We somehow managed to miss/ignore New York Fashion Week, but there were apparently some interesting designs there related to wearable tech. Stylite’s got a pretty good roundup. CuteCircuit had a nice collection, and Stylite makes a cool point about the sort of LED-laden designs that they make: the displays on electronic clothing could easily reside in an app store. The clothing design you buy could be changed with a simple download, the way you can change your watchface on a Pebble watch.
Hmm…. That might make for an interesting secondary revenue stream for designers.
Much as we love the “maker” movement at WTI we frequently struggle with the difference between “project” and “product.” At what point does a hacker making some neat one-off thing merit coverage, when scaling the one-off up to commercial status would be overwhelming or impossible? But we also think of the haute couture world, which faces pretty much the same challenge. All that stuff is hand-made and in impossibly small numbers, which is why couture is so expensive and seemingly counter to the tech world, the economics of which is largely predicated on scale. It’s plain that wearables have met couture; the frontier now is for wearables to make it into the mass clothing market.