Gizmos you can wear - think invisibility cloaks and airbag helmets - are emerging as fashion gets geekier. Evan Clark reports.

The geeks are coming into fashion. Computers have already remade the world, changing business and culture as they jumped from clunky mainframe to desktop to phone. But now technology is growing even more prevalent, moving beyond the back office and factory floor and creeping toward the accessories, dresses and shirts themselves.

Wearable technology, if not yet mainstream, is having a serious moment. Serious money and talent are being devoted to developing a market in fashion's backyard, a market that might just be the next big thing.

Iris van Herpen's 3-D printed platform shoes from fall couture. Provided to China Daily

The buzz around wearable technology is only one indication of the fashion industry's techie turn. Also looming is the potential of 3-D printers, machines that allow consumers to produce three-dimensional objects at home. At her fall couture show in Paris, Iris van Herpen showed printed platform shoes, and Stephen Jones revealed he's working on a 3-D printed hat.

While the commercial implications are small right now, the potential is huge.

"The fashion designers kind of gave up the fashion business once on the manufacturing side because our factories couldn't retool fast enough, etc, and a lot of it was done offshore," says Robin Raskin, founder of Living in Digital Times, which produces technology conferences.

"I think technology is going to stop mass production to some degree. They're learning how to 3-D print cloth."

At a symposium at the Fashion Institute of Technology entitled Cross-Pollination: Fashion and Technology, speakers discussed invisibility cloaks, airbag helmets for bikers, the sustainability of growing skin in a lab instead of killing animals, and more.

Suzanne Lee, founder and director of BioCouture, which is working on techniques that use microbes to grow material for apparel, says this new world of possibilities "requires a shift in thinking. It calls into question everything about why we wear clothing and what we want our clothing to say about ourselves."

"The real competition is really between you and your imagination," says Steve Zades, founder and chief executive officer of The Odyssey Network, a consultancy.

"There's a monster gap between what is technically possible today and what the consumer can buy on the shelf. It's a team sport. It's very collaborative. You're not going to get there on your own with this kind of innovation."

Zades tells FIT students at the symposium: "Things are going to change big time in the next five years. When you think about who you're going to work for, it may be Samsung."

So while it used to be the geeks on one side and the fashion crowd on the other, the fashion set is now becoming increasingly geeky and the two sets are intermingling.

Google Inc introduced its hands-free digital interface, Google Glass, at Diane von Furstenberg's spring runway show. The technology is expected to be rolled out next year. And Apple, which recently hired Paul Deneve, former CEO of Yves Saint Laurent, is rumored to be exploring a "smart watch".

Accessories are an easy first step for technology in fashion, but the pioneers are now pushing beyond accessories. There's a small core of budding businesses and do-it-yourselfers who are making a variety of fashion looks that can log in or light up.

They are followers of Hussein Chalayan - whose illuminated dresses and other flights of fancy have delighted and amazed since the '90s - and they want to transform the future.

The stakes are high, and incorporating technology into apparel could ultimately change what it means to be a designer.

"Instead of designing patterns flat and static, I design little videos and animations," says Francesca Rosella, creative director of London-based CuteCircuit, which sells a dress with nearly 9,000 LED lights that are controlled by an iPhone and can change colors and flash patterns.

CuteCircuit has a variety of washable looks that light up, as well as a shirt that can remember what a hug feels like and then send a similar sensation on to another person wearing a hug shirt, which has sensors and actuators that are linked up with Bluetooth technology.

In the future, says Syuzi Pakhchyan, author of Fashioning Technology, "designers will have to learn the language of how technology works".

Pakhchyan says wearable fashions are still restrained by technology and describes today's techie styles as "expressions of ideas that will come in 10 or 20 years". By the time the technology is ready, she says designers will be ready, too: "It's going to be seamless for the fashion designer to be designing with some of this stuff."

Others believe it might not take that long.

Joanna Berzowska, chair of Concordia University's department of design and computation arts, says the technology for wearables was "getting exponentially closer".

He says technology's point of entry in mainstream fashion will be very simple - for instance, a strip that changes color for embellishment - similar to fashions that are already on the market.

In essence, wearable technology is in the process of being wrestled away from the function-minded engineering set and taken over by the designers.

"The goal is to really connect you to digital life without really taking you away from real life," billionaire Google co-founder Sergey Brin says of Google Glass.

He went largely unnoticed backstage at von Furstenberg's spring runway, where models and the designer helped introduced Google Glass to the world.

"It's not just about technology," Brin says.

"It's about lifestyle It's a very important component of making technology desirable and compelling - it's got to be stylish and fashionable."

The collaboration between Brin and von Furstenberg left a big impression on fashion's tech contingent.

"As opposed to technology coming in and changing fashion, (the Google Glass debut showed) fashion kind of having an influence or an impact on technology," says Emma McClendon, co-curator of the recent Fashion and Technology exhibit at FIT.

"They chose to not only align it with a fashion designer, but New York Fashion Week using the whole process and the whole aura of fashion to promote a tech gadget."

McClendon says any move to the mainstream would likely be a gradual process.

As an analogue, she offers Pierre Cardin's "egg carton" dress from the '60s, which used heat-set Dynel to create a distinctive three-dimensional diamond pattern. The dress remained a novelty, but the technology lived on. Pants with heat-set pleats became a staple of the modern wardrobe in the '70s.

Just which innovation today will become the staple of tomorrow is a project that seems likely to consume fashion for the next decade.

The New York Times

(China Daily 10/27/2013 page13)