In the Future, Clothes Will Listen to Our Bodies

Racked is no longer publishing. Thank you to everyone who read our work over the years. The archives will remain available here; for new stories, head over to Vox.com, where our staff is covering consumer culture for The Goods by Vox. You can also see what we’re up to by signing up here.

The future of fashion is not a realm of simple textiles. Already, consumer wearables can monitor people’s health, environment, and habits. A small yet diverse community of designers are now experimenting with high-tech clothes that could do more than cover our bodies; clothes that could actually interact with us.

Michelle Hua, the entrepreneur behind MadeWithGlove self-heating gloves and cofounder of the professional network Women of Wearables (WOW), thinks in the future we won’t just ask which designer or label made a fashion product. Instead, we’ll ask what the clothes can actually do, what lies beneath the surface. “Right now [the industry] is moving to smart textiles, clothes that interact while you’re wearing them,” Hua tells Racked. In the future, clothes will listen to our bodies.

Hua is working to develop stylish gloves with biosensors woven into the material itself, able to detect skin temperature, then create heat when needed. If her startup raises funding, she hopes to have a commercial product ready by 2018.

It’s been just a year since WOW started. Yet these professional events have already reached over a 1,000 participants and 6,000 community members, representing hundreds of new wearables, such as high-tech gloves that can translate sign language into text or speech.

Health and fitness trackers are some of the current market’s most successful wearables. However, Hua believes smart textiles will soon rise to completely redefine fashion innovation. “I think in the next three years, you will see garments with technology built in. It will almost be the norm,” she says.

Around the world, designers are experimenting with smart textiles and reimagining the core experience of wearing clothes as a form of self-expression. For example, the famous high-tech spider dress, with shoulder spikes that "attack" the space around the wearer if biosensors detect the user feeling threatened, was invented by designer Anouk Wipprecht.

Even mainstream brands are getting in on the action. Google is teaming up with H&M’s digital fashion house Ivyreel on a "Coded Couture" project, which designs custom clothes based on personal data collected from the shopper’s phone.

The Coded Couture data dress is designed around information about user habits gathered by Google’s Android's Awareness API. Does the user go to posh restaurants or business meetings more often? Does she prefer to walk on hot summer days or take taxis? The customer’s data is recorded and turned into a unique dress, tailored to her lifestyle, that will be available for purchase online.

CNN Money reported that this technology is still in the development phase. But several other interactive fashion products are much closer to being market ready. For example, the Sensoree mood sweater, with LED lights that change color like a mood ring, recently opened the waiting list for prospective shoppers. Sensoree founder Kristin Neidlinger originally made this sweater as a tool for people with sensory processing disorders ranging from ADHD to autism.

“It helps them see and connect with what they’re feeling,” Neidlinger tells Racked. “And it helps other people see what they’re feeling… it gives their body a voice.” Now that the mood sweater is ready for commercial production, Neidlinger has set her sights on another therapeutic project, AWElectric.

A wide range of people with mental health challenges, like depersonalization disorder, often struggle with a feeling of detachment from their loved ones and surrounding environment. Neidlinger’s team of inventors created a jacket with 3D-printed, bioresponsive animatronic patches that create the physical sensations of awe and wonder. The jacket does this by gently tickling the skin to create that feeling of shivers running down your spine and hairs standing on end, while using lights in the shoulder pads to mirror excited breathing. It also links up with a matching jacket for a friend, like a high-tech friendship bracelet for your shoulders, that then helps communicate the feeling through the clothes themselves.

“When the person feels awe, the sensors detect it and trigger the frisson fabric to amplify the sensation,” Neidlinger explains. “Then, the frequency to create aesthetic goosebumps is sent via Bluetooth to the friend’s design. Triggering their frisson fabric evokes the feeling in them so they feel the sensation at the same time.” The jacket’s biosensor measures physical excitement through the user’s heart rate variability and GSR galvanic skin response, or the amount of sweat and electricity in the skin.

So far, Neidlinger sees two main markets for these types of products: therapeutic users and clients she calls “mindful partiers,” such as DJs who want to amp up their emotional engagement with crowds in public spaces. “There’s so much space for personalization,” she says. “Imagine if it [clothing] could read your mood and react in real-time. It allows us to be so much more expressive.”

From illuminated sweaters with biosensors to graphene formal dresses that change colors to match the wearer’s emotions, interactive fashion reimagines what clothes can mean to the people who wear them. Pauline van Dongen, a high-tech fashion designer who debuted a touch-sensitive denim jacket at SXSW 2017, wants wearable connoisseurs to think beyond the limitations of apps and smartphones.

Unlike most high-tech fashion currently on the market, van Dongen’s jacket does not sync up with a mobile device. That decision was deliberate. “Today, still most wearables interact with the user through the interface of a smartphone, which I think is really unnecessary,” she says. “Clothing is already on our bodies, around the surface, so we can communicate directly with them. We don’t need to constantly interface with a screen.” The jacket’s goal isn’t to optimize anything or turn habits into data. On the contrary, the intention behind van Dongen’s jacket is to promote mindfulness.

The denim jacket she designed can both register touch, like if the person wearing it hugs a friend, and simulate the sensation of a delicate stroke on the wearer’s shoulder with sections of conductive yarns woven into the denim. ‘We created this design to really propose a new direction for wearable technology. To inspire a new line of thought. To show that wearables do not only have to be cognition driven, quantifiable,” van Dongen says. “To show what fashion can actually bring is this more emotional, and sometimes surreal quality.”

The jacket’s algorithm counts human interactions, physical touches like hugs, and digital conversations marked by times the wearer reaches into the pocket to check his or her phone.

“When you put the jacket on, it automatically activates itself and starts counting, but you cannot keep track of it,” van Dongen says. “So as you wear it, you cannot measure your own activity…there’s a certain spontaneous or surprising aspect to it, so that the wearer cannot anticipate when the jacket is going to respond.” These periodic touch sensations are meant to offer the user a moment of reflection, drawing attention to the body’s physical presence in time and space, and sometimes prodding memories of the social interactions he or she had so far today.

Van Dongen is no stranger to interactive fashion. She founded her namesake high-tech design studio in the Dutch city of Arnhem back in 2010. So far the studio also developed a cardigan that helps correct the user’s posture, much like the Nadix X yoga pants and other athletic products with haptic technology that are already on the market. These clothes can sense the body’s positioning and movements, then use vibrations to tell the user to adjust her pose.

The denim jacket takes this idea from a health perspective to a psychological one. When clothes listen to the body and talk back, they can also enhance social activities like going out with friends. These high-tech outfits would be completely different from most luxury fashion products on the market today, which prioritize function and spectacle instead of the user’s experience wearing it.

The possibilities are endless, although it may take a while for these innovations to reach average consumers. “The smart textiles industry is quite a small, niche industry… it is extremely challenging [to raise money],” says Hua, whose product is still in the R&D phase. “Investors want something that’s already out. They want traction, they want financial analysis. They want return on investment.” Steep development costs mean high-tech fashion startups need to rethink traditional business models.

Similarly, van Dongen found traditional fashion models didn’t fit the scientific process for inventing new technologies. “That was how I ended up working on a project basis. Our studio is more like a fashion brand that is also a design studio. We have engineers,” van Dongen says. “We have about 10 people on the team, ranging from fashion designers and people with a textile background to engineers, interaction designers.” Her studio does a lot of freelancing with other companies that hire the team to create unique products, like solar-powered wind breakers for tour guides and national park rangers. That way, the lean studio team can focus on developing a repertoire of high-tech fabrics without needing the business structures of a traditional fashion company.

“We are not the actual company selling the designs, so we rely on the partners we collaborate with to decide whether and how and when they will put the product into the market,” says van Dongen. “I often rely on testing things myself. Wearing them, putting them on bodies, looking at them in movement. Once a design is interactive you cannot theorize the use of it; you really need to explore it and make it physical as well.”

For now, Neidlinger and van Dongen believe high-tech fashion carries a luxury price tag like most couture products. The cost of development and production, as well as the challenges of e-waste once the clothes wear out, makes it difficult to imagine a ready-to-wear product with a double-digit price. That will limit how and where consumers are willing to wear these smart textiles. But Kathleen McDermott, an artist and researcher pursuing her Ph.D. in electronic arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has already managed to create range of affordable, interactive wearables with a little DIY engineering.

McDermott’s Social Escape Dress, which emits a cloud of fog from the collar when the user is feeling stressed, uses a skin-response sensor that cost around $10. She wired the sensor to a microcontroller, which hooked it up to her computer so she could program the device, then inserted it into a regular dress. “Sometimes it requires writing a few lines of code to say something like IF we see a sudden skin response change THEN turn on all these motors and vaporizers that will make fog,” McDermott explains. “In a consumer product, usually all the setup is done already and sensor calibration happens automatically.”

Unlike the other women Racked spoke to for this article, McDermott makes art instead of developing functional products. Customized sensors like hers would be expensive to mass produce and difficult to tailor for general audiences instead of individual bodies. She prefers art because it allows her to imagine a future where high-tech fashion is highly personalized. “So individuals can make or commission devices that suit their unique needs or desires,” McDermott explains. If future consumers themselves were educated in electronic design and computer programming, topics that are increasingly popular in public schools today, then there’s no reason people couldn’t make their own custom wearables.

Photo: Kathleen McDermott

“Many people are already comfortable trusting AI with predictive algorithms, and perhaps with self-driving cars. Will they be comfortable with machine learning acting on behalf of their own body?” McDermott wonders. “I'm very interested to find out… I imagine the relationship between identity and what we wear will become even more intertwined.”