Fashion meets Tech

A VERY short introduction on where I see the influences of current technologies on the industry of fashion. Presented at the amazing upfront Berlin front end user group.

Transcript

1. Fashion meets Tech On Emotion and Optimization Hi, I’m Jana and I’m going to talk about fashion and tech tonight. But first of all I’d like to thank Kriesse, Katha, Max and Alex for inviting me. It’s a great pleasure!
2. A little about me and my motivation Jana Ahrens - @plique text/pr/style So to help you understand what on earth brought a fashion designer to be at a tech meetup, let me give you a very quick insight into where i’m coming from and my motivation.
3. A little about me and my motivation Jana Ahrens - @plique text/pr/style My full name is Jana Ahrens, on the web I am plique wherever I want you to find me. I work a lot with text, pr and style, all on the topic of fashion. And lately, like: very currently, I started speaking about it.
4. A little about me and my motivation Jana Ahrens - @plique text/pr/style Now you might think: Ah, fashion! So next she’s going to tell us about the latest it-bag
5. Jimmy Choo it bag Marcel Ostertag walking his own show cause she knows whats going on on the runways. And probably she’s going to reveal to us which color will be the next black.
6. Black is the new Black Nope. I won’t. Because although that is the part of fashion which earns the highest revenues, there is so much more to it from my perspective.
7. Fashion as code Try to see fashion as a language spoken by nearly everyone on a daily basis. It is a code we decipher regularly on a scale from unconscious over unwillingly to passionate. Try to see fashion as a language spoken by nearly everyone on a daily basis. It is a code we decipher regularly on a scale from unconscious over unwillingly to passionate.
8. Fashion as code Try to see fashion as a language spoken by nearly everyone on a daily basis. It is a code we decipher regularly on a scale from unconscious over unwillingly to passionate. Some of you might say now: Well, I’m definitely not interested in fashion. I know nothing about it and I’m merely a „just-jeans-and-a-t-shirt“-person. And there you got it:
9. Fashion won’t let you go. Because as fashion is part of your profile, your appearance, it will always be part of your identity. Until you arrive at an outfit of jeans and a t-shirt, you already made a whole lot of decisions to how and even were to present yourself.
10. You get up every day, put on that specific t-shirt and a pair of jeans. Tadaa: Identity. Know what? … As Paul Something Something
11. – Paul Watzlawick „One cannot not communicate“ famously said:
12. The great value of clothing is no longer its functionality. What people get out of fashion is rarely optimization, but identity and emotion. The age and constant change of the code of fashion indicates: We obviously need it or long for it. READ SLIDE If you refer to fashion as a code, it might suddenly get much more interesting. But its main difference to the code you use everyday is that it aims to express emotion rather than functionality (going deeper into it we might discuss the functionality of emotion, but not today)
13. The great value of clothing is no longer its functionality. What people get out of fashion is rarely optimization, but identity and emotion. The age and constant change of the code of fashion indicates: We obviously need it or long for it. So at this point of the story I’d like to introduce an opposition, that I clearly need to identify as a stereotype, but maybe a quite helpful one. Optimization and emotion.
14. How current technology changes the fashion business I hope I already got you a bit excited, because now we are going to dive into the current status of where the fashion industry…
15. How current technology changes the fashion business …or should we rather say INFLUENCES? …and tech industry meet. Bare with me.
16. From Customer to User From the customers point of view it mainly comes down to social media.
17. It is all about social media: Bloggers sit in the front row of fashion shows and are one of the primary advisers to consumers. ! Services like Kickstarter empower new developments and tiny brands. ! Whoever wants to produce something will find a market place to put it out there and test its value to others. ! So the customer is now a user. This could be interesting for you. But looking at the above: Hm, nothing specific, nothing new, right? Bloggers sit in the front row of fashion shows and are one of the primary advisers to consumers. Services like Kickstarter empower new developments and tiny brands, mainly fueled by spreading the word through social media.
18. It is all about social media: Bloggers sit in the front row of fashion shows and are one of the primary advisers to consumers. ! Services like Kickstarter empower new developments and tiny brands. ! Whoever wants to produce something will find a market place to put it out there and test its value to others. ! So the customer is now a user. This could be interesting for you. But looking at the above: Hm, nothing specific, nothing new, right? Whoever wants to produce something will find a market place to put it out there and test its value to others. This hints at the more and more professionalizing DIY scene. So the fashion customer is now a user. Well…
19. Meh… amazing revelation, right? It happens everywhere at the moment. I was hoping for a more unique intersection of the two areas.
20. The Retailer Well than let’s have a brief look at the people who sell fashion?
21. It is all about feedback: Images are liked, shared and faved. The sales team might know before placing the order which styles from the runway will sell out quickly. ! Cashier systems are directly connected to order backends and analytics, the feedback loop gets faster and faster. Fast fashion forward.! ! Uncountable varieties of online shops open new options to remarket or parallel market products which formerly have been sold through one channel. ! ! Is that a development specific to the connection between tech and fashion? Here it is mainly about feedback and channels. The feedback comes from images released quickly after shows and presentations, prior to production. It comes from cashier systems and online shops. Is that a unique development?
22. Nope. It also happens in most industries around us. Great stuff, but its also just an application of information technology like you see anywhere else.
23. The Designer Now we have a look at the designer.
24. It is all about new material: Smarter weaving-, knitting- and coloring machines and software open new ways to produce new types of fabric. ! ! 3D printing allows rapid prototyping and amazing garment structures. ! The new way we see things influences the way we want to see ourselves. New trends evolve: glitch, layered transparency, shiny surfaces. ! ! Again: Only a result of combining fashion with tech? And for the designer, besides being more thoroughly impacted by impressions through the web, it is mainly about new material. Well, i wont even read it to you, you might guess it: Not so specific neither. All great stuff. But researching this, I had this nagging feeling of:
25. IS THIS IT? Is there anything coming up that brings together the best of both spheres and by doing so makes them even better? I mean, let’s look back at where this collaboration started:
26. You know this thing right? It's a Jaquard Loom, named after the guy how sacrificed his whole life to mechanize the looming of complex decorative patterns on fabric. He wasn't mainly interested in creating new and exciting patterns. Helping his mum with her exhausting work of weaving from an early age on,
27. he experienced what a painful process it was to manually fumble all the colored pattern threads into the weaving machine. He had a desperate urge to optimize that process when he inherited the family business. He sounds very much like a programmer, doesn't he?
28. So what he came up with was a weaving loom working with an infinitely running punch card system on a binary code. Sounds familiar, right? Today it is seen as the grand-grand-parent of computers.
29. But already then, he triggered a technical revolution influencing a whole cultural revolution. It was the first step to industrializing all the things. Definitely a revolution which had and still has its dark sides. But it is powerful and still meaningful today.
30. Shouldn’t we aim for something powerful like that instead of enriching the market on the status quo?
31. Fashion and Tech: There is lots to be done. And that might be a good thing. Fashion definitely needs optimization. On so many levels. But it is complicated. Here is an example why:
32. Sarah Kessler is a journalist of fastcodedesign. For one week she wore any wearable tech gadget she could get her hands on that claimed to be fashionable. Her conclusion: it only made fashion and technology seem farther apart.
33. – Sarah Kessler „The people, the manufacturing processes, and what defines success in technology and in fashion are all completely different.“
34. Generally in fashion you need to put out a whole range of clothing and present it in huge shows. So everything is mainly finished before it reaches its audience. And the variety of the collections ensures you will sell more than one piece.
35. In tech you can launch with just a web site. You can pretend to have a product and then go from there. Minimum Viable Product.
36. In tech you have open source software: Your work and process is often public, and people can openly engage and improve it. You share your knowledge and don’t even consider it might harm your business. Because you believe that sharing is beneficial for everyone.
37. The fashion industry is a very secretive one. Although we all work with the human body as a medium, we still pretend that it is urgently necessary to shield away our new developments from competitors and consumers as long as possible.
38. One example: It is not allowed for so called fast fashion brands to attend the Bread and Butter trade show in Berlin. Fast fashion brands are the ones like H&M, Zara and similar, as opposed to „not-so-fast“ but highly industrialized brands like Timberland, Diesel or Carhatt.
39. Still, most of the fast fashion designers will attend anyway with false names. Because their companies send them. Most of the time they are asked to take photos, too, which is not allowed at those trade shows. So they are not only copying each other, industrial espionage is part of most designers job profile.
40. And finally: In fashion we create something highly individualized, very peculiar. From there we downscale it to a wearable, mass-producible garment. Most tech product works the opposite way. They aim to address your 5 year old cousin in the same way they addres you or your grandparents.
41. Bridge the gap between: - Open source and industrial espionage double moral ! - Minimum viable products and an „everything at once“-approach ! - Simplification for the sake of accessibility and the potential for very personal expression If we want to work on fashion and tech projects with a serious impact, we might want to consider the following: READ
42. Bridge the gap between: - Open source and industrial espionage double moral ! - Minimum viable products and an „everything at once“-approach ! - Simplification for the sake of accessibility and the potential for very personal expression And for the final point let us shortly get back to the iPhone. It is claimed that the purchase of mobile phones is more and more part of peoples accessory budget instead of the tech budget. So what happens is this:
43. 800 Euro design objects are plastered with cheesy stickers, family images,
44. covered in colorful bumpers with crazy extensions. All for the sake of individualization. Now I totally understand apples conclusion to find a gadget that is not a singular design solution
45. but allows you to individually choose parts and surfaces in a way that promises the perfect merge of your fashionable longing for individuality and your need for an optimized tech gadget.
46. But that’s what it is. It is the most obvious choice to go for a watch here. It is nothing more than strapping your iPhone to your wrist. Tech and fashion come together in this piece very nicely but they don’t merge into something truly new and better.
47. – Sarah Kessler „It is not necessarily about a [wearable tech] swiss army knife. It’s just doing the right thing at the right place. That needs to happen right from the beginning of designing something. Rather than: We are gonna strap a smartphone to your wrist now! “ READ So the designing process is rather complex. And It took plenty of years - technology-wise from tiny green-grey displays to huge touchscreens, designwise from stupid rectangles to polished surfaces -
48. – Sarah Kessler „It is not necessarily about a [wearable tech] swiss army knife. It’s just doing the right thing at the right place. That needs to happen right from the beginning of designing something. Rather than: We are gonna strap a smartphone to your wrist now! “ to design and build tech gadgets that create a longing, to transform an everyday life optimization like the mobile or smartphone into a beloved object like the iPhone. It is an even more complex idea to transfer this into a business as individualized as fashion.
49. The serious tasks: Now let us get away from the obvious aspects and have a look at the underlying structural problems of the fashion industry. We could really use your help here.
50. We do have to deal with massive over production. Tons of unsold and therefore worthless clothing thrown away, burned and buried by the second.
51. The serious tasks: - Over production (3D printing and kickstarter can not be a solution yet) ! ! ! And 3D printing or kickstarter are not the solution.
52. Ridiculously bad production conditions everyone in the first world manages to tune out most of the time.
53. The serious tasks: - Over production (3D printing and kickstarter can not be a solution yet) ! - 3rd world production standards ! ! ! This is such a complex issue. Automatization seems implausible. And anyway, the fashion industry has only a very low interest in changing anything.
54. Then, if you go for high quality and perfect production standards in first world countries, you can be 85% percent sure that your producer will mainly be reached by fax and barely speaks english.
55. The serious tasks: - Over production (3D printing and kickstarter can not be a solution yet) ! - 3rd world production standards ! - first world high quality producers and their detachment from new technologies and communication ! Because high quality seems to be a beautiful but old fashioned thing, far, far detached from technological change. These are all topics that sound a bit scary or even dry. But if we go back to this guy:
56. He solved a technical problem. At the same time he enabled the textile manufacturers to produce much more colorful and complex patterns. And besides that, he improved the working conditions.
57. But today the problems and tasks are much more complex. So one passionate, smart white dude alone will not singlehandedly solve the issue. We need a team.
58. Technology Focussing on the optimization of the current structure and the processes. ! Openmindedly approaching the fact what still seems to some the optional beautiful packaging of a product will be the core value people a longing for in fashion. Fashion Knowing the fashion code and its economical and sociological impact. ! Grasping the chances of technological optimization and fully embracing the value of sharing knowledge. ! We need people from the tech world who focus on the optimization of the current structures and processes. Or even find new ones. But these people need to respect the emotional value that fashion creates for users and consumers. It is as important, often even more important, than the technical aspects.
59. Technology Focussing on the optimization of the current structure and the processes. ! Openmindedly approaching the fact what still seems to some the optional beautiful packaging of a product will be the core value people a longing for in fashion. Fashion Knowing the fashion code and its economical and sociological impact. ! Grasping the chances of technological optimization and fully embracing the value of sharing knowledge. ! And we need people from the fashion world who are fully aware of the code they produce and its huge impact. I’d love to see them approach the open source values with open arms and focus their skills on the integration of new technical solutions.
60. Technology Focussing on the optimization of the current structure and the processes. ! Openmindedly approaching the fact what still seems to some the optional beautiful packaging of a product will be the core value people a longing for in fashion. Fashion Knowing the fashion code and its economical and sociological impact. ! Grasping the chances of technological optimization and fully embracing the value of sharing knowledge. ! Finally if you plan on putting a team like that together: Make it as diverse as the tasks and problems ahead. With this collection of urging but unfinished ideas, i leave you.
61. Thanks for your time and for listening.