Even in Manhattan's edgy Soho neighborhood, Sensatex's notion of fashion is a bit extreme. Not far from the atelier where Helmut Lang sells his minimalist designs, this small, privately held company is preparing to introduce a computer motherboard that is worn as a shirt.
The item is more about function than form: The idea is to monitor vital signs like heart rate and breathing for a potential market that runs from the infirm to triathletes. "You basically throw on a shirt and your EKG is monitored," says co-founder and CEO Jeff Wolf. The "smart shirt" uses fabric woven with optical fibers to send and receive electrical impulses.
Although it'll be years - if ever - before Wolf's designs show up on the shelves of Gap and Banana Republic, the company is riding the latest revolution in the garment industry: interactive textiles, which can sound as far out as Maxwell Smart's shoephone but are often simple breakthroughs that translate well from research labs to store shelves.
Some items are already out there. At least one Paris fashion show in October featured fabrics that changed color in response to different lighting. And Levi Strauss last year took an unsuccessful stab at selling a jacket with an embedded cell phone and MP3 player. This fall, Columbia Sportswear will start selling a parka that stores body heat that will be released as temperatures drop.
Columbia, based in Portland, Ore., touts its new jackets as the next step beyond Gore-Tex. The coat detects when the wearer's skin temperature has dropped and releases heat. The key lies in a layer of microscopic wax bubbles on the inside of the parka that capture and store body heat. When the wearer's body temperature falls below a certain level, the bubbles, which seek an equilibrium with their immediate surroundings, release the heat to warm the body. "Its like ice cubes," explains Katie Hoffner, VP of marketing at Outlast Technologies, a venture-backed firm in Boulder, Colo., that licensed the fiber technology to Columbia. "Eventually you will have tepid water that matches the room temperature."
Columbia is targeting its parkas at skiers who are often chilled on the chairlift going up the mountain but warm when they ski down. The jackets will appear in stores in August and will sell for $249, about $50 more than regular parkas. The company is already selling socks with the heat-saving feature. "As a percentage of the business it's not huge, but it's an exciting area," says Bill Inman, a senior merchandiser at Columbia.
Columbia isn't the first to use Outlast's high-tech fabrics. Serta has licensed them for mattresses that regulate a person's temperature during sleep. "One of the biggest problems people have is they get cold during the night," says Serta VP of marketing Bob Malin. Serta's new line of beds, introduced in October, is designed to take care of that problem. Ordinarily, premium-priced mattresses - those that sell for $1,499 to $4,000 for a queen-size outfit - account for 5 percent of Serta's sales. But Malin estimates that the heat regulating feature could drive that figure to 10 percent. "That will help our gross margin," he says.
Other textile developments go beyond the slopes and the bedroom to high fashion. Brazilian designer Alexandre Herchcovitch gave Paris a frisson last October with his mutable fashions. As models paraded down the runway past different lights, their heat- sensitive outfits changed patterns. "This was not the faux modernism of futuristic fashion," wrote a critic in the International Herald Tribune, "but a textile revolution."
On a more mundane level, Soho-based Sensatex is licensing its smart-shirt technology from the Georgia Institute of Technology, where researcher Sundaresen Jayaraman developed it with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the central research and development unit of the U.S. Department of Defense. Even though the technology hasn't made it to the marketplace yet, Jayaraman says it heralds an important advancement beyond the idea that the network is the
