messy room. Wearatble Solar, a start up company, has been developing clothing that incorporates flexible solar panels into the fabric with the capability to charge phones and iPods. With this new technology, just an hour in the sun can leave you with a fully-charged phone battery! That being said, appearance-based technological innovations have also infiltrated the fashion world. One might assume that these innovations – with their awe-inspiring beauty – will become incorporated into the high fashion world, allowing designers to pursue technological advances without sacrificing their artistic impracticality. Designer Amy Winters incorporates holographic leather into her designs. This material responds to sound and, as the volume cranks up, the material illuminates to create what she calls “visual music.” Meanwhile, designer Ying Gao uses eye-tracking technology that allows patterns to move when they are being watched. Luxury clothing label Moon Berlin incorporates soft-circuit LEDs into their fabric, which gives it a luminescent glow. These technological trends will undoubtedly spread, but the variable remains how they will diffuse into the fashion world. Will high fashion be forced to assume a practical stance in order to have the first say before the products trickle down to the mainstream market? In my opinion, designers may soon adopt this position. A few designers will likely refuse to sacrifice their idea of fashion as visual art, and thus focus primarily on the flashy technological elements rather than the practical ones, but the larger industry needs to be taken into account. Visually, high fashion is art, but, industrially, it operates as a dramatized prototype for less expensive wearable brands to mimic.
If the high fashion industry neglects to incorporate technology in practical ways, other tech and start-up companies will take the reins. Consequently, brands such as Dior, Chanel, Versace and Balmain will soon become obsolete in comparison to entrepreneurs and visionaries within the wearable fashion world. The high fashion world must either shift away from its adoration of total impracticality or watch as the runway transforms from the face of a multi-billion dollar industry into a moving art show.