When fashion met tech, it wasn’t love at first sight. The marriage of these two industries has been fraught with mixed signals and gimmicks, redefining the fashion-tech relationship at every turn. It’s the same love story many industries are trying to narrate alongside emerging tech, as sensors and computers get smaller, faster and more powerful. Now that tech has found new ways to integrate into the actual fabrics we wear, how can fashion and technology better communicate for commercial success?

“Fashion and tech need to talk more to each other. That’s where we come in,” said Anouk Wipprecht (pictured), a Dutch fashion-tech designer. Having spent more than 15 years hybridizing robotics and bespoke fashion, Wipprecht finds the art of cross-industry conversations worth the effort.

Her designs skirt the edge of wearable technology, with dresses that mix cocktails and attack threatening oncomers. While such imaginative creations draw museum crowds, advanced tech has yet to find mainstream appeal in fashion retail. Yet with research group IDC projecting the wearables market will double by 2021 and the connected clothing sector expected to grow from three percent of the wearables market share to nearly 10 percent between 2016 and 2021, there’s an opportunity to evolve fashion tech beyond gimmick status by making the interface invisible and lowering the learning curve.

“I started in the beginning of 2000, really trying to see how fashion can become this interface. By me growing into this, technology got smaller and smaller and closer to the body. I think that opens up so many interesting possibilities that haven’t been explored yet, except for only the Fitbits and smartwatches that are more bothering us but don’t do data visualization,” Wipprecht said. “I want to cut data out of the screen and into the real life.”

This week theCUBE spotlights Anouk Wipprecht in our Women in Tech feature.

Haptic feedback crucial for smart textile growth

Somewhere between Fitbits and Wipprecht’s dresses is the smart textile industry, where signal-sending particles are weaved directly into fabrics. New and affordable tech in hand, gutsy initiatives are now popping up in a range of industries. Car manufacturer Nissan is experimenting with smart fabric that knows when a driver becomes dangerously dehydrated, measuring sweat levels through the steering wheel and seat. Levi Strauss and Co. and Google are enspiriting denim jackets with haptic feedback to control smartphone functions like music play, navigation and phone calls.

Buzzworthy use cases, to be sure. But these disparate experiments lack the most important thing to realize a truly invisible interface: cross-communication. If Nissan’s seats could talk directly to Levis’ jacket, perhaps the end user could be reminded to drink water and even be navigated to the nearest convenience store.

Incorporating haptic feedback technology is crucial to smart textile’s growth, Wipprecht explained, as it becomes the new interface connecting fabric to screened devices like smartphones and laptops. How can that “haptic feedback, the way we interface with the screen, be embodied and … become an epidermis that goes into your house? Moods and emotions can be explored for new interactions,” Wipprecht said.

New interactions, like displaying tweets or heartbeats on a T-shirt or a dress that senses the intention of an approaching person, rethink the use of garments as data visualization tools to enhance social interactions. For Wipprecht, fashion tech is an opportunity for artists to do something unique with data.

The “Spider” dress Wipprecht made for an Intel project is “really about personal space,” she explained. “Proximity sensors are measuring when people come into the space there are mechanical legs on the [dress] shoulders that attack in different ways. … If someone is approaching fast, it will attack. You can use this on your body to do something you might not do. … If you have a system on the body that can do this for you, that’s technology helping you outright.”

Open-source’s impact on wearable industry

Still, the issues plaguing the broader wearables industry affects smart textiles as well. To store, retrieve, analyze and act on this data requires a bevy of devices and software applications to talk to each other. Such infrastructure demands span data centers, mobile Wi-Fi networks, secure websites and analytics programs, originating from a myriad of third-party device manufacturers, software vendors and internet providers.

Even at the onset of the “internet of things” era, industry players recognized the importance of collaboration and standardization to promote mutually beneficial data-sharing practices. The Internet of Things Consortium hosts dozens of businesses, from General Motors to Comcast, all eager to collectively convert early adopter interest into mass market transactions. Wipprecht herself works with the likes of Microsoft and Audi to broaden those data exchange routes necessary for true consumer adoption.

Open-source software will play an important role in democratizing technologies for the types of commercially appealing products borne of Wipprecht’s extreme designs. And while the free sharing of software code is already initiating a culture change in technology, Wipprecht thinks open-source principles can be applied to the fashion industry as well.

“By seeing what kind of piece you can give away from your process, somebody else can learn from that,” she said. “A company — you don’t have to open-source all [designs], but what is that little piece you can open source, that you can give away … to developers or people in the community?”

Such a shift away from proprietary designs would revolutionize the fashion industry, historically known for creative solutions to curb copycats and fraudsters. But it could help the fashion industry in the end, leveraging open-source tech and the growing makers movement to enlist new designs while also benefiting from cross-industry collaborations. This synergetic approach to tech brought rise to garage tinkerers in the 1980s, enabling new business opportunities for the likes of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Michael Dell. Wipprecht sees similar potential for fashion tech.

“How can fashion learn from tech and tech learn from fashion?” Wipprecht pondered. “It’s a melting pot; it’s a wonderful world I see happening.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Samsung Developer Conference.

Photo: SiliconANGLE