A new wave of innovation
is fueling a radical change in fashion.
Wearable technology, data, automation,
and lab-grown materials will have a major impact
on what people will be wearing in the future.
We are just seeing a pace of change which is frightening,
but it's also incredibly exciting for the future of fashion.
Since the birth of sewing and weaving,
technology has always led developments in fashion.
The Industrial Revolution mechanized manufacturing,
enabling mass production.
In the 1960s, synthetic materials like polyester took off,
creating new possibilities for fashion.
Now, the convergence of new technologies
is opening up previously unimaginable possibilities.
Self-styled fashion scientist Dr. Amanda Parkes
is in the vanguard of the industry's latest reinvention.
She heads up innovation at FT Labs,
a venture capital firm that invests
primarily in disruptive fashion tech startups.
The future of fashion is a mixture
of combining new material technologies
with all-new forms of business models.
Among these startups, the race is on
to find the next generation of renewable materials
that can be grown in a lab.
So one example of this is Bolt Threads,
which creates lab-grown spider silk.
Traditional silk is produced
from insect larvae that form cocoons,
most commonly silkworms.
But rather than relying on these insects,
Bolt Threads is creating silk in test tubes.
So they've taken the DNA out of a spider,
just the part of the DNA that creates silk,
and transformed that into a microorganism, into a yeast.
And you can think of it like brewing beer.
So as they feed the yeast, as it brews,
it creates silk protein.
Bio-fabricated materials remove the need
for animals and insects, and they are a more sustainable
and efficient way of producing raw materials.
You're able to speed up this process,
put it into a controlled environment
in a laboratory, and have a lot more control
over what you're growing and how.
Other companies are creating
leather alternatives.
Rather than using animals, scientists are creating
bio-fabricated materials from pineapple leaves
and even mushrooms.
Another example is a mycelium-based leather.
So the root structure of strains of mushrooms
can be grown synthetically in a lab,
but they're all-natural fibers.
When you think about the convergence
of what technology can do with this
in terms of the future development of materiality,
and so we really have the opportunity
to make huge global change by changing
the means of production of materials.
The convergence of fashion and technology
also provides opportunities to transform
not just clothes but the people wearing them.
Myant is a company that's pioneering
the creation of clothing that can monitor your every move.
We call it textile computing.
Some other people call it smart fabric.
Essentially, it's an interactive fabric
that could sense data from you.
So-called smart fabrics are being touted
as the next frontier of wearable technology.
Yarns are paired with electronic sensors
so that essential data can be captured from the human body.
This is a men's boxer.
You can see the sensors embedded
on the band and on the body.
Within seconds, it will start transmitting your ECG,
temperature, your movement, your respiration.
To create clothing that can monitor
the wearer's health and fitness,
Myant has brought together teams of people
that have not traditionally worked under the same roof.
We have the advanced research engineers and scientists
at nano scale technology, electrical engineers,
mechatronic engineers, software AI.
We wanted them to interface and to interact
with fashion designers, with pattern makers.
Smart fabrics could radically change
consumers' relationships with the clothes they wear.
But as technology increases the pace of change,
how can the industry keep track
of what consumers really want?
Francesca Muston is the head of retail at WGSN,
the world's leading fashion forecasting agency.
We are just seeing a pace of change which is frightening,
but it's also incredibly exciting for the future of fashion.
The staff here use big data
to analyze political, social, and environmental trends
in order to predict the hot new looks of tomorrow.
If we think back over the last five years
at how the fashion industry has changed,
think about the way that we shop
compared to the way that we used to shop.
Technology is driving an explosion
in consumer choice, as well as the bewildering array
of clothing design and creation.
To keep up, the industry is also turning to technology.
We are for sure in the midst of a digital revolution;
AI, the idea of machine learning and big data.
How do we start to sort of synthesize
all of these new technologies and start
to make sense of it, both in terms of industry
but also in terms of the consumer?
Machine-learning technologies
are now central to fashion forecasting, quickly spotting
patterns among the ever-growing volume of data.
From bio-technology to demographic shifts,
predicting trends is no longer an art;
it's becoming a science.