This Shocking Metal Dress Can Withstand 500,000 Volts

Futurist designer Anouk Wipprecht designed an armored dress that withstood 500,000 volts (and looked fashionable while doing it).

by Beckett Mufson

August 8, 2014, 5:20pm

Images via

By creating this plate mail dress, haute couture technologist, robotic dress-designer, and Fergie stylist Anouk Wipprecht has merged Medieval battlefield sensibilities with shocking turn-of-the-century chic. Replete with a spiked helmet that can conduct electricity, at the MakerFaire 2014 in San Mateo, California, she demonstrated the dress's shocking capabilities by performing with ArcAttack— the same band that electrified David Blaine while playing rock songs with a Tesla Coil— and fashionably withstanding nearly half a million volts. As the band reached the climax of the very epic In The Hall of the Mountain King, Wipprecht stepped in between the two coils, gazing serenely at the audience as the electricity passed through through her clothing. "Normally I work with fashion models,” Wipprecht told Popular Science. “But this time, nobody else wanted to wear it.”

Consisting of a 600-ring chainmail suit, a stylish plate metal dress, and a large metal helmet, the suit acted as a Faraday cage, partially to safely conduct the electricity, and partially because spiked clothing just looks awesome.

No stranger to integrating electricity into fashion, Wipprecht often uses electronics in her work, including a 3D-printed smoke dress, which cloaks its wearer by emitting bursts of smoke, andIntimacy, a dress collaboration with Studio Roosegaard, that becomes transparent when it interacts with electrical currents.

Check out the newly released footage (above), which offers key insights into how the dress looks and works when conducting a charge equivalent to around 800 electric eels. You can also learn more about her dress— and how to make one yourself—with this handy instructable. But if you do choose to build your own plate mail dress, we must suggest you abstain from doing the Electric Slide— even chainmail can't handle a million volts of cliche.