Diana Dew was an American fashion designer known for creating early electronic clothing, or e-textiles, in the 1960s.
Early life
Dew was born on June 25, 1943 in Memphis, Tennessee. She was a fashion model from ages four to fourteen and attended the Memphis Academy of Art. After high-school, she attended Bard College for one year and was a student of Method acting in New York City for a few months. She then transferred to the University of Florida to study engineering. Realizing that she wouldn't be happy as "a cog in a big machine", she briefly designed theater costumes in Memphis at the Front Street Theater before buying a Volkswagen bus and moving to California. There she was accepted at the University of California at Berkeley where she quickly became disillusioned with the counterculture scene, rejecting LSD for its tendency to "become your normal pattern, and then you’re still searching for something new."
Fashion design
Dew subsequently moved back to New York City, where she "made the East Side folk music scene" and designed clothes for Joan Baez. From there she relocated to Boston and opened a custom dress shop named Isis on Harvard Square, but was unable to attract a youth clientele that could afford her high-end designs. In late summer 1966 she became a designer for Puritan's Paraphernalia division after a referral from a modeling agency, and eventually presided over her own division, Experipuritaneous. Stylistically melding two contemporary institutions—the psychedelic world of the counterculture and the futuristic and innovative field of space travel—Dew's designs epitomized the ethos of the 1960s and were met with widespread acclaim. Powered by rechargeable nickel-cadmium batteries, her designs could stay lit for up to 5 hours. Projecting a hallucinogenic light show, the speed of the strobe-like flash was adjustable via a potentiometer worn at the waist. Intended to be "like an LSD trip with none of the hang-ups," her designs debuted for $150 and up in February 1967 at the Paraphernalia boutique in New York City. Given the suitability of electronic clothing for dark venues, Dew was also a popular costume designer for musicians. She made suits for the psychedelic band the Blues Magoos that would grow brighter as the sound intensified on stage. One of these suits is currently in a Smithsonian Institutiontime capsule as an example of 1960s art, set to be open in 2065. In 1968, Dew was included in the ground-breaking exhibition Body Covering. Held at the Museum of Contemporary Craft in New York City, it focused on the relationship between technology and apparel.
After a brief stint in an all-woman rock band named Creamcheese that wore Dew's designs on stage, Dew turned her focus to hydroponic sprout farming and raising her three sons during the 1970s and beyond. She married twice, once to songwriter Richard Lee Curtis and second to a local carpenter. She died in her home in February 2008. The Dew name lives on in her sons and her grandson.
