TECH TWENTIES

Words: Daniël Geldenhuys | Images: Getty + Instagram

The 2010s were a big decade for tech and fashion. You’re reading this, which means you like to shop online and are probably using a smartphone you never imagined 10 years back. So what’s next? In addition to all the hyped features and convenience of use, 2020 tech will have an added social responsibility to not just filter away the flaws, but actually try to make the world a better place. As predicted by Google, Alexa and Siri, these are the fashion tech game-changers you can expect to drop this decade.

The internet can be quite the rabbit hole for rumours about unreleased Apple products. Case in point: there is a website that is already marketing and selling the Apple Lens on an uncanny platform that’s specifically designed to look like the official Apple website. You might remember the failed Google Glass circa 2013, so why is an Apple version significant? Apple Watch wasn’t the world’s first smartwatch, but it changed the game and pushed smartwatches into the mainstream.

The juicy rumour is that Apple has a secret unit tucked away in its headquarters with over a hundred people working on this product. It’s expected to drop around 2023. “It” being either an augmented reality headset iPhone accessory, an independent pair of augmented reality glasses – or both. Apple’s glasses will change the way we look at the world, incorporating virtual objects with real ones and embellishing the physical world with digital information. How exactly this affects the fashion world is up to app developers, but if Instagram can dress your face in bunny ears, Apple glasses shouldn’t have an issue letting you try on that Superbalist dress you’ve been eyeing. Suddenly, every mirror in your house has the potential to transform into a digital fitting room and that’s just the beginning.

Technically, this has been around for a while already. People who play video games are happy to drop cash on new outfits for their avatars. Moving into the new decade, exclusively digital clothing will make increasingly significant interactions with the real world.

The popular example is Scandinavian online retailer Carlings. They sell physical clothing, but they also have a digital collection. The pieces range from futuristic chaps to T-shirts, puffer jackets and luxuriously “fabricated” coats – all at a flat rate of just under R350. When purchasing an item, you submit a photo of yourself to Carlings and they’ll send it back to you with the item digitally rendered onto your body.

Digital clothing is marketed as fast fashion’s answer to sustainability. It’s a super-simple way to incorporate the latest trends into visual representations of yourself without having to rely on any finite resources. That said, right now it only seems to be serving influencers (and the occasional fashion fanatic) who are desperate to update their feeds with original looks on a regular basis. How might it have an effect on, for lack of a better term, “real” people? Once technology like the Apple Glass becomes more mainstream, it could be easy to imagine us purchasing digital upgrades to our looks (a print for a white shirt, a pair of sunglasses similar to a snapchat filter) that other glass wearers would see, similar to a WhatsApp avatar, but applied to the real world. When i-D magazine interviewed a trio of influencers on this subject, they all expressed convenience of fit when it came to dressing themselves digitally – finding the right size of a garment or making tweaks to things like sleeve length was suddenly effortless. This starts a conversation that, especially in the plus-size world, could end up echoing back and having a positive effect on physical clothing.

Blockchain

We did a story earlier last year on How Blockchain Makes Fashion Better. The potential is major and likely to evolve significantly over the next decade. Simplified, blockchain technology is a secure digital verification platform. One of its key elements, transparency, will allow consumers to access information about every step of the production process of a garment they purchase – from the origin of the material to the conditions in which it was manufactured.

Blockchain also promises to democratise the way retailers interact with customers from a design point of view. The technology can be used to allow consumers to give their advice and requests to clothing manufacturers and designers, often in exchange for some form of cryptocurrency.

Although the how is still hazy, blockchain seems to be the game-changer that will hold fashion accountable for its actions, both positive and negative. It will inject a significant amount of truth and accountability into the industry. You might call it a reckoning.