The future of wearable tech: interactive dresses that track stares, heart rate and more

When Google’s head-mounted optical display, Google Glass, made an appearance on the catwalks at a 2012 Diane Von Furstenberg show, it signalled the beginning of an era: wearable tech in fashion.

Since then, numerous brands have attempted to make their mark in this burgeoning category by developing stylish wristbands and watches. There are even T-shirts that can track your heartbeat.

While many, such as the Apple watch, have been successful from a technological standpoint – and reasonably popular – those in fashion continue to question their aesthetic appeal to consumers.

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Merging fashion and technology isn’t exactly a new phenomenon. Many designers, including Turkish Cypriot Hussein Chalayan, have used technology as a tool to both question and advance the form and function of clothing. In 2000 he launched remote-control dresses with moveable flaps and he’s since experimented with animatronics and other technology to create video dresses embedded with LEDs or coffee tables that transform into a skirt. For his recent spring/summer 2017 collection, for example, he partnered with Intel to create glasses equipped with sensors that measure biometric data such as heart rate and stress levels.

As impressive and newsworthy as many of these creations are, they have yet to address a fundamental problem: how can we integrate technology seamlessly into fashion in a way that is easy to use, relevant and pretty enough to appeal to the so-called “fashion elites”?

The answer, it seems, lies in the advent of “smart” fabrics that physically integrate microelectronic technologies into the garments themselves.

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“Like everything, it’s all about timing,” says Sophie Hackford, the former director of Wired Consulting. “As sophisticated camera lenses, sensors, gyroscopes and chips get more powerful and cheaper, the possibilities for ‘computing’ become more interesting. Instead of having a ‘computer’ – be it a smartwatch, phone, or laptop – we are entering a moment where computing becomes pervasive. It becomes the services it provides, not the specific device that you focus on.