Tech Fashion and Aesthetics: can wearable technology ever be aesthetically pleasing?

Technology in fashion has a broad meaning. It can mean from new ecological-type fabrics to laser cut on clothing. But in this post I want to talk about the type of attire that seems to want to combine practicality and clothing.  After an entire semester studying fashion and technology, a question kept coming back to my mind while looking at some pieces: apart from its practical or useful purpose, would anybody ever be caught wearing those technological garments?

It can seem like a shallow question at first, but I bet anything that you do not buy the clothes you wear just to cover your body. When people go out to buy winter clothes for example, they do not just choose whatever is warm. They pick the color, the brand, the pattern, the fabric. They try it on to see if it flatters their body. We have gone over and over in this class about how fashion is a way to express ourselves, to make statements, and about how much our choices have to do with our identity even if we do not realize it. We are judged on what we wear and how we present ourselves in different environments – whether we like it or not.  But going through the books we have been using for this class, most of the wearable technology we have seen would not actually be wearable. We look at this Water Purification Rain Coat and think: “cool”. And then we head to the next mall to buy a standard rain coat made by a brand we think represents us best.

Andrew Bolton, one of the designers interviewed in the book Techno Fashion (Bradley Quinn, 2002) , asks the following question: “In an increasingly interactive world, what could be more appealing than self-reliance?” In other words, in a world that changes so much and so fast, being able to control your own little environment inside a jacket would be freedom. And maybe in some situations, such as recent movements and protests that have been going on around the world, those garments would be more than welcome. Great example: Lucy Orta’s Refuge War collection.

“Lucy Orta is an artist who refuses to accept the ‘superficiality’ of fashion. Her work inverts the idea that clothing and built environments are separate entities” (Techno Fashion, Bradley Quinn, 2002)

Figure 1. Lucy Orta – Refuge Wear collection

Orta defines herself as a former fashion designer. In fact, many of the designers in the book avoid calling themselves fashion designers – which leads me to think that apparently, in the world where technology meets fashion, designing something that is actually dedicated to please the masses is not especially well seen.

As I said before, some of the garments we have seen could be used in certain situations. But right now, on a day-to-day basis, more appealing than self-reliance is high self-esteem. In a world where we are exposed every day to an unattainable ideal of perfection that we, somehow, keep trying to achieve, “self-reliance” is the last thing in our list when we are out shopping. But after studying it for six months, it disappointed me to see that the only way I could find weareable media that would aesthecally please me was if I designed it myself or waited until the idea of technology+fashion became more popular. So I decided to do a little bit of research online to find things that are techonological AND easy on the eyes.

After running into a lot of DYI videos and rave-type outfits, I found the Fashioning Tech blog to be quite useful when it comes to wearable technology that focus on Fashion first.  Created by Syuzi Pakhchyan, author of the Fashioning Tech book, the blog is a collaboration of different bloggers and designers wth an interest on the subject. Anybody can join the group and then start posting. It has become a database of interesting technological fashion projects, with sections such as photos, videos, tutorials and a forum.

The only problem is, it still seems to be a gap between useful fashion techonology and fashion that merely utilizes technology as a visual appealing detail. For example, this dress by Christian Dils & Manuel Seckel is beautiful and I believe it to be very wearable considering our fashion standards today. But it is not useful. It lights up, it looks good, but that’s it.  Meanwhile, this purse made by MIT students  Heidi Chen and Nicole Tariverdian is useful, but it I’m not sure it would be a best seller if it was sold in a store. This other dress is beautiful and useful in theory – but who is really interested in wearing something that shows the levels of pollution in the environment? It is very hard to find something that looks good and is actually useful. In my search, I found very few exceptions to this rule (such as this other purse by Diffus).

Clearly, we are still far from finding a balance between technological fashion and popular taste in fashion. And of course, the prices so far are not very popular either – due to the fact that something can only achieve popular prices if made in large scale and these type of pieces lack the demand and the support necessary for such. I guess we will have to wait a little longer before wearable technology becomes something we see everywhere and buy in any store. While that does not happen, books such as Fashioning Tech can help you DIY your very own.


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