We’re aware that clothing is one of the original technologies. Along with fire, clothing has been instrumental to man’s existence from the very beginning. Clothing protects our bodies, whether you start off with a bear skin or more refined textiles over time. The clothing and textile industries have been tied closely to previously revolutions in technology, in particular, the first industrial revolution which really centered on the textile industry. In our area, in the Boston area, it drove commerce to new heights. I always find it interesting, we don’t talk about it as technology, but if you think about it, the Roman armies, for instance, had great advantage over their counterparts because they had great clothing, including sandals which protected their feet on long marches and enabled them to cover more distance and dominate. Their armies could dominate other armies because of their technology and specifically sandals were apart of that.

As we’re looking ahead the evolution of clothing and innovation of clothing, down the road from us is the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and they’re having what looks like a wonderful and interesting exhibit called Techstyle. I’ll spell that out for you because it’s not textile as you would think but Techstyle. It’s #T-E-C-H-S-T-Y-L-E.

It raises for us, as designers and technologists, an interesting question which is — How do we interact with our clothing? We’ve sort of come to a certain point where, at least for me, clothing is functional and I don’t interact with it much other than to put it on in the morning and take it off at night when I get into my pajamas. There’s a whole range of interesting things you can do with clothing. If you’re a chemist, there are all sorts of inks that you can put into clothing that might respond to particular environmental factors. I know that for older folks, there’s clothing that can provide certain kinds of support and therapy for areas of the body that no longer work the way that they used to. There’s interesting new work in bio-sensors. You could have clothing that indicated if you were exerting too much pressure on your back and your back was going to give out.

You know, now we have this new equation where you need the special detergent for your dignified wacky clothes. Nobody’s going to do that. I don’t want to do that. You know, clothes are such the wrong delivery method for this stuff. Using your clothes and the proximity to your body to surface metrics about yourself, there’s something interesting there, not something interesting that would, in my opinion, unless you’re a professional athlete or some special corner case, justify completely complicating and changing your laundry workflow. At least maybe there’s something interesting there.

A lot of it strikes me as being like the early internet refrigerators where there’s a little screen on the refrigerator where you can get on a web browser and muck around. What are you going to bend over in front of your refrigerator? It’s nonsense. I think a lot of the to-do around fashion technology and how it hooks into the digital life today is just nonsense. Jon, one of the sort of technology paths that we’ve talked about and I know interests both you and I are cyborgism. The fact of the matter is that almost everything interesting that’s happening there is being driven by the disabled community. It’s being driven by people who are not able to function the “normal” way, whatever the hell that means, so they are incentivized for quality of life, for a lot of different reasons, to spend the money, spend the time, and invest themselves in something that, while remarkable, is clumsy and expensive and doesn’t make a lot of sense for the average Joe you and me. That will change. Cyborgism will become a much more integrated part of the everyday life, but that’s a ways down the road. I think this fashion technology stuff falls into that same bucket. Some of it’s interesting. Some of it super silly. It’s really not going to matter to us in ways beyond mere novelty for a really long time.