Cut from the Same Cloth: Fashion Featuring Technology

The emerging field of wearable technology posits a challenge to existing frameworks of fashion theory. Its merging of fashion and technology invites us to more thoroughly reflect on the way in which garments influence the perceptivity of the body. Proposing the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty as a methodological and conceptual framework for the study of wearable technology, this paper explores how the integration of technology into fashion affects the embodied and experiential qualities of clothing. More specifically, three examples from the field are discussed in order to explore how the embedding of sensors and actuators affects the relation between the fashion, technology and the body. A growing number of designers are experimenting with the integration of sensors and actuators, which allow garments to detect signals from the wearer’s environment or body and to respond to these signals accordingly. In fact, these wearable technologies even allow garments to materialize or visualize signals that would normally remain unnoticed or imperceptible to the wearer. They thus stimulate and even extend the wearer’s bodily perceptivity. Rather than passively ‘dressing’ the human body, these garments are able to actively transform and shape the way the wearer looks, perceives or acts in the world. Wearable technology highlights the intrinsically embodied nature of fashion. It emphasizes the reversibility of the relation between the body of the wearer, the garment and the integrated technology. Reciprocally perceiving and ‘touching’ each other in an ongoing process of interaction, wearer and wearable are neither independent, nor identical, yet always ‘cut from the same cloth’.