Why wearable tech needs fashion to survive and to thrive

"You can imagine a scenario where advertisers pay you to have adverts running across the back of your jacket"

In the future, our clothes will replace our devices. They will light up with social media alerts, producing holograms to read those updates wherever we choose. We'll never need to remember umbrellas or coats again either -- sensors will read humidity levels and tell the conductive fibres of our customised 3D-printed clothes to release waterproof chemicals, while a shift in their nanoparticles will pull fibres together for insulation. Sensors will send our biometric data to doctors, while the antibacterial fabrics protect us from viruses.

These are most definitely designs of the future but that future is not so distant: all these technologies exist in some form today. Products like Google Glass and Apple's rumoured iWatch represent the early stages of the wearable technology market, a market that Credit Suisse  has predicted will have "a significant and pervasive impact on the economy". The "mega trend" stands to be worth up to $50 billion over the next three to five years, fuelled by the wellness and fitness sector and advances in battery and sensor technology. However, unless these technologies converge with the fashion industry, there's a danger they will fail to become popularised and remain unaffordable.

Cornell University's Textile Nanotechnology Laboratory is a hotbed for this sort of convergence; between the chemical and biological engineers, fibre scientists and physicists, there's more than a few designers. "They have a very different way of thinking from scientists," Juan Hinestroza, who leads the research team, told Wired.co.uk. "This interaction between people is extremely productive, with incredible outcomes that aren't possible if only one discipline works there." The fruits of this convergence are self-explanatory. We can see it in Cornell's solar-powered dress, which uses conductive cotton to charge smartphones, or their nanoparticle-coated outfits that change colour when light and matter is manipulated in the spaces between those particles. The team has used nanoparticles to engineer natural fabrics to be conductive, bacteria-resistant and to filter toxic gases. Importantly, natural fibres are used throughout. "I chose cotton because it's available all over the world so can be easily replicated," said Hinestroza. "The idea is to have these technologies embedded into existing material, so we won't need to build multimillion dollar factories. We're also developing transistors made of cotton so the electronics will not be attached to the textile -- the textile will be the electronic device."

Hinestroza is thinking big from the offset. There's little point creating these incredible processes if they never find a practical application. As an academic, he's all too aware that unless big companies can get onboard easily, he and his team will continue to work in 1cm x 1cm swatches.

At the other end of that struggle are groups like Cute Circuit, founded by designer Francesca Rosella and artist Ryan Genz. Their imaginative designs blend fashion and technology specifically for self-expression, whether it's a custom made dress for Katy Perry that flashes to the beat, or the Twitter dress worn by Nicole Scherzinger at EE's launch last year, that spun illuminated tweets round her body in realtime. Yet despite being focused on all things that make a design replicable and popular -- comfort, style and ease of use (the pair spent two years machine-washing their motion-reactive LED T-shirts to make sure they wouldn't break) -- even Cute Circuit's concepts were initially met with resistance from manufacturers.

"When we first started there were no materials to make it look and feel good, rather than just work technically, so we made our own," explains Rosella. "Convincing manufacturers it would be a good thing to do our specifications, making certain things gold plated etc, was a painful process. It was the same convincing companies to give us materials. We came across this strange material used for rocket boosters, like embroidery threads. There was 1km of this conductive thread and we asked them, 'didn't you notice, it's very pretty?!' Sometimes they're so taken up with it, they don't realise it could have other applications. You have to convince them of this awesome idea -- but once they get it, they become very collaborative."click for more