The Future of Fashion

Holly Fry. Introduce yourself, Holly, Hi, Hi, Hi. I'm Holly Fry, normally from Stuff You Miss in History Glass, an excellent podcast that if you don't already listen to, you should check out. Yeah, definitely, And Holly has been on the show before. At some point a long time ago. I believe Holly was with us, I think to talk about gamifying fitness, right, Yes, that was like October. We've been doing this a while and that kind of ties into our topic for today, which is fashion, the fashion of

the future, the future of fashion. Specifically, we want to talk about whether in the future there will be literal fashion police armed with shock sticks and packs to chase down offenders who wear plaid jumpsuits. I don't know, there won't be no Well, Joan is gone, so the Fashion Police have all but disbanded. I don't know what you're talking about. Come along and will be The Fashion Police used to be a show that Joan Rivers headed up,

where she would basically do that verbally described. She passed Kathy Griffin replaced her briefly, but then didn't really like the tone of the show because there was some you know, it's a little judge and negatives. Um so now it's kind of in a floundering and if anybody were going to start that branch of um, you know, legal actual chase you down and hurt you for your poor choices,

it would have been Joan Rivers. What send. She's not with us anymore, although I have hope that like her brain is resting in a jar somewhere Futurama style, and that her her robot army will descend upon our dystopian future or utopian future. Really, I think that would work

pretty well. So I imagine, Holly, you'd be a great defense counsel in the court of the Fashion Police, probably because I'm down for anything, right, So we we actually do want to talk about fashion today, maybe not fashion Police, but just more broadly the future of fashion. And we've

talked about the future of clothing before. Yeah, in December we talked about stuff like kinetic fabrics and and three D printing of pieces, and self cleaning fabrics and odor filtering fabrics for all of your farts and um and and other stuff like that. Well, today we we brought Holly on because Ali actually does have a wonderfully interesting sense of fashion, and she designs things I do. I mean, I like clothes. I always have sin so I was a kiddo, like I don't remember ber not ever being

into clothes and not making them. Yeah, yeah, And you make a lot of your own clothes, right, I do most of the unless it's a T shirt, it's a pretty safe bet that I made it. Except you make like really interesting clothes, not like the boring stuff I wear. Like you make like things for for like sci fi conventions, and I do. But I also make most of my day wear. Um. And part of that is because I don't. I never, even as a kid, liked what the offerings were off the rack, Like I didn't like wearing the

same thing as other people. And it didn't have enough grito on it. Probably nothing ever has enough grito on it. Probably Do you have a grito tattoo? Does the world know this? I do, and the world knows, and the world will know more. We have a video coming out soon ish about me getting my grito tattoos, which will be on the House to Works YouTube channel. But yeah, I always was into kind of that crazy a lot of film inspired stuff and wanted to integrate that into

my daily wear. So that's how I ended up kind of well, that's definitely where my brain and immediately goes when I think about the future of fashion. I just start thinking about, okay, sci fi movies set in the future, what do people wearing them? And immediately the first thing I think of is the fifth Element. I'm not sure why that is the movie that screams future? Yeah, who is that? I'm sorry, you're I hate. I hate to affirm stereotypes and be the guy in the room who

doesn't know anything about fashion, but I don't. Well, we should also say that Jean Pagutier is not the only designer on it. Mobius also designed a lot of this. That's right, that's right. But Jean pau Gautier is a very well known French designer, as you might guess from the moniker Uh he does if you remember. This is a ways back for some of our younger listeners, though I'm sure they've seen them. Their iconic Madonna's tour where she did all the cone bras and those crazy corsets

in the eighties, that was all Gautier. That's the future, it was then. Yeah, um, now you know those are just de rigor so yeah, well, I mean that is one vision of the future to me. The fifth element is interesting because it's got these sort of like wild, very eye catching and busy kind of fashion pieces, bright colors,

strange patterns, things were not used to. But then the some depictions of the future sort of go in the totally opposite direction, right, Like you've got Star Trek and things like that, where they just say, well, in the future, nobody's gonna care about fashion and it's all just going

to be identical jumpsuits or you know, basic gray fatigues. Well, but you're thinking about Star Trek in terms of the uniforms, because if you look at anybody else that gets on that ship, any any of the various alien cultures an encounter, although it seems like they default to jumpsuits and mumu, Well that's true. That's a very good point. But yeah, you have to remember that they're technically like a military crew.

Military is maybe not the right way to place it, but there there is, you know, an exploration there are a governmental agency basically exploring space. So it's all uniform base, right, I mean you're part of an organization like Starfleet. Organizations like that, past, present and future always going to want to destroy your individuality and make you an identical peg. That's a fun way to look at it. I look

at it is simplifying and codifying. You know, you have to make it easy to identify who's who and if you're allowed to where whatever you want. You won't know who the science officers are. Yes, you won't know which of the away party should die on the planet because

they won't be wearing the red shirts, right right. I mean I'm personally really voting for like the golden age sci fi nineteen fifties version of future fashion, wherein all dudes where like deep ocean diving suits, and all ladies where like bikinis that are covered in vacuum sealed plastic wrap. I want lots of rings. I want ring collars everywhere.

I want it to be very metropolis and a little bit of Do you remember when Futurama went to the bar where the rings were all the thing in terms of accessories and for I was like, oo futuristic and I'm like, no, this is retro. So I'm into that.

I dig it. Pigs in space fashion forward. Yeah, well you bring up an interesting thing there, Holly, with retro and future sort of colliding, because a lot of people do seem to have observed that fashion goes in cycles, right, Yes, there is some argument over the length of the cycle, but yeah, for the most part, you'll hear people bandy

about like the twenty year cycle. Uh. There was an article recently, I'm kind of pulling this one out of memory on Slate where they actually talked about a New Yorker article that discussed a forty year nostalgia cycle and that was in reference to Madmen and sort of how that has all happened. But they were using that juxtaposed against predictions and social observations of others, um other sociologists and predictors that would say there was a cycle. But

they all gave them different year denominations. Oh no, it's a thirty years fifteen is really where the site no is more where the cyclist so well. But but but either way, it's it's easily observable in the fact that a lot of the things, uh, like, a lot of the things that the young hip kids these days are wearing seemed very similar to what was popular in like hip hop culture in the mid right, Uh, and that

that does happen. There is an argument going on right now that the cycle is getting shortened by the you know, sort of permutation of technology in our lives and the compression apidity with which we share interestation now whereas before part of the twenty year cycle was like the big cities is where the retro stuff would start and then it would slowly ripple out to more and more rural areas until it became kind of ubiquitous. But now everybody's

attached to everything at the same time. So interesting that happened is interesting. But what I wanted to bring up was Labour's law. He was a historian, among other things, and a journalist, and he sort of observed and wrote down this sort of uh, the cyclical nature of it

and he broke it out in the year. So his sort of the way that he says the fashion timeline goes is that an item is considered indecent ten years before it's time, shameless five years before it's time, daring one year before it's time, smart when it's okorn, and that's smart in the sense of snappy, not intellect like, oh,

that's a she's a smart dresser. Uh dowdy one year after its time, hideous ten years after its time, ridiculous twenty years after its time, amusing thirty years after its time, quaint fifty years after its time, charming seventy years after its time, romantic one hundred years after its time, and beautiful one fifty years after its time. That's kind of a long I don't know if that's even a cycle. That's just sort of like a qualitative spectrum emerging from

the present year. Yeah, And I had mentioned to Joe a little bit ago, and I did not put it in the notes because I had a revelatory moment while I was driving into work this morning, because I was thinking about this and I was trying to kind of retroactively apply these rules and be like, well, like a hundred and fifty years ago, we were kind of one of those shifts in Victorian fashion when the bustle skirt was very big, and I was like, well, that's never

going to come back, and then my brain went Nicki Minaj and I was like, oh, it did come back, and now people are getting you know, dairy are implants so that they can make the badanc a little larger and more sumptuous, and it's basically a modernized version of a you know, like a bustle pad. That was the point of bustles, really was. That was the point of the crinolines. I thought it was like, so peoples and bustles are not the same thing. Okay, So the big

the big dresses and big skirts. I always thought, and I could totally be wrong, that the point was that nobody's going to see the shape your leg moving the dress that way. And there are a lot of different

reasons you can't really break it down to one. Like, for example, when you look at sort of the the wide pannier of like the Rococo period, like so think of a marianto a net dress and this really really exaggerated hip shapes, like like you can't fit through doorway unless you turn sideways right, right, And that was like

the six ft diameter, right. So part of that is one did you know the rough and little pocket cages in there where you could there were little pockets that you can have which actually just like a pocket that you would tie around your your waist, over your usually over your your corsetree. Uh yeah, I was gonna say your chemise and then your person layer. But they also had some that were like the cage itself made a little pocket that you could like literally shove a bottle

of wine. Not quite big enough for an astronach, but um, you know, sizeable. Uh. And part of that is, you know, those big extreme shapes are kind of about creating a silhouette that is fantastical and and not practical. Oh yeah, that's part of going I am so rich. Yeah, it's part of wearing the hustle through a door, y'all sure, and also being able to say, look at how much silk I can afford and how much embroidery. Wow. So do you think we're going back into an age of

like large, ostentatious kind of clothing pieces. No, because I don't think it's practical in today's world, you know what I mean, Like it could be more practical then because there wasn't as much hustle and bustle to life, whereas now, even if you are theoretically the idle rich, you probably still have a lot of things you have to get to and do, and you know, planes you have to fit onto, and it's not quite the same aside from like on the red carpet, especially at the at the

Met Fashion show, Yeah, yeah, there are moments of that, but in terms of like general daywear or even evening where so much. But that's part of the cycle, is that things come out as tour first and then they slowly get kind of a little water down and adapted. Like many years before the blingy jeans became popular, Like if you look about five years before that, Jean Paucautier was doing, um what I will never forget. Alan Cumming covered one of his shows for some magazine and he

kept calling them chandelier pants. But they were basically these genes that were just dripping with bejewel mint and beaded fringe and stuff. And then it's like, if you look just a few years later, we got to that point where we were in fact getting a lot of rhinestone, um, accessorized genes and kind of you know, more of that sparkly thing. But it starts hard in the oat coutur

arena and then it kind of slowly comes down. Well, I thought we should try a little fashion experiment to see exactly how true Labour's law was to at least our experience and what we can see on the internet. So I pulled up I thought we should just look at some Google image search results for so let's start with fashion. So Labour's law says, fashion to us now should be doughty. What do we see when we look atten fashion? I don't think it's especially dowdy. I would

not classify most of this is dowdy. Now, Um, where we're seeing essentially are actually analyzing at your short people are going to be who's going to be modeling? But these tall gals are looking really uh yeah yeah, I mean, I mean what's actually striking me right now is that this A lot of the photographs are things that have have have dropped into common fashion in in much the way that Holly was just discussing, what uh this nice

sea through dress. No, um that um, A lot of the A line skirts and the kind of bright colors and patterns moving away from the color block that was popular in and into this sort of busy pattern that's popular today. Yeah, a lot of tribal patterns, which you know periodically those will crop up in in fashion, and but it seems like those were getting more adopted into. I mean, you can go to your local department or even like a target, and you'll see things that really

echo this stuff. Okay, here's the thing I just noticed. When I type in something like two thousand five fashion, pretty much all the results are women. So does this just not even give us a window into what men's fashion looks like at any given time? And does men's fashion change less? Uh? It depends. I mean, I hate to keep invoking Gautier, but he does some amazing men's where that is very very outside of the norm. Yeah, and changes a lot odd Like he's one of those

designers that does a lot of dresses for men. He does a lot of like split leg clothing for men that kind of are cut like a gown would be, except their pants. Um, he's pretty egalitarian and who gets what styles in terms of his men's wear line and his women's were line. You know how gender informs fast and might be something that's worth talking about in in the future of fashion, because I can totally see societal attitudes about gender changing the way we have expectations for

what men and women should wear. Um, but let's let's look at least one more. Because Labour's law says that fashion should be ridiculous, it probably will be. But I love a little ridiculous. Huh. I expected to see more plaid. I'm not seeing plaid um not not in the high fashion range. No, but oh man, here's here's in fact some of that. There's a poster for Empire Records. Yeah. Oh and clueless. Yeah, what did nine fashion look like?

Explain this to me? I don't know what I'm seeing. Uh, you know, I kind of look at the mid nineties in terms of fashion as a big old miss like I always have, because we were coming off the popularity of grunge and that whole so r where people were like, no dress up, forget that, dressed down, get really sloppy and sloppy is where it's at, and super relaxed shows how you know cool I am. But there were still people going to know, let's make a pretty frock. Come on,

let's get it. Yeah. And there's also that influence of the very where your wealth hip hop culture, segment of hip hop culture that was becoming very prevalent and even crossing over into some of the grunge. Where the way that we're seeing in some of these images of the crop tops and the miniskirts um that we're also influenced by the mod movement of the nineteen sixties. There's a really groovy dress in these results with some beautiful optical

illusion on it that I'm we need those. Okay, let's look at one more before we move on to the future. The past of nineteen fifteen fashion. Now, according to Labor's law, nineteen fifteen fashion should be romantic. And what I assume Labor means by that is not like you know, oh, we're going out on a date romance tick, but as in like it's a romantic notion having like high emotions, and right we romanticize its place in the cultural landscape. Yes, sure, um, I and I don't know I would go out on

a date with some of these hats for sure. Well, you've also stumbled into, um, the period of one of my favorite designers of all time Paul Poire who just did mild and beautiful things. Uh. He was the one who designed if you guys watched down to Nabbey, those beautiful Harem pants that the youngest daughter got in a little bit of scandal ye for wearing correct Yes, he

uh is a fascinating gent we um. We did a podcast on him on mist in History at one point, and one of the cool things that he did was he was sort of one of the first designers who understood branding, Like he also put out like in addition to clothing lines, like he had a little school that produced its own art pieces, in its own stationary pieces, and they were all branded Pire and he just had a He would also have parties where if the ladies

weren't dressed properly, he would dress them before they could come in. That sounds both awful and amazing, Like I would have gone into all of those parties. Yeah. Uh So what was what was going on in nineteen fifteen? A lot of these clothes are are historically interesting because during that period we were in the middle of World War One, so a lot of fabrics and styles were becoming more streamlined and simple. I think is people kind

of tightened their belts literally and figuratively. And also we were in the middle of the women's suffragette movement and uh, moving away from the giant corsets and giant bustles and restrictive skirts and all of that thing into something a little bit more movable and breathable. Yes, giggles, No, that sounds very insightful. I had. I'm just all I'm seeing is ankle length everything. All dresses our ankle length, and all the men are wearing ankle coats. Well, we hadn't

quite escaped. Dresses didn't lift so much yet. Given another five years and they'll start popping up. Yeah, those helms will start shortening. All I can think of, though, is Mary Poppins, but that's just me. Yes, since they have the whole Suffragette movement song, it's very exciting, yeah, and lots of very gorgeous gowns. And I romanticized the whole thing. And this is also, you know, around the Titanic time, so think about those for a visual for any listeners.

So I guess, I guess we do romanticize the Edwardian period because because this is this is still Edwardian light, Edwardian sure. All right, Well, let's take what we've learned and see if we can make any predictions about the future of fashion. One of the things that's sticking with me that came up a minute ago was the role of gender in what's fashionable for people to wear. Oh yeah, and there's been a few news items lately about upcoming clothing lines or pop up stores that incorporate a more

unisex look. Yeah. In January of this year, self Ridges in London actually did a pop up unisex store where they offered everything from bathing suits to like, you think, it's very easy to sort of unisex things like tops, like a T shirt is you know, kind of carries across everyone, even though there are different cuts. Those are easy to kind of consider, uh, gender neutral. But they really have kind of been like, no, let's all wear the same swimsuit bottoms, let's all wear the same you know,

kind of more body conscious styles. It's kind of fun. Yeah, And and you can you can see that on on the street and the type of pants, for example, that men and women are wearing these days that are you know, for for a certain body type. Everyone is just wearing skinny leg uh type jeans well, and they're even I mean a bunch of different clothing stores and clothing lines that offer what's called the boyfriend gene basically boycott jeans that are slightly altered for a woman's figure. Yeah, for

hips essentially. Yeah. I love watching the look on Joe's face as we discuss fashion, because eyes just get big at moments there. Um. Uh. American apparel Um has announced that in the fall they're going to be introducing a few gender neutral pieces in they're in their very widespread stores. Um. And you know historically that the trend of unisex clothing is is nothing new. Uh No, I mean it's happened periodically.

Children will go back in history for a minute briefly, but you know, all children used to dress very similarly and very freely. Like I have a picture of my grandfather when he was a tiny child, looking for all the world like the most dolly dressed, petite little girl with the ringlets and everything. Our standards. Yeah, it used to be very standard. Little boys would have on even dresses and these very freely little enssembs up to a certain age back then, did boys have to wear that

until they killed a bear? You know, it was when they were quite little, you know, then he sort of started to see the little boys suits after a certain age. Yeah, I think it like toddler age again, the practicality of like, if it's a baby, then it doesn't really matter to the baby. And also it's just easier if it's in a gown then well and too within you know, larger families,

you just hand those off. You don't have to worry about Oh no, we had a boy for or we had a girl first, and now we have a put the dress on him. It's fine. Yeah, I mean, one of the things I've always heard is that this whole idea of like blue being a color for boys and pink being a color for girls is a recent invention. It was reversed, I believe in that we early part

of the nineteenth century or twentieth century rather uh. And and of course, over over time, what's considered masculine and feminine for for adults has varied so greatly across cultures and epox and all of that kind of thing. Um Pants, for example, in the West, pant type clothing became a gender thing partially due to the rise of horseback infantry, and uh, it wasn't until the irrational dress movement of the mid nineteenth century that was an actual thing that happened.

They were like pamphlets out like, you know, it's time for women to wear seven pounds of underclothing or less. No more of this more than ten pounds of underclothing. Um uh. That that trousers started to enter the scene for women and they were considered so shocking at the time. Pants for women were high fashion around like nineteen eleven and trendy amongst the populace by the nineteen thirties or so.

And again, thank you, Paul, Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But part of it also just seems to me to be changing attitudes about expecting people to dress or behave certain ways based on gender. Like I think it used to be much more common to say, well, men should dress a certain way and women should dress a certain way. And I think generally are our values are changing, um, towards just not expecting people to do one or the other

so much, I I hope. So that's lovely. Yeah, And there have been you know, sort of bursts of these moments in the past. I mean, when you look at sort of David Bowie in the Laddin Sane phase. He brought in like a real trend of androgeny that was pretty popular and fairly widespread because he was, you know, a pop icon. Yeah, but again it wasn't sort of enough of a ground swell to be like this is

how we do it now. But it was sort of one of those early sputters that I think leads to moments like this where it's getting totally cool for things to be less gendered in terms of how they're made and cut and designed. Oh yeah, yeah, I think it's an indicative of a like larger cultural shift of us. Yeah, like like redefining what gender roles and gender standards are,

or even the concept of gender itself. Um or or you know, at the very least, we currently have a fascination with all of that, which you can see if you are, for example, on the internet ever by you know, by just looking at the you know, huge fuss of m ras decrying Fury Road because it had eighties in it, I guess, um or you know, when when Facebook exploded just this past week, when we're recording this podcast with a Caitlyn Jenner's photo shoot, or just the sheer fact

that teenagers on Tumblr frequently have in their public profiles not only their uh sexuality and their gender, but also their sex. They'll say, Oh, I'm assist Jen dude, or I'm a trance lady or whatever it is that they're saying. Yeah, I mean that dialogue is huge in the public sphere right now, which is why fashion follows suit. Yeah. I think this is hopefully just indicative of we're heading towards the world where people are just more cool with whatever

anybody else wants to do. You can wear what they want. It's nice. Yeah, I think it's a pretty pretty easily applicable principle. To quote RuPaul, You're all born naked. The rest is drag. Every beat everybody is in some form of drag because it's all about presentation. Yeah. Really, that's probably aren't worshiping at the altar of Mamoru the way that I do, But like, really, I hear it every morning.

But that is interesting because you point out the whole thing about clothing being performative, Like when you put on an outfit, you are, in a way, in acting and performance, you're trying to like present a certain face to the world, and that ties into something that comes up when we think about a lot of these sci fi outfits that we were talking about earlier, which are these kind of like strange, really eye catching or sort of high engagement elements,

things that are not just like a plain piece of cloth, but they do something really active and strange or weird. Yeah, I mean I love this stuff. Um. There have been a lot of these and a lot of different designers popping up kind of around these ideas that clothing should illicit responses and it should be responsive to the environment. There's a design company called Rainbow Winters and they do

it's almost performance art like. They have a dress that, um, when it hears loud noises that could sound like peals of thunder, these lightning flashes will appear across the dress and it's super beautiful. Um. Diana Ang who is a designer that some people may know if they watch Project Runway. She was the one that was a huge science geek that was on there. She has a clothing company and she designs clothes that do similar things. They react to

the environment and to exposure to light and uh. There's also a designer named Yengao who really is often characterized more as a performance artist, but she makes these incredible clothes that have like these tiny little servos and stuff in them, and she has some that will react to being looked at, like the track eye movement and it they'll subtly shift and it's very trippy looking when you

look at some of them. Some of them just react to light, like if they're in a dark place and someone were to shine a flashlight on them, the fabrics will start to move and kind of flutter up together, and it's really beautiful and it is very trippy, Like there's this moment where you're like, am I watching something happening happened? Or am I having a cerebral event. But it's all sort of designed to just kind of draw the viewer in and think about like what clothing is

and what the presentation really is. I love it. That's really interesting, But I want to revisit that in a question later in this episode about what people really want out of their clothing. Okay, sort of along those lines, I saw back in a Brazilian computer scientists to named Katia Vega, who was demonstrating the system of um false

eyelashes that let you control technology. She had metallicized eyelashes and this conducive eyeshadow that when you blink or wink for more than half a second, it would complete this really low voltage circuit and let you control like a drone or or light and unlight crown of LEDs that you're wearing, because wear led crowns sometimes, And uh, yeah, it's it's more along the lines of performance are at

that point. But it's really interesting to me that that designers are thinking about how to incorporate practicality into these fashion statements that we're making. I just think about how many times things would be blinking, because I'm blinker anyway. Well, it's it's she said that it was a hard blink that it was. You know that it's the more than half a second is to make sure that your eyelashes fluttering isn't going to set off yourself bring all of

the power on the block going out. But see, then you don't know if the person across the room is winking at you or just trying to activate their drone to something out of your dress. Well yeah, I guess, I guess if their drone comes over to you, then you know, and if it doesn't, then it doesn't quite work. But of course, speaking of clothing and fashion items that activate electronics. That of course brings us to nanogenerators, which we talked about before, but are worth mentioning again. The

incorporation into clothing of ways of generating power. Yeah, there's actually a lot of work on this going on very near to us at Georgia Tech. Um dr z l Wang that oh yeah, has a lab there has really advanced nanogenerators quite a bit. Uh, And they're not just

for textiles. You can also incorporate them, like there are some that are intended as medical devices that will be self powering, where the movement of your body, for example, like your lungs breathing will flex the nanogenerator enough to generate a current. Actually like run a pacemaker. Yeah, your your heart beating will run here. But of course it

also gets incorporated. Um. They did not seem to come to Fruition, and I don't remember the company, but for a while you were seeing like in those little mini look for this in the future kind of blurbs in in fitness magazines like oh, there's a company working on putting nano generators into like running pants, and eventually they will power your iPod or your you know, shuffle and then you will have to keep running to keep getting music.

And it's a great concept, but it doesn't seem to have taken off because it's been a couple of years since those were really kind of popping up everywhere. Yeah, I remember hearing about this too. I mean, I think generally the idea was that you would have piezo electric elements that like when you when you smash them or press them, apply pressure, it sends a current to something, but you couldn't ever get that much current out of it. Yeah,

a human body produces. Yeah. Yeah, it was a break in the level of current that you could get out of the things without storing like a heavy battery upon your person. Yeah, like a few years ago. I'm sure it's advanced since then, but that was when I was working on a project for work here for it, and it was like you could get about to a batteries worth of power from you know, a pretty decent amount of Now, my theory is just slap those on a bunch of kindergarteners and let them go and that's a

lot of a batteries we can power the world. But you know, coaches, um, Yeah, it seems like nanogenerators have kind of been supplanted in terms of what's the next big thing in technology clothing with solar systems. There's a company called Wearable Solar that makes clothes that have solar

panels on them. That looks cool, you know. I have to say that's really the sticking point that the actual designs are a little They're doing some pretty interesting things, and they're really working to finesse them and they're improving all the time, but they still look a little like something out of th h X one eight, you know,

they're a little clunky monkey um. And there's another company which is called um Voltaic Systems, and they actually make bags that will similarly collect solar energy and create power with it. Right now, the bags are all very utility. They're not super fashion e but give it a minute. It's an easy to adapt situation. I remember some backpacks coming out maybe five years ago or so that I saw that we're right, had little solar panels built in.

That's really interesting. But also there is the question of the materials that we make our clothing out of, and how our clothes are manufactured, and how this does actually become a part of the fashion because the material in a lot of ways is the fashion element, right, I mean material matters. Yeah, yeah, it's material and construction, and construction follows the materials. So I saw something that I

thought was really interesting. It was actually a feature in a new item that was being inducted into the Museum of Modern Art, which was a quote four D dress. Oh, which is not not a size I had to realize, but that refers to four D printing. So that's a concept we've talked about on this show before. But the idea is three D printed materials that change over time, right,

due to some kind of stimulus. Right. So the traditional one is, say you print out a flat sheet that's sort of like a cross shape, and then you put it in water, or you shake it, or you do something that applies some kind of like changing force on it, and along some preprinted hinges, it will fold up into

a cube standard, right, a cube. Yeah. I wish I had more cubes in my house because I'm always trying to solve the lament configuration and if I could just put some decoy cubes that would keep me away from the real danger. But anyway, these there were some people from a design studio called nervous system, and they designed a kinematic dress created using this four D printing principle. So it's three D printing materials that adapt over time

to make a dress. Well what would that mean? So normally you would have to make clothes by stitching together flat pieces of fabric or material, but this was one piece printed in a three D printer. So it's printed in sort of this jumbled up ball. And it's a custom body fitted three D dress that's made from a digital three D scan of the body of the person who's going to be wearing it. And it's a dress made out of two thousand, two hundred and seventy nine

quote unique triangular panels. I love that it's a great triangular panels. So each of these little panels is going to be rigid, but they make the dress, uh fabric y, I guess they make it flexible when they connect at these hinges. And so you can watch a video of this online if you want to look it up. Tons of hinges, little triangles. It makes something that just looks like a dress and looks yeah, and I think that's really interesting. The idea that you could print your clothes

in the future. Like you could go straight from a digital design to a print to something that you could wear. So sort of imagine a future where instead of trying on clothes at the store, you scan your body. I guess you'd have to get naked at the store to scan it. Maybe you got one of these at home. I don't know. You scan your body and then the computer comes up with the piece of clothing that is

a perfect fit for you. You can make alterations to it in your little Photoshop style clothing editor, and then you print it, and then you can wear it, and then everything will have grito on it. Right now, I have to do it the chump way where I have to actually design fabric and order it to be printed and then make a thing out of it. This will really save me steps. Yeah yeah, thank you, future, I hope. So now, of course this is right now. This is

a kind of like intensive and expensive process. That that's why you see it's coming out of like a design studio and not like a store that's just making tons of these two sell people. But I can imagine like the price and in the intensivity of the design stage coming down. Oh yeah, yeah, I'm sure intensivity will pretend it's a word, whether or not you coined it. Chimp uh. We are the music makers and we are the dreamers of the dreams. Um. Other other fabrics that might be

made in the future include organic ones and not like cotton. No, there is actually a company called Bioculture, and they have figured out this way to grow fabric from basically like a sugar green tea water solution with a mother culture of bacteria. This basically grows a piece of fabric, not like like a laser cut and turned into clothes, not a thread that has to be woven. Correct. It's pretty fascinating and right now it's in early stages. One of

the things, um there is a great documentary. I was actually watching it right before we came in here, so I didn't even add it to the notes. It's called The Next Black and they talk with a lot of different people that are, you know, sort of shaping the

future of fashion. But this woman behind Biocutur was saying, like, right now, it's still in its infancy and it's very simple, but what she envisions for the future is that eventually they could genetically engineer the bacteria to be able to produce different kinds of fabric and different thicknesses, isn't different with different qualities, and then it will just become a huge thing. And the really great thing is that there's almost no waste to things like this because you can

just reintegrate whatever your your cutout pieces are. You can either biodegrade them or you can potentially reintegrate them as perhaps a mother culture depending on its status at that point. Wow, yeah, that's great. You no more like like beautiful scraps of fabric that you have no use for. You can almost find a use. Yeah. Well, if it's bigger than a four by four inch piece, you can find a use for it. There are always handbags to be made. It's true,

it's true. Um uh, well, I wanted to talk for a minute about um the fashion of hiding, but using fashion for digital camouflage. So you're talking about fashion. This just designed to blend in with the crowd, so that you're the opposite of a character in the fifth element, just kind of and you're more like a character in a William Gibson novel. There you go. Um no, but but that is certainly a thing that I could see people doing, and that people frequently do, like the fashion

of just blending in and being ignored. Um, it's what I go for. My main fashion thing is like, is this not going to be noticeably ugly? I don't always succeed. Um no No. When that that facial recognition boom hit um in coinciding with the leak of the n S a s sort of best practices that everyone started freaking out about with completely good reason. Um. A few concepts surrounding this, this fashion of digital camouflage surfaced and that's

uh fashion that will let you hide from facial recognition technology. Um. For example, there's one project called c V Dazzle that released a kind of look book of tips for fashionable techno camouflage. They were inspired by the the cubism designs of World War One naval camouflage, which are fascinating unto themselves.

And and also the understanding that the facial recognition software depends on I ding key facial features and UM symmetry and comparative tones across the contours of any given face. That means the kind of highlighting and shadows that are created by the bridge of the nose and cheekbones and

the brow across most humans. Yeah. Um so Their idea is to arrange your hair in ways that obscure part of your face and to use makeup to disrupt those lines of your contours, your cheekbones, your nose, bridge, your brow, and you know, you kind of get bonus points for creating designs that mimic eyes elsewhere on your face that will totally freak out the software and the designs really wound up looking like a street punk version of Gem

and the Holograms. It was not what i'd call practical for daywhere necessarily it was something like at a transmit if you guys have read the comic book trans Metropolitan. But I mean it was interesting, like the restaurant. There's a brestaurant and Athens called Transmitted after the book. Okay, to the best of my knowledge, it is. I'm not sure if I would want to eat a cool Can you just go furiosa and just engine grease the top half of your face? I think we all should be

more like furious. I mean, I love her, but that looks not for me. She pulls it off. I'll do something else, but not so much with that one, not not the and not the engine grease. Maybe yeah, bad for the skin. So well, that's interesting. It makes me wonder, though, is trying to hide from camera as a fashion statement. I guess it kind of is. Well, I think if you do something like this, you make it one. Yeah.

So it's not It's not just the practical aspect of like, I don't want facial recognition software to keey me in and put me in a day base somewhere. It's that you're actually saying, like, I'm not the kind of person who wants to be recognized. This is who I am. Fashion statement. This is a visual representation of myself and that is slightly paranoid with good reason. Yeah. But with glittery shadow and makeup. Yeah yeah, I think beautiful bright

colors and very strange fringe styles. The magical combination of peacock in and hiding at the same time, right right, which is what I found so great about it. I'm like, yeah, high fashion hiding. Um all right, yeah, another thing along

those lines. Um. Japan's National Institute of Informatics released this pair of goggles that will hypothetically block your face on infrared sensitive cameras due to them having these very bright, outward shining l e ed s that we're in the near infrared range, so you're not gonna give your coworkers headaches wearing them, but cameras will be blinded by them as long as they pick up the infrared. Yeah. I've

not seen anyone wearing them. I don't think. I don't think they really caught on, mostly because a lot of cameras are visual range and not infrared range. But you know, for certain uses I could see how how they could be, you know, terrific. Um another thing that I guess we might be moving towards, but that I have not seen catch on with anyone yet. Um, what if what if fashion becomes deemed unnecessary? What if clothes don't need to

exist anymore in the future. Oh so you're going like full on beyond just the jumpsuits future into like why

we're clothing at all? Yeah, Well, that is actually an interesting idea, I think, because if you think about the history of clothes, in addition to being purely decorative and and sort of fashionable or expressive of your personality, clothing has had, you know, at least a largely functional origin, Like it protects you from cold trapping, body heat, protects you from the elements, so rain and snow and sleep and all that protects you from insects and mosquito bites,

protects your skin from the sun. In some cases, it will actually protect you from mechanical damage. So you can see like a lot of like a leather armor basically. Uh. And then of course there's the protection of our sensibilities, the idea that we think like nudity is socially inappropriate. But I was just thinking about how a lot of people these days live in climate controlled, sheltered, mostly bug

free environments and spend like of their time there. So if you are a person who lives a life like that, where almost all of your existence is in a place where you don't need to be protected from cold, rain, sleet, sun, insects, snake bites, saddle sores, stuff like that, will we eventually select for nudity, Like, is there any reason people will continue to want to wear clothes? Well, one question, will

we continue to keep pets? M hm? You know, just a piece of fabric will help a lot from a cat walking on you and accidentally giving you a claw mark. But if we become the equivalent of an indoor cat, But if we're still also keeping indoor cat, But I want to say no, just because I like clothes so much, Like at this point, are we living on the axiom? Like I don't. I don't know where we land at that point. Well, I had a kind of stupid idea.

But my my thought was, you know, this would make chairs difficult because like I wouldn't I wouldn't want to you know, if I lived in a world where everybody was naked all the time, I wouldn't want to like have public use chairs where I put my butt, my naked butt on some chair somebody else's. But I mean, I barely want to sit on the subway train to begin with, like with multiple layers between my butt and

the previous persons. But so yeah, I think, but maybe maybe in the future there will be nudity, but all chairs will have like the chair equivalent of the toilet's eat cover at the airport. Well, or they'll all be made with antimicrobial materials, so would be self self cleaning. Yeah, but no, no, Well, and I think the sensibilities will override a lot of it anyway, And too, if you take away the clothes, there's a whole cultural thing then of like people will have to actually be humans and

have conversations and cultivate personalities. Oh. Man, I mean, I'm a I'm a close person. I love it. But I think if you take all the clothes away, it will be become very, very difficult to talk to one another. Yeah. Also, man, like that would erase so many like like class lines and gender lines. I mean that would and a lot of people are not going to want to let those go for Oh, certainly not No, huh, good question though.

I mean, I'm I can't imagine being comfortable. I mean, there are new diest colonies and have been for a long time. Yeah, but not for everyone. Yeah, those are definitely the a niche and not the the pervasive cultural norm. Okay, Well, here's another sort of question for discussion then, and it's about the idea of these sort of like what we were talking about with these high engagement pieces of clothing

and and sort of e clothes. So we we've talked about wearables e clothing, and I think it's a very simple proposition these days to create textiles or clothing items that have some form of embedded electronics or or some kind of reactive visible feature. But most of our discussion in the past has sort of been about functionality, like you know, clothes that are self cleaning or gathering data or displaying data for you, or you know it might

be fitness data or health data. But what what about simple fashion, Like do you think in the future many people will actually want to wear clothing with embedded electronic elements like these clothes we see with LED lights and screens and displays embedded in them just for aesthetic reasons or is that going to remain the kind of thing that it is today where it's just kind of like a weird novel to your curiosity. I mean, would people actually want screens and lights and stuff in the clothes

they wear every day? Um? Yeah? If I wouldn't get the number of weird looks that I know that I would, I would be wearing a two two like studded with LED lights right now. I don't care about weird looks. But they're hard to wash. That's a trick. They're hard to construct and they're hard to wash. Not that hard to construct, Like there are a lot of groups now that you know online groups that will do like LED clothing that we're incorporating, But it's the washability that makes

it tricky. Yeah, I mean, I feel like if you go to a tech convention today, you're going to see tons of this stuff. Are you kidding? If you go to a nighttime race, yeah, there are a million people wearing two tuos with lights in them. Yeah okay, but you're saying, like just the practical factor of the washability, well okay, let's eliminate that. Let's say it's just as washable as your standard piece of clothing. Wearing it right now?

You think people really do want that for standard clothing. Yeah, absolutely, I mean it's it's a concept of flashiness. Literally, I suppose that. Um, it sounds like for you it would be a foreign concept, like you're trying not to attract attention with your clothing. Yeah, it seemed ridiculous to me. But I don't know. I mean, I can't imagine you wanting to have elements on my clothing that would like make people look at me. I don't care if people

look at me or not. I just care if I'm delighted. Yeah, and here's the magic words. And this is why Diana Ain't always stays a designer that I love. She knows the magic word to get me to go. I want that and it's Twinkle. She'll be like, this is the Twinkle Collection. I'm like, shut up and take my money. I wish to have Twinkle clothes. Thank you, thank you. It's it's you're walking glitter at that point. Who doesn't want that? Yeah, yeah, it's it's not everybody is Tinkerbell.

Well I'm not tink about either, but I almost there's I'm holding back from going down a Disney Fairies tangent road with just a galloping vengeance. I appreciate it. I think we all do. Thank you, Hollywood. We know, we know you're you're you're one of the other fairies. We get it, Holly, Holly. I think we should plumb your expertise on a on another question, a question that actually came from a user. Oh yeah yeah. A listener in fact, at Rosie Philip via Twitter asked, will Cravats ever make

a comeback? Uh, Lauren, I know you've done some research on this. Uh yeah, okay, So so I you know, I looked into it and the next tie really is a descendant of the Cravats. So so it's basically never gone out really, but um, the Cravat was supposedly originated by Croatian malicious or the sixteen hundreds, then popularized by French fashion. They're called cravats because the sword for the

Croatian militia was basically cravat or cravat rather um. But it then bled over into British fashion and thus, to use the parlance of our times, went viral. Um, can I stop you and ask you a question? Of course, I'm sorry, so a next, I know what a neck tie is. A cravat is basically just like a more

loosely tied, less shaped kind of necktie thing. You're onto it with the less structure, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's loosely tied, like if you look at like French cravats, sometimes they would be wrapped multiple times and tied fairly tightly around the neck. Sometimes they're tied a little more loosely, but they're just they're just not the structure that you would get from like a bow tire in neck time.

I looked it up. But but but a cravat, yeah, is basically a scarf that is tied about the neck in whatever fashion the user intends to tie it in. Um. There is a cravat day in Croatia as of two thousand three, it's October every year. Let's celebrate it, guys. For that first one, there was an art installation of a gargantuan redneck tie nodded around a local arena, like it was tied around this colosseum. Yeah, coming out the

side of Yeah, it was beautiful. Um, but so so so Holly, what's a what's your opinion on the fashion statement of cravat? They're already back, oh are they? Yeah? Last year Nicholas Parsons, who is a British personality, he's kind of a TV hosty kind of personality, has been around a very long time. But he wrote this whole thing last year about like cravat back everybody, I have said, so so start wearing um. But also I mean Fred

from Scooby Doo is the famous cravat. That's true, but or some people have argued it's a neckerchief, it's a cravat. In my opinion, it is. Here's a picture of Brad Pitt wearing a cravat. Yeah, they're very zassy and I think Roth is standing right behind him. So if it makes Elie off, follow you and I you know, and I think that the popularity of British period dramas, for example, have probably influenced to that. Just just S Bendict, cumber Box, existence, um,

and etcetera. I think, you know, I'm very into late clothing freedom, where whatever you want, whenever you want. I don't care if it's in fashion or not. If it's making you happy, you do it, you're living it and it's cool. Get your life to use another ruepaule thing. Um. So I think nothing ever completely goes out of fashion unless you decide that you don't want to wear it, and then it's out of your fashion. And there are certainly cultural fashion trends, but everything is on the table

in my opinion at all times. I'm gonna wear a bustlegown tomorrow, yes, all right, but they're hard to drive in. Oh yeah, i'd imagine. So what are the takeaways from for the future of fashion from the people who know what they're talking about here? I feel like I heard um more acceptance of basically more freedom and less expectance that you would wear a certain thing based on what your culture is or what your gender is or something

like that. More freedom, more individuality, and that probably translating to more androgyny in fashion. Uh lots of these electronic elements that as long as we can get past the washing machine barrier, which somehow I feel like can be beaten, we can get there. You're saying your pro electronics. Yeah, yeah, why not electronics and everything? Uh forty printed clothing, strange biocultured fabrics. What else? Camouflage. I I don't know if

digital camouflage will ever really become an actual trend. I'm doubtful personally. I think it will become probably popular in a less peacocky way in a niche market certainly. Yeah, I think there is a group of people out there who's like, I need that because they just don't like the idea of the you know, pervasive all seeing eye everywhere. Uh. So I think that's going to evolve. It will be less about kind of the showy gym and the holograms

makeup and more. There will be other ways that people will develop again, probably more along the lines of those goggles technologies that you can use to write counteract technologies. Yeah, what else? Yes to cravats, no de nudity, You were only the cravat, that's all. You're technically not nude. You're like kind of togas that are made out of just one giant cravat, perhaps for men and women. Next Okay, sorry, um, yeah, yeah.

I I hope I hope that it will be more of an anything goes kind of future in fashion and that more, more types of fabrics and more choices will become more affordable due to some of these technologies that are letting us create fabric in in these ways. Um, you know, and hopefully if you were sweatshops that would be really great as well. All right, well, Holly, it has been excellent having you on the show with us today. Thank you so much for coming in. Where can people

find your work? First, thank you for having me. But if they wanna chase us over to miss in History, you can go to missed in History dot com? Uh, and you can hit us Twitter at most in History and we're on Facebook, Facebook dot com slash missed in History. Awesome, Lauren. Where can people find our work? Well, Joe, it's on the internet. Um, you can. You can check out our website.

It is fw thinking dot com. If you would like to ask us a question the way that at Rosie Philip did, you can do so on Twitter at FW Thinking on Facebook and at Google Plus. FW Thinking is basically the name in all of those places. You can also send us an email and email at FW Thinking at how Stuff Works dot com. We hope to hear from you, and you'll hear again from us real soon. For more on this topic in the future of technology,

I'll visit Forward Thinking dot Com. Problem brought to you by Toyota Let's Go Places