorry for the repeating texts. These images were part of a presentation.
I started to play around with other fastenings like Velcro. More important in the development was that I began to work with detachable elements like the straps in the example below, which can be taken off. The flowers are attached to the straps and the dress using Velcro.
Being one who works with moving images, I came up with a skirt which I call the timeline. I continued to use the crocheted flowers I had made to demonstrate the idea behind this. The elements could be silkscreened images, numbers, letters or whatever.
Since then, maiin-maiin interactive clothes have developed further. It is great to see others trying out ideas in this direction. Recently I discovered Sass Factory on Indiegogo, the international crowd funding platform.