Dezeen Magazine

Bono's Laser Stage Suit by Moritz Waldemeyer

It's taken a while, but German-born designer Moritz Waldemeyer has sent some official pictures of the laser suit he created for U2 singer Bono for their current world tour.

The suit, featuring 240 lasers, was created for the group's 360° tour, which started last summer.

More Dezeen stories about Moritz Waldemeyer:

Customised guitars for OK Go (January 2010)
Bono's laser jacket (first pictures, July 2009)
OK Go stage costumes (November 2007)
Laser dresses for Hussein Chalayan (October 2007)
Video dresses for Hussein Chalayan (April 2007)
Hussein Chalayan runway show in Paris (March 2007)

Here's some info from Waldemeyer, written at the start of the tour in July last year:


U2: Bono's Laser Stage Suit

U2’s 360 tour opened with a spectacular show at Barcelona's Camp Nou Stadium, using the Waldemeyer-designed jacket in the encore for a truly memorable grand finale. The jacket offsets the tradition of the spotlight, which alienates the performer from his crowd, as Bono is able to project his own light onto thousands. It provides an interactive and personal element to the show whereby individual members of the audience are literally connected to Bono for an instant through a single laser beam. This creates an electrifying sense of the performer reaching out to his audience audibly, visually and spiritually.

The futuristic jacket that Bono wears embodies Terminator-chic, with 240 lasers embedded along the seams of its arms and main body. This extends Bono’s silhouette outwards into the vast space of the stadium, magnifying his every movement in hundreds of scintillating beams that flicker across the audience. The performer becomes a dazzling artwork that moves in synchronisation with the music. He emits rays of light like a new-age idol and the lasers become a visual metaphor for the power of influence between performer and audience.

Moritz Waldemeyer is an engineer-cum-designer whose work embraces innovative applications of LED and laser lighting, bringing it into everything from fashion and furniture design to the world of music and performance. Born in East Germany, Moritz moved to London to train as an engineer at Kings College, completing his master’s degree in 2001. He has since collaborated with many of the world’s top designers and architects including Hussein Chalayan, Zaha Hadid and Philippe Stark. Waldemeyer has an equally strong body of independent projects, which illuminate the grey area between technology and creative design.

The 360 Tour will perform 44 shows across Europe and America. Every aspect of the show is highly innovative from the costume design to the stage: on the opening night Bono announced, ‘we’ve got a stage designed by Guadi’. The tour features a spider- like construction with a circular platform in the centre of the audience designed by Willie Williams and Mark Fisher. By elevating the sound and lighting equipment, the walls that traditionally obscure the performers from their audience are removed. Waldemeyer’s costume design works impeccably with stage design to raise the bar on interactive and visually spectacular large-scale performance. As the tour progresses expect to see more exciting Waldemeyer creations which are to be developed.

The U2 360 Tour will play in 15 cities in Europe finishing at Cardiff’s Millennium on the 22nd of August before heading to North America with 20 shows starting in Chicago on the 12th of September. In 2009 the tour will perform for over 3 million people in 44 shows.