The fashion world’s entrance into the realm of high tech has been the digital equivalent of tripping on the runway.
Earlier this year, the iconic designer Diane von Furstenberg released her collaboration with Google Glass, DVF I Made for Glass, featuring five different shades of Google Glass. With its lofty ($1800) price tag and shades with names like “shiny elderberry” and “matte java,” DVF I Made for Glass was clearly intended to signal an aesthetic shift in the wearable tech market.
While Google Glass had been roundly derided since its release, DVF I Made for Glass sought to prove that smart eyewear could be sleek, sexy, and ultra-modern, rather than a piece of high-tech nerd hardware that’d be more at home in a 1950s sci-film than on someone’s face.
The DVF I Made for Glass
The DVF I Made for Glass Yet when the line was unveiled in June, fashion and tech bloggers alike were less than enthusiastic...
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Valleywag’s Sam Biddle perhaps summed it up best: “What does it tell you that DVF—one of the most elegant, fashion-savvy style geniuses of our time, a woman with enough foresight to literally invent a new kind of dress—looks dumb with a face computer? It tells you that there’s probably a reason Google didn’t mention Glass a single time during its recent mega-conference, and that if high fashion can’t save high tech, the project is probably fucked.”
Following Diane von Furstenberg’s example, a number of other high-fashion brands have sought to collaborate with tech developers, to varying degrees of success. In the last month alone, Samsung released the Galaxy S smartwatch, including a version embedded with Swarovski crystals. (“Looks like a Dali-esque melted galaxy phone,” one reporter cracked on Twitter.) And Ralph Lauren released a line of performance-tracking smart polo shirts that premiered at the U.S. Open....MUCH MORE
