Many of us know Lady Gaga as the artist with a huge following and a radical, out-of-the-box, sense of fashion. Well the artist took her well-known reputation for style to a new extreme. On November 10th, Gaga arrived at the Brooklyn Navy Yard to celebrate the release of her new album in a flying dress named Volantis.
The battery operated vehicle/dress was not flown by Gaga, but by a technician via remote control. The dress flew up to a height a of 70 inches off the stage floor. The design of Volantis consists of six six booms arranged in a hexagonal shape. Each boom has two electrical motors which power the carbon fiber propeller inside the boom. The image below shows how Volantis works:
The designer’s said the major challenge was creating enough lift to counteract the weight of the craft and the passenger (Lady Gaga). They said that providing this much thrust to fight Earth’s gravitational pull required some clever engineering. The power for the dress comes from a series of batteries located in the central hub of the boom mountings. The overall power capacity is around 250 ampere-hour. Besides power, weight of the craft was also a factor which was monitored closely while designing the dress. Most parts are made from carbon-fiber and even the wiring involved in controlling the dress was specially designed to reduce weight.
Lady Gaga said the suit represented the future and the youth of today saying, “I wanted to make today about something even more important to me, and that something is the youth of the world… Their minds are just so boundless. They’re just so inspiring.”. She went on to say that the dress is “essentially a metaphor for me. I will be a vehicle today for their voices.”
The video below shows Lady Gaga at the release of her latest album, ARTPOP, in her Volantis dress:
