Wearable Tech: ready for the fashion of the future?

Caress the end of your sleeve outwards, and you are in communication with your mom, or plunged in your favorite podcast.A tickling in the opposite direction, and your headphones suddenly whisper the fastest path to your destination, while indicating you on the way your favorite restaurants.Tap the same area and take a photo from your laptop from a distance.Does your whole jacket vibrate or flash?Do not panic, she only seeks to alert you with an oversight.

This utility choreography is signed Jacquard by Google, the intelligent fashion project for which the Internet giant has been working for years, and which has just unveiled a brand new model of connected denim jacket in partnership with Levi’s.Proud of his high -technical collaborations with important brands - Adidas, Saint Laurent, Samsonite -, Google claims this interactive technology which consists in inserting in a garment or an accessory of weaving or chips linked to its headphones and your phoneby Bluetooth.

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With these basketball soles calculating our physical efforts or these backpacks alerting us with a downpour or an appointment not to be missed, the goal announced by Jacquard by Google is in a slogan used during the promotional campaign withLevi's: “Connected not distracted» (“not distracted»).Is thus formulated a promise to reduce the time spent behind its screen to wander on social networks to promote new efficiency based on the optimization of intimate and sensory, through a machine made invisible but more essential than ever.

Fantasies and gadgets

This advance is not unique to Google, it represents a sector of the market at the crossroads of fashion and high -tech called Smart Fashion or Wearable Tech.From the Apple Watch in 2015, a pioneering of a relatively confidential trend, there is today a string of experimental and increasingly refined products that make a cloakroom with tenfold functionality possible.

Polos (the tech polo) of Ralph Lauren - which make it possible to calculate the heart rate and the distance traveled on foot in one day - in Samsung which offers an intelligent costume capable of distributing your electronic business card from one smartphone to another, unlock your phone remotely and turn on your speaker.More gadget, Pizza Hut presented a basketball that allows you to order pizza.

In another vein, the brand of sport under Armor imagined the UA Recover night clothing line which absorbs body heat and restores it in the form of infrared light, promising to calm the aches following physical effort.Not to mention the Neviano swimsuits which capture the room temperature and the amount of light rays and remind us to put sunscreen backing.

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Loufoques ou utopiques, ces avancées résultent de fantasmes et d’expérimentations titillant la frontière entre les humains et la science, depuis les vêtements rebrodés de fibres électriques au XIX^e siècle notamment.What to think of this symbiosis between our corporality and artificial intelligence?The promise of an increased humanity or, on the contrary, a more present surveillance society than ever in our daily lives?

A hyperconnected existence specific to our time, but which is not without raising many questions, in particular as to the use of our data by large capitalist corporations.

Second skin

For the High Couture High-Tech Clara Daguin designer, this rapprochement between the locker room and the machine would make it possible to dream of “a second skin on which we can project a future where technology is closer and closer to the body and merges with him».Born in France and raised in Silicon Valley, the stylist offers sculptural clothes that oscillate between know-how and science fiction, continuing to question the relationship between natural and artificial.

“Ma philosophie est de faire évoluer le travail de la main avec la technologie et de rendre la technologie plus humaine et poétique dans notre interaction avec elle.» Clara Daguin, styliste

During the Parisian haute couture week last July, she presented a collection from a carte blanche offered by Google.With the help of engineers, she created on this occasion a series of five dresses incorporating the intelligent fiber developed by the firm for a light and interactive effect - including LEDs, circuits, radio frequencies -, giving thusTo see bright creations, including a central part sparkling in contact with the palm of the hands of visitors.

Clara Daguin is part of an experimental fashion generation within the Smart Fashion, a wave of avant-garde creator combining highly manual artisanal know-how and high-tech perspective, two dimensions that connect and future: “Electronics evolves exponentially and, conversely, embroidery has existed for millennia.My philosophy is to develop hand work with technology and make technology more human and poetic in our interaction with it.»

Before her, the contemporary experimental fashion had continued to reinvent itself in terms of technological innovation.At the turn of the millennium, the British stylist of Cypriot origin Hussein Chalayan, precursor of a connected fashion, collaborated with contemporary artist Jenny Holzer around dresses becoming screens on which were screened a film or texts, such as aabyme of the show society at the time of the all-in-matter.

More recently, in 2016, the New York designer Zac Posen imagined a brilliant ball outfit in the dark thanks to fiber optic embroidery;And the American fashion house Marchesa associated with IBM for the design of an evening dress which reflected, by a change of colors, the reactions of its audience during a gala - through the tweets shared during theevent and reactions recorded at the same time on social networks.

Without forgetting the Dutch Iris Van Herpen, clearing designer specializing in 3D printing of whole collections, which, in 2013, had equipped its models with surprising functions: one of them led for example electricity and generatedtrue lightning.

They participate in a study on the Cloud Generation - the emergence of a hyperconnected generation within the Millennials -, relating to a youth which, in their daily life, merges its real speeches and its virtual avatars.

This hybridization between clothing and machine is reminiscent of the writings around the being cyborg of the theoretian of the genus Donna Haraway, who called for his readers to erase hierarchical distinctions between the human species, technology, but alsoNature and animal kingdom - a new horizon?