This 2,550-Hour Dress Blew Real Bubbles at the Met Gala

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The Met Gala is probably the most popular and glamorous fashion event in the Western world. Whichever way you feel about the organizers and having such a lavish event in these times, you can’t deny that it is very much talked about, especially on social media, due to the personalities who attend and, of course, what they’re wearing.

This event is also a chance for designers to showcase their more experimental works. One of the most eye-catching and interesting dresses we saw this year is the Airo dress, worn by Olympic freestyle skier and model Eileen Gu and designed by Iris van Herpen in collaboration with artist duo A.A. Murakami. The dress features 15,000 iridescent glass bubbles and, believe it or not, it actually released real floating bubbles live on the red carpet.

Designer: Iris van Herpen

The dress’s silhouette is sculptural and mini in length, giving off a cloud-like, ethereal effect that instantly captured eyes on the red carpet. Van Herpen described the bubbles as a reflection of human anatomy, “which is composed of 99.9% empty space,” and the piece is also a nod to her ongoing fascination with biotech couture. Olympic triple medalist Eileen Gu is a wonderfully fitting muse, as the concept philosophically mirrors the kind of weightless, almost gravity-defying precision her sport demands on the snow slopes.

This is not just a simple dress adorned with bubbles. Each of the 15,000 iridescent glass bubbles was hand-moulded and then attached to the bodice using UV light, a meticulous process that required 2,550 hours of work across 15 weeks, carried out by a dedicated team of specialists in couture, science, and computational design. Underneath the skirt, hidden microprocessors pressurized gas and released real, floating bubbles in timed sequences. Everything you saw on that red carpet was completely real, with no filters and no CGI. It was a pure, breathtaking collaboration between fashion, art, and science.

What truly elevates the Airo dress from couture to living art is the partnership with A.A. Murakami. Alexander Groves and Azusa Murakami, who work between London and Japan, are celebrated for transforming ephemeral materials like steam, light, and air into immersive living installations. Their renowned “Floating World” exhibition is a perfect example of how they blur the line between the tangible and the invisible. Remarkably, the Airo dress marks the very first time they have applied their artistic philosophy to a wearable garment, and the result is nothing short of extraordinary.

What makes this piece particularly compelling is the question it poses while you’re simply looking at it: where does the body end and the space around it begin? The cloud of iridescent glass and the soft stream of real bubbles dissolving into the air around Eileen Gu created something genuinely hypnotic. It wasn’t just a dress being worn; it was a statement unfolding in real time. The silhouette seemed to blur the lines of her athletic frame, giving her an almost otherworldly quality that no CGI could ever replicate.

Van Herpen is no stranger to this kind of boundary-pushing. Her previous viral creation was a luminous dress made of living algae, crafted in collaboration with a bio-engineer and biophysicists from the University of Amsterdam. With every headline-making piece, she continues to challenge what fashion can be, not just as clothing, but as a vehicle for scientific exploration, philosophy, and wonder.

And perhaps that’s the most exciting thing about the Airo dress. In a sea of beautiful gowns at the Met Gala, this one made people stop and ask questions about science, about art, about the human body, and about what fashion is even for. At a time when so much of what we see has been filtered, edited, or AI-generated, there’s something incredibly refreshing about a dress that creates its own quiet spectacle from the inside out. Real bubbles. Real craft. Real wonder. That’s the kind of fashion that stays with you long after the cameras have gone.

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Your Samsung Galaxy Watch will soon predict sudden fainting before it happens

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Fitness trackers and smartwatches are great at monitoring various body parameters, so we can learn from the input and take care of our health and lifestyle. While we are on top of the calorie count, steps walked, and stress levels, we are often negligent about how these smartwatches with heart rate monitoring and SpO2 detection can help with preventive care. Alerting us ahead of time when something is not right with the body.

Amid other interesting features like heart irregularity and fall detection, the Samsung Galaxy Watch is now getting another new feature. The Galaxy Watch is tested to be able to predict fainting caused by vasovagal syncope (VVS). A preventive care option that can help up to 40% of people who “experience vasovagal syncope over their lifetime.”

Designer: Samsung

Samsung in a collaborative clinical study with Chung-Ang University Gwangmyeong Hospital in South Korea, has developed a technique to monitor vasovagal syncope with high accuracy. The technique is possible using a Galaxy Watch, which, through the obtained bio-signals, can successfully predict impending fainting episodes up to five minutes in advance with 84.6 percent accuracy, Samsung notes in its press brief.

With its ability to predict fainting episodes before they happen, the Galaxy Watch should be able to offer preventive care to people struggling with vasovagal syncope. VVS is a common condition, and not dangerous in itself, but sudden falls and unattended episodes can leave patients with serious injuries, including a concussion.

Professor Junhwan Cho from the Cardiology department of the participating hospital informs that “Up to 40% of people experience vasovagal syncope over their lifetime, with one-third experiencing recurrent episodes.” If patients can receive early warning signs, they can get to a safe place or call for help. This can help reduce injuries and in cases, even prevent them.

In the collaborative clinical study, a total of 132 patients with suspected vasovagal syncope were tested. VVS fainting generally happens when a person’s blood pressure and heart rate abruptly drop. Reasons for this can be different, but the body’s response is often the same: fainting! The Galaxy Watch, with its photoplethysmography (PPG) sensor, was used to analyze the heart rate variability (HRV) data with an AI algorithm and it was successfully found to predict impending fainting episodes with great accuracy.

Samsung does not share as to when this feature will be commercially available on its Galaxy Watch series. But we learn via its press release that the Korean tech giant desires to work on “personalized, preventive health solutions,” and enhance the health monitoring capabilities of its wearables (including the smartwatch) through “collaboration with leading medical institutions.”

 

 

 

 

The post Your Samsung Galaxy Watch will soon predict sudden fainting before it happens first appeared on Yanko Design.

This Little Coffee Tool Fixes a V60 Problem You Didn’t Know You Had

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Somewhere between your gooseneck kettle and your burr grinder sits a problem nobody in the coffee gear industry bothered to productize until now. It is not glamorous, it does not involve motors or digital displays, and it will not show up in a roundup of the year’s best brewing hardware from the usual outlets. SAQ design, working out of Seoul, built the Filter Presso anyway, because the problem is real and the existing solution, which is essentially hoping your filter stays put, is not actually a solution. This is a precision metal tool designed to seal your V60 paper filter against the dripper walls before you add a single gram of coffee.

The Presso itself is a fanlike arrangement of metal fins on a tapered handle, angled at exactly 60 degrees to match the V60’s cone geometry. You lower it into an empty rinsed filter, the fins press the paper flush against the dripper walls, and then you add your grounds on top. When a filter loses contact with those walls mid-brew, water bypasses the coffee bed through the gap, extraction goes uneven, and the cup suffers in ways that are genuinely difficult to diagnose through the usual variables. The Presso closes that bypass before the brew begins, and the gaps between the fins keep water moving freely once it does.

Designer: SAQ Design

The specificity of this tool is the whole point. SAQ built it exclusively for the Hario V60, the most widely used dripper in specialty coffee, and that single-platform focus shows in the geometry. A 60-degree fin angle is not a design flourish, it is the V60’s cone angle, and matching it exactly is what makes the seal work. A more generalist tool trying to serve every dripper on the market would have compromised on that precision, and the compromised version would have been considerably less useful. SAQ made a deliberate call to go narrow, and the engineering is tighter for it.

What makes the Presso worth taking seriously as a piece of product design, beyond the functional logic, is the material execution. The fin structure reads as a precision-machined metal object in a way that most coffee accessories do not. Most of what gets sold into this space is either plastic or ceramic, which is fine for the dripper itself but feels like a missed opportunity when you are talking about a tool meant to be handled deliberately as part of a ritual brew process. The Presso has the weight and finish of something you pick up with intention, which fits the V60 context well. Pour-over already attracts brewers who enjoy the process as much as the result, and this slots into that dynamic naturally.

The practical question, as always with a tool this specific, is whether the problem it solves is one you actually experience. If you brew light roasts at finer grind settings, where bed resistance is higher and filter lift-off is more likely, the Presso addresses a real and recurring variable. If you are pulling a medium roast through a coarser grind with a gentle controlled pour, the gap between your current results and what the Presso might deliver is probably narrower. Either way, the underlying engineering is sound.

The design went through a serious spread of 3D-printed iterations before landing here, spirals, coiled forms, disc geometries, progressively refined rib configurations, all tested before SAQ arrived at the final fin arrangement. The finished object looks inevitable in the way that well-resolved designs always do, which is usually the clearest sign that the process behind it was anything but.

The post This Little Coffee Tool Fixes a V60 Problem You Didn’t Know You Had first appeared on Yanko Design.