What kind of new world will smart fashion open up?

Now, smart watches dominate the smart wearable devices, and fitness enthusiasts are keen to wear these devices to monitor their exercise status, geographic location and physical condition, and hope to use these devices to improve their health. Yes, now fashion designers have also joined this industry, they fully tap the potential of sensors and connect to the Internet, hoping to design clothes and jewelry that are not only beautiful and interesting, but also smart.

Imagine a dress that glows - actually, it's LEDs embedded in the fabric - that make it shimmer on the catwalk. This was the vision of Matt Drinkwater, who brought it to life with help from Disney, StudioXO and Richard Nicoll.

Drinkwater, professor and head of fashion creation at London College of Fashion, called the Tinker Bell dress the pioneer of high-tech fashion. The dress, which pays homage to the fairy in the Peter Pan story, is made of fiber optic material and LEDs that make it glow in the dark.

Drinkwater hopes to see more of these pieces at international fashion weeks, and more celebrities wearing them on the red carpet at award shows, but there is still a lot of work to be done.

He said: "In 2014, Elie Taharis's dress with 50 iPhones sewn into it was absolutely stunning at New York Fashion Week. We can expect connected clothing to appear in the fashion industry. Now almost all connected clothing appears in the field of health."

Lauren Bowker, designer of The Unseen, has invented a material that can change color and pattern using sensor signals, including a skirt that can understand a person's energy field and emotional changes by reading human brain waves, and a headdress made up of 4,000 gemstones that can read brain activity and use different colors to depict an individual's thought process.

At this year's London Fashion Week Men's, British brand Ada+Nik released a leather jacket with a built-in Narrative Clip automatic camera.

“Ada and I both feel like we’re missing out on a lot of life experiences because we’re always using our phones and cameras to record them,” Nik Thakkar said, as if one person is split in two. “This jacket allows people to experience the moment directly and record it at the same time, so it can enhance people’s technology rather than being divided by it.”

London-based CuteCircuit has designed light-up clothing that displays tweets, created a "hug shirt" that connects to Bluetooth so people can send a hug to someone wearing the same shirt at a distance, and a 1024-pixel programmable T-shirt with a built-in camera, speaker, and microphone that lets you update your tweets, songs, and pictures in real time.

Francesca Rosella, Creative Director and Partner at Cute, added: “In our latest collection, we introduced a number of beautiful silk dresses and jackets that have smart fiber optic diodes built into them to change the way the clothes look and interact, and people can control these clothes using an app on their phones. This means that in just a few seconds you can download a new style and the clothes will look completely different.”

In fact, it's not just clothing. Even brands like TAG Heuer have announced plans to enter the IoT wearable space, but smart jewelry has even more room to grow. Drinkwater points to Kovert jewelry from Shoreditch that can vibrate to alert you, and Netamto's bracelets that can track your daily sun exposure.

There is also MICA, which Intel created with trendy brand retailer Opening Ceremony. Intel unveiled its $495 bracelet at last year's CES. In the field of exhibition notices and smart wristbands, this exhibit is very eye-catching. MICA is also a platform for customized applications.

Ayse Ildeniz, Intel's vice president, said: "When we sat down with Opening Ceremony for a roundtable meeting, our engineers were terrified when they heard their various ideas for the first time. Oh my God! How can this be feasible? This is impossible! After returning, we chose a compromise solution that would satisfy women's aesthetic requirements as much as possible and be technically feasible, but it was really not easy to choose between the two."

This year, Intel outshined the competition with its Spider Dress, which combines sensors and robots to show the wearer how they feel. It extracts a lot of biosignals to understand the wearer's stress, and when someone approaches you, if you are nervous, the dress will attack, and if you think the other person is friendly, it will leave enough room for contact. The dress was created by Danish artist Anouk Wipprecht.

“The Spider Dress is a work of art,” Ildeniz said. “We opened up our R&D shop to Anouk and asked her, ‘What do you want?’ That dress was her idea. It’s really unique because it uses Edison, our IoT platform that we already had in place, and the designers added sensors to it. It’s very stylish, and the process of making it is very stylish.”

Ildeniz said she once joked with her friends about wearing a red light on the subway. She said: "I don't know if I want such a dress. This dress shows people how the wearer communicates with the world, his feelings and emotions." It is no exaggeration to say that this is mind reading through clothing.

What will happen in the future?

The more sensors there are, the more interactions will be needed between garments like Intel Spider. "If we really live in a world led by sensors, then clothes can communicate with each other, with stores, with other things. We will open up a world of infinite possibilities that we have not yet explored and what this new world means. By bringing clothes into the Internet of Things, we can create a whole new way of communication... and that's really exciting."

But what happens next depends on the development of technology. Ildeniz pointed out that sensors and processing power are almost completely squeezed into a mobile phone, which acts as a hub to connect various devices, or this power is dispersed throughout the body. Whether it is in a necklace, a watch, earrings, or a pair of pants or a bra, it will form a distributed connection.

"The research is still oscillating between the two extremes," she said, but one thing is certain: the future world will be filled with interconnected sensors. We just have to decide how to use it - whether it's a pedometer or a T-shirt that displays our emotions.

Another hurdle is making the electronics small enough. One answer from Intel is a button-sized system-on-chip that can read and analyze sensor information and transmit the data via Bluetooth.

There are other issues, most notably how to clean the garment. Ileniz points out that most smart health garments use a "puck" that is removed when it's time to wash.

CuteCircuit's Rosella noted that her company's clothes are more technologically sophisticated, but she said: "We design them so that people can wear them."

Basic clothing can be washed at 30 degrees with a standard detergent, however more delicate materials will need to be dry cleaned.

Rosella said, "We conducted two years of washing tests before launching this high-tech fashion on the market. Wearing these clothes is no different from wearing other clothes, but these high-tech fashions look more beautiful and can create magical interactive effects. So the only excuse not to wear an interactive T-shirt is: you are too lazy to wash it and put it at the bottom of the dirty clothes basket."

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.