Future fashion - At the interface

Abstract

Imagining the future, we create sci-fi predictions visualized through telematic imagery, involving stage sets and costumes. Looking back at sci-fi's imagination we find it depicts the ideologies of the period in history when it was created far more accurately than it manages to predict future materials or functions. This article focuses on the body, but goes beyond the traditional perspectives of fashion, to consider wearables as an interface between the body and the world. Two key concepts will be presented in order to interpret future fashion, they are: 'fungibility' and 'empathy', which will be discussed through examples of clothing as a means for expressing data. User interfaces of the future will acknowledge the relationship between people, places and things as emergent spaces that generate meaning through everyday activity and therefore ones in which users themselves act as co-designers. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.