If you’re one of those people who doesn’t like to repeat an outfit, thank Adobe. In 2023, the tech giant revealed Project Primrose, a digital dress that ensures you’ll always have something new to wear. Changing colors and shifting patterns, the dress is not only wearable technology, it’s also wearable art.
Project Primose made its debut at Adobe MAX 2023, worn by one of the key individuals behind its development, Christine Dierk. Dierk was a UC Berkeley graduate student working with wearable technologies when Adobe tapped into her expertise. Initially joining as an intern, she was brought on as part of the research team that prototyped and developed the dress.
The digital dress required the sewing skills and technical knowledge that Dierk brought to the table. All told, 1,182 individual petals, each shimmering like sequins, were hand-sewn onto the dress. In addition, the 74 driver boards that also ran the dress had to be sewn on by hand.
“The petals were a geometry problem. To accommodate the shape of the dress, we needed to use wider petals in places where the dress is wider and narrower petals in the narrow places. We had 16 different sizes to keep everything looking uniform,” shared Dierk. “Then we created a petal-by-petal map in Illustrator. Attaching them was like a paint-by-number project.”
When Dierk hit the stage and began changing her dress, the crowd at Adobe MAX went wild. Flipping from silver to a dark gray and back, the dress instantly transformed before the audience’s eyes. Different patterns appeared, and even seemed to move along with Dierk as she turned from side to side.
Soon after Abode MAX, videos of Project Primrose hit the internet and quickly went viral. While it was odd for Dierk to see her face all over TikTok and Instagram, she knew it was a sign of what they’d accomplished.
“I hope the big takeaway is that fashion doesn’t have to be static—it can be dynamic and interactive,” she shared. “I hope it inspires people in technology and fashion design, and anyone who does making.”
Moving into 2024, Project Primrose continued to evolve and even walked the runway at New York Fashion Week thanks to a collaboration with Christian Cowan. While we don’t see any updates in 2025, the digital dress remains a viral moment that shifted the world’s collective imagination about fashion and technology.
Source: Project Primrose: The story behind the digital dress-gone-viral
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