The Indian wearables startup that’ll have you dazzling like Claire Danes

If you’ve ever wanted to see celebrities decked out in the weirdest and most expensive fashion, the Met Gala may be a good place to start. Every spring, designers and Hollywood get together and celebrate couture fashion, which translates to people getting all dolled up and strange. This year’s theme was “Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology,” which basically gave us variations on the theme of “robot” – everything from droid-armed Kanye West to a very shiny, rubbery Beyonce.

Zac Posen had a brighter idea, sending Homeland star Claire Danes to the red carpet in what looked like a conventional gown. Can’t go wrong with the classics, right?

And then the lights turned out.

The dress’s fiber optic and LED designs took over, and all of a sudden, Claire looked like a glow-in-the-dark princess.

If you’re not a primetime television star with primetime television money, you can still illuminate your closet with a t-shirt developed by Hyderabad-based company Broadcast Wearables. The t-shirt, which has already raised 340 percent of its original Indiegogo goal from over 1,000 backers, has LED panels on the front and/or back, depending on your preference.

The prints are programmable via a free smartphone app, meaning it’s possible to program and change what you’re wearing all day long. You can draw your design or animation in on the app with your finger and wear it. Or, if you find your drawing skills lacking – I know I do – then you can join the app’s community, where people upload their designs for others to find and wear.

If that’s not enough variety for you, the shirt is available in round neck or collared styles in 15 different colors and, according to the co-founders, there are numerous other colors possible, as long as they’re not grey or white (neither of which fared well with visibility in the trials).

Broadcast also covers a wide range of sizes – XS to XXXXL as well as children’s sizes. And it’s washable – though only by hand or dry cleaning – and has a rechargable battery on the back left. The shirt has to be charged every four hours, and it takes about two hours to fill up on power, so you might need to navigate around having to plug yourself in around lunch break at work.

A single shirt is currently available for US$49-69, which is more than your average printed tee (bundle deals are also available on the crowdfunding page). Still, along with its interchangeable design options, there’s the possibility that it could take the place of several shirts in your closet, so perhaps that’s worth taking little breaks to look like a Star Trek Borg.

The company has been doing livestreams on its YouTube channel to show how the shirt designs could be changed.

Bright idea

Though either gender can order a Broadcast shirt, the idea for it sprang up in November last year from a conversation co-founders Ayyappa Nagubandi and Mahalakshmi Nagubandi had about men’s clothing.

“We look at women – they have a lot of options,” Ayyappa tells Tech in Asia. For men, he saw only two options – a shirt or a t-shirt. Except for variations to sleeve length, that wasn’t a lot to work with. Most of the variety in men’s t-shirts came from the print on the front, so why wasn’t it possible for people to change those whenever they wanted? Ayyappa saw potential there for variety and a conversation starter. If people were changing the messages on their shirts throughout the day, people might ask about it.

Changing the wearable