The Courtship of Fashion and Technology
In 1989, the sequel to the critically acclaimed film Back to the Future was released which saw Marty McFly and Doc Brown time travel to 2015 and one of the coolest futuristic item stood out to every child was the Nikes that Marty McFly wore and the best part about them? They were self-lacing! Fast forward to October 21st, 2015 the same date as the movie and Nike announced the Self-lacing Nike Mag which released in 2016 which were limited to only 89 pairs but this led to them creating a new product line called the HyperAdapt which were commercially available and had the self-lacing technology built-in within them.
This was one of the first glimpses we saw of what happens when technology and Fashion emerge, this started a trend in the technology industry that led to the burst of what is known as Smart ‘Wearables’, now a common household name and a common household product.
The rise of wearable technology
Gone are the days of LED light-up hats from our childhood, products like the Apple Watch that lead the global smartwatch sales with 12.9 million sales in the last quarter of 2020 play a crucial role in our daily lives from reminding us to drink water to tracking our workouts and giving us our notifications. An everyday object that was designed not to be bulky and geeky looking but designed to seamlessly blend into your outfits and match your attire no matter what you wear. This is crucial for the wearable industry because products that don’t shine a focus on fashion tend to fail.
A crucial example of this is the Google Glass. Created in 2014, this was marketed as the latest and greatest in wearable technology, allowing users to have their notifications, maps, etc all in their glasses. Advertised as an extension of yourself, they released it for $1500 but the issue most people had with it was, it wasn’t attractive. It was clunky and unattractive and overpriced. This led to it being discontinued only a year later.
Nowadays the smart glasses produced have built-in smart assistants and work as wireless earphones such as the Bose Frames or the Echo Frames or even have the Snapchat Spectacles which have a camera built into the frame and can record 10 seconds clip that directly gets saved on your Snapchat account! So why do these work? What’s different about these compared to the Google Glass? The biggest differences are price and style. These were priced lower than the Google Glass making them more accessible and more importantly they were stylish.
They weren’t clunky or geeky, they were designed to look like high-end glasses, and they were made to go with your outfits! This is the step technology is taking, how to integrate accessibility and usability while maintaining style and class.
Glasses are not the only example of technology and fashion merging. Google’s Project Jacquard partnered up with many different companies to create a whole new accessible smart wearable product range. One of these is their collaboration with Levis where they came together to create a denim trucker jacket that connects to your smartphone and you can then control your phone to take photos or change the song by pressing the sleeve of the jacket in a certain spot.
Another collaboration they did was with Adidas and EA Sports to create a smart shoe that aimed to connect the real world with the digital gaming world, these shoes allowed you to measure your kicks, distance, and shot power and can be uploaded to compete with other people and synced to your game to earn rewards.
But our clothes aren’t where it stops, even our accessories are becoming smarter. Accessories are constantly being innovated and tailored to match our expectations of a technological future. NOVA is a Munich-based startup that has worked on earrings that also transmit audio. Beautifully crafted freshwater pearls held by either a gold or silver-plated clip but what makes them unique is something called ‘Directional Sound’, patented technology by the company, it sends any sound straight to your ear canal from the earlobe and there is no sound leak to keep your music and conversation private. We are even witnessing the rise of smart rings such as Oura or Motiv which are created to track our sleep, monitor our fitness and some even can store your debit/credit or RTA cards so you can just use the ring to pay or use the metro! These type of accessories are nicknamed ‘camouflaged tech’
We see our technology becoming an extension of who we are and how we express ourselves, this is being reflected in the direction that technology and fashion are taking from simple light up led shoes that we enjoyed as children to shoes that can self-lace or track our movements and turn fitness into a fun game. All of this being influenced by what’s in our pockets and what do we use on a daily basis, It’s only a matter of time before our everyday clothes have some sort of integration with our technology and make our lives easier and make activities and our daily tasks more accessible.
