Japanese Fashion House Turns Robes Into Pixel-Packed LED Displays

March 6, 2025 by Dave Haynes

Somewhere, there is a dreamer entrepreneur sitting in front of a monitor right now, having watched the video below, scratching her or his chin and and thinking about clothing as digital ad displays.

Guaranteed.

I’m not suggesting it’s a good idea – just that someone will be noodling the idea of garments becoming walking posters for brands – based on what was shown this week in Paris on a fashion runway.

The Japanese fashion house ANREALAGE had an over-the-top showing this week in a Paris cathedral of its Autumn-Winter 2025-26 collection. Designer Kunihiko Morinaga, says the description, imagines a future where black clothes serve as a SCREEN for displaying any color, pattern, message or graphic. Garments morph into mediums for diffusing messages, reflecting and transforming a stream of visuals and information – the SCREEN-Age equivalent of the humble sandwich-board man of the early 20th century, or slogan T-shirts.

These SCREEN garments change instantaneously according to the wearer’s mood, drawing from a galaxy of downloadable designs rendered in vivid digital RGB colors unreproducible in CMYK. Patterns of light emerge and fade, giving rise to new and continuous visual expressions. The clothing – like life itself – never stops evolving; there is no final form.  

Each piece worn by the models is said to have roughly 10,000 LED light pixels, somehow or other woven in or applied. As the video below shows, this is much more about art and attention-seeking than anything practical. Any brand would want to see 100,000 LEDs, not 10,000, to sharpen the visuals.

But as noted, someone, somewhere, will still think there’s a digital OOH or marketing play with this sort of thing.

My advice to that person … stop before you start.

Maybe there’s something there in 5-10 years, but right now, no.