Fashion designers are starting to implement technological features in their high-priced clothes. This way, they hope to prevent copying by regular fashion companies.
A week ago, clothing store H&M released a new collection “Lanvin for H&M”. With other words: H&M is going luxury. This way, people will be able to buy clothes that look big-ticket but aren’t too expensive.
How do the high-end clothing designs react to this? They complain about fashion companies knocking off runway clothes and getting it in their stores before it reaches the outlets of high-end designers. To prevent them from doing this, they created a hybrid: smart clothes. Engineers and designers started collaborating to add technology to fashion clothes.
The results were dresses equipped with motion sensors that makes its embroidery illuminate while walking. Another example is the Novero Victoria chain (price: $100,000) featuring a two-carat diamond which is also a headset that supports Bluetooth 2.1 and hands-free voice calling.
High-end clothing labels believe fashion companies won’t be able to adapt this technology as quickly as they normally would. “Try copying these, H&M! “
Whether it involves buying normal clothes or purchasing a classy watch, it seems to me that technology is becoming an important part of shopping. Preventing imitation, adding more value, online selling, helping customers, it’s all encouraged by technology and all part of the future world of merchandising.
Andreas Verleysen
http://www.forbes.com/2010/11/08/katy-perry-rihanna-technology-fashion.html
http://video.forbes.com/fvn/tech/high-tech-luxury-fashion-trends
Hi Andreas,
BeantwoordenVerwijderenit was really fascinating reading your blog about technology in the luxury industry. Finally, the luxury retailers have come up with a decent idea to prevent other companies with lower prices, to imitate what they're doing.
Nevertheless, I never knew that clothes would be compatible with technology, but now that I've read this fantastic article, I really think it is...