With Mollycoddle, Christine Liu wanted to explore the relationship that people have with their clothes.
Mollycoddle is a dress with a hunger for love and attention. Its wearer needs the dress for obvious (coverage) or nonobvious (personal) reasons, and in turn, the dress needs the wearer. Mollycoddle wants to be touched and caressed by the wearer on a semi-regular basis, but it can be happy being touched by other people, too.

The dress is sort of an externalisation of the wearer’s need for affection and attention. If the dress doesnt get touched or hugged in a while, it gets lonely, and the same goes for the wearer.

If the dress doesnt get loved enough, it gets needier and starts squeezing the wearer, begging for a touch or two. It will send vibrations as well. First it’s a little huggy-plead which gets more aggressive with time. If its begging is ignored the thing will squeeze you to, ostensibly, death.

Christine Liu explained that “the touch part works, the squeeze part is still ongoing. i would like to have a corset-like frame in there to do that, but for the current prototype i have some naggy pager motors in there for vibrations along the kidneys and a tie-around necklace with its ends connected to some motors for squeezes around the neck. i didnt want to kill anyone in the construction of this thing, so i’m treading carefully.”

Thanks Christine for having answered my questions!

Picture from the Seamless show.