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http://www.tcn-uk.org/siteassets/documents/TCN/F/7/F74348B3-FBAF-4AFD-994F-9AC0A8F43FA2/1/Qtr2Yr05%20The%20Future%20of%20Fashion.pdf
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The future of fashion
BT futurologist Ian Pearson explores how fashion could get a whole lot funkier...
Fashion is really just starting to interact with the information technology (IT) world. Today there are already 'cool' gadgets and wearables, but tomorrow, we will see whole new domains where fashion can play a key role.
The biggest of these is the duality of appearance - where we may appear one way in the physical world, and have a whole range of digital appearances in the augmented reality and virtual environment worlds. This will lead to many people designing for themselves.
Along the way, electronics will continue to shrink in size to a point where it no longer significantly need affect the form of the object that carries it. Form and function will be separated, at least as far IT is concerned.
New materials and devices
Fashion is often at the forefront of technology usage. Many new materials and technologies are used in textiles and accessories when they are still too expensive or primitive for other uses.
The next decades will see the gradual convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive technologies. Typical results will be materials with different tensile, thermal and optical properties, integration of IT into fabrics, and linkage of our bodies to the network for medical and communication purposes, via clothing or skin-wearables.
Thin, flexible displays are becoming available already, and we will undoubtedly see them built into clothing with increasing frequency. This will be both for body adornment and functional uses.
A wide range of electronic devices can already be built into clothes and this will increase. New fabrics are already being developed to provide power generation - using solar power, electromagnetic, thermal and mechanical means.
Storage technology is improving extremely quickly and we may expect massive amounts of storage to be available in very small volumes, so that people can take all their files, music and videos with them - integrated invisibly into small devices or clothes.
Ambient intelligence, smart environments
Clothes will be part of the ambient intelligent environment we will inhabit in a few years' time. There will be myriads of chips all around us - in building infrastructure, furniture, gadgets, clothes, foods, packaging, even on our skin and inside some peoples' bodies (for medical and security purposes).
Chips in the environment or on our person will offer processing, storage, sensing identity and communications. The resulting smart environment will know who we are, what we are doing, where we are, to the nearest few millimeters, and all about us, subject only to our own preferences and privacy or security laws.
Form and function
As we head down this smart environment road, we will see an almost total decoupling of form from function. Almost any amount of electronic functionality can be associated with something without necessarily affecting its form.
Chips will be physically very small, so can be hidden anywhere, and any functionality that won't physically fit into a device can be accessed via the smart environment. This means that fashion designers can add a wide range of functions to something without needing to change its design.
Digital bubbles
The smart environment could offer many advantages and disadvantages for people. Potential abuse by marketing departments will necessitate the development of digital bubbles that protect us from the flood of unwanted electronic information coming at us from all angles.
These bubbles will act as an electronic force field and personal firewall. But of course we will want some information and want to communicate to some degree with the smart environment, so it must be a semi-permeable force field that allows information through it selectively.
What we want and need depends heavily on context, so large amounts of artificial intelligence (AI), security and profiling technology will be needed.
Duality of appearance
Various sensors on and about our person will monitor our behaviors and physical characteristics, and respond accordingly. One of the areas that computers may want to share with other people's digital bubbles is that of personality characteristics.
An ego badge would alert us to other people that are likely to be of interest to us so that our social and sex lives would improve. A related device is the active contact lens, which uses tiny lasers and micro-mirrors built into a contact lens with circuitry and power supply, to raster scan a high resolution image onto our retinas. This is called direct retinal projection.
Any computer generated images could be superimposed on what we see in the real world. We would be able to modify how we see other people so when you meet people you could change how they look. Beauty will be quite literally in the eye of the beholder.
This brings us to the heart of how fashion will change. Suddenly we have to worry about our digital appearance as well as our physical appearance. And digital appearances can be infinitely diverse.
We will not be limited by the properties of physical materials, or have to have the same appearance for everyone looking at us, nor even have the same appearance all day. Our appearance can be different to each viewer and different each time they look at us.
So fashion designers will need to design virtual fashions, and these will need to be dynamic and context sensitive. Dual appearance dictates dual fashion.
One of the accessories that we might need in such a world is the digital 'aura generator'. This will act as a sort of wireless web server that radiates our digital appearance into the nearby space.
It is almost like the hologram generators that science fiction fans will recognise from Red Dwarf. The main difference is that it will make us look different to different people.
DIY fashion
Finally, with increasing assistance expected from AI in all walks of life, we should expect that people will often want to design their own clothes - making most of the artistic decisions and letting the computer sort out the technical stuff.
As local production becomes more widespread, self design may become very popular indeed. How much this affects the market for professional fashion designers will thus depend on how much relative skill and creativity they really have, as well as on how much effort people can be bothered to invest in designing themselves.
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