Transcript
[APPLAUSE AND CHEERING]
RACHEL ARTHUR:
Often the perception of the fashion industry is that it's a frivolous entity based on silly ideals about what we should wear and how we should look. I see certain people's eyes glaze over when I tell them this is the world in which I inhabit, the industry I spend my days writing about as a journalist and advising on as a consultant. It's seen as fluffy and fake, silly and superficial, vain and vacuous.
And yet truthfully, it's a $3 trillion global market. It accounts for 2 per cent of the world's GDP and employs close to 60 million people. While we may not think that fashion changes the world, it almost certainly impacts each and every one of our lives in some way, shape, or form, and it's set to do so even more up ahead.
My specialist area is technology, which gives me licence today to prove to you, I hope, that this is really one of the most innovative businesses out there. But more than that, it needs to be for the future sustainability of our planet. To do so, I wanted to start with something a little bit fun, and talk to you about the future of fashion through the lens of the expectation that film has set.
There's a scene in Back to the Future Part II where Marty McFly arrives in the future and dons a pair of self-lacing shoes. It's one of the most iconic moments in film history as far as technology goes, and particularly where fashion is concerned.
Now jump to today, nearly 30 years later. And of course, that's not standard footwear attire at all, despite the imagination that it would be. Then again, so too did the filmmakers believe that we would all be riding around on hover boards, wear instantly drying jackets as McFly also has on here, and have access to that little thing called time travel. Hollywood has long made promises that we've chased after ever since.
Let me give you another example where fashion is concerned. In 1995, Cher Horowitz of Clueless introduced us to her virtual wardrobe. It was an icon of desirability for every teenage girl at that point in time, of which I was massively a part. In her oversized desktop computer, she scrolled through all sorts of different looks that she could wear to school on any given day until she got her match.
It was a catalogue of all of the things she owned, but more than that, a symbol of the future for an intelligent, connected wardrobe, and importantly, for fashion and technology coming together. Of course, we still don't all own one of those either. So what about the invisibility cloak? Long a fantasy of folklore and fairy tale, it's also been a massive part of modern day literature and film, including the likes of Harry Potter.
Now while we don't own one of those either, all of these depictions I've given you in films so far do present some really quite incredible, not to mention feasible ideas for the future of our garments. If Hollywood has got it right, we will all be wearing clothes in the future that can do things like change shape, that can communicate with one another and the world around them, and that are so scientifically advanced that they can enable our bodies to do more and more wonderful things merely through the textiles themselves.
So why aren't we there yet? How have we got to 2016 where we are so technically advanced in everything else that we do, and yet we are still wearing the same garments as the generations before us and next to us?
The truth of the matter is fashion and technology are not the most intimate of bedfellows. One is cold and hard, the other warm and soft. And yet in spite of that, you might actually be quite surprised at the way in which they're already part and parcel of our lives.
Innovation in fashion is, in fact, all around us. You may have just not noticed it. All of you in this room are wearing wearable technology. I am wearing wearable technology. When I say that, I don't mean smart watches or fitness trackers, or all of those things that we've come to think of it as. I mean your tights, your shirts, even your bras.
The truth is, textiles are technology. They've transformed our world from trading in ancient times all the way through the Industrial Revolution and beyond. When we think about hosiery, for instance, we forget the fact that nylon stockings were built around innovations in polymers by DuPont just after the Second World War. Equally, we take for granted that Lycra was invented in the 1950s.
And did you know that Marks & Spencer was the first British retailer to open a research laboratory dedicated to pioneering new fabrics? That led to all sorts in the way of easy-care synthetics through to machine-washable wools. Innovation and Marks & Spencer, not two words that I thought I would be working together in a sentence on the TED stage.
Equally the idea of shirts that are crease-resistant or gym clothes that wick away moisture, very thankfully, are also things that we now just completely come to expect. We're used to this amazing amount of innovation from largely the big sportswear and outdoor brands.
As for our bras, let me tell you one incredible story. In 1965, the industrial division of underwear manufacturer Playtex managed to convince NASA to let it enter a design into a closed competition for the Apollo spacesuit. Now they had previously been pushed out at an earlier stage of the race for being, indeed, too frivolous a fashion company rather than an engineering one, therefore perceived not to have the technical skill.
And yet they went on to win it in just six short weeks of this part of the competition, praised for their high-level couture sewing skills and the expertise of their seamstresses. They had to make something that was flexible and strong enough, which of course, they had the know-how from making bras.
What resulted was a suit that was, of course, able to withstand the enormous demands of lunar exploration. It was a crucial part of the resulting astronaut success. So let me tell you this. A company that makes bras sent man to the moon.
[LAUGHTER]
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The exciting thing is there is a lot more of this on the way. There's a tonne of innovation being put into that vision of the future. Those self-lacing shoes from Nike, for instance, they are really coming. The company has been through a reported 11 years of research and development to get to a prototype that went to the actor Michael J. Fox, of course, the man who played Marty McFly in those films, just last year.
And now this version looks like a normal shoe. Looks like the sort we wear from this brand all the time. And yet, it has that self-lacing technology embedded within it. And this will be on our retail shelves this year. So there you go. 2016, and finally that self-lacing technology we were promised in 1989 is really truly coming.
And the idea of things that change shape is being played around with too. This is a fashion show from a designer called Hussein Chalayan several years ago at Paris Fashion Week. And what happened was several looks came out onto the catwalk and started to adapt in form right before the audience's eyes. So as you can see here, a long-tiered design shortened into a mini before the bust area also changed shape.
Now all of that was possible thanks to microchips and animatronics, not the sort of thing that we're all going to wear every single day. But scientists are genuinely exploring this now. Can they make it possible in the textiles as well?
And they're doing it through complicated fibre science on a molecular level. It's not the sort of thing that's going to be in our wardrobes tomorrow, but it is being experimented with, and it's not a complete pipe dream, which is so completely astonishing. And the same thing goes for items that change colour and those that change texture. The sort of thing that all of us, I'm sure, would be very, very excited about.
And then there's that computer-aided system for getting dressed in the morning from Clueless. Now while there have been iterations of this on the market for many, many years, it's been too hard to commercialise, largely because, let's face it, we're all too lazy to manually capture and enter everything we own in our wardrobes already, which was what would be needed to kickstart it.
But now businesses like Avery Dennison and EVRYTHNG are automating that for us. They're putting chips in our clothing from the beginning of their life cycles. Not in a creepy way. Not in a way that identifies or tracks us. But in a way that connects our clothing to the grid to enable it to communicate with the world.
So what does that mean? Well, a personal stylist in the palm of our hands. An app, for instance. Somebody that's able to recommend to us exactly what we should wear in the morning, based on knowing what we've got up ahead, whether it's a normal day at work, an interview, a date night, you name it.
But even more exciting, and this is the bit I love, imagine if it could recommend, as you can see here, that you need to buy that red jumpsuit, because it matches something else that you've got in your wardrobe. Or it could tell you about things to go out and get, knowing your preferences and your interests and your lifestyle, because you've given it that sort of information up ahead.
That's the sort of thing that I am so excited about. It's like that Clueless wardrobe, that teenage dream come true, but on a much, much more heightened level. After all, how many of us have stood in front of our wardrobes and said, time and time again, I have nothing to wear?
[LAUGHTER]
Just imagine what it took for me to figure out what on Earth to wear to come today and give a TED Talk. And connected clothing is already getting more advanced, or certainly more useful now. This is a project from Levis and Google's Project Jacquard team. And it's a smart jacket. When I say smart, I don't mean a suit jacket, or indeed, formal attire at all. I mean smart in a technical sense.
So what it has is a textile interface on the left cuff of the sleeve that you can tap, swipe, and hold to do all sorts of different tasks like change music track, get access to voice-delivered navigation instructions, and more. And I should say, this is designed specifically with an urban cyclist in mind. And of course, if you are a cyclist, it's the sort of functionality that's really very useful.
But what I love about this is the fact that it looks good. And it looks good because of the fact it looks like a jean jacket, and not a piece of technology. And in fact, that's the whole point. The future of this space is about connected clothing where the tech is entirely invisible.
So what about that invisibility cloak then? Can you imagine if we could actually have this, or something like this? Well, scientists think they might have got to a point of making it possible. And they're doing so by making curved surfaces appear flat when they come into contact with electromagnetic waves. So it's about bending light around the human form.
And they're also exploring and taking inspiration from the way that refracted light creates the bold colour of the morpho butterfly, which is why I have this beautiful picture up here. And in fact, where nature comes in really does speak to the future of the space and the sort of innovations in our clothing that we will completely take for granted in the future.
There's all sorts of startups doing an incredible amount of amazing things here, but one of them that I'm tracking is called Bolt Threads. And what they're doing is creating artificial spider silk at scale. They're brewing it in fermentation vats and then spinning it into yarn to make a material that's stronger than Kevlar, but more durable and at least as flexible as Lycra, which is absolutely astounding.
And the amazing thing is, we're going to be able to wear this as well. They've partnered with Patagonia, the outerwear brand. So presumably, this will be coming to our coats and our jackets in the foreseeable future.
And then this one, Modern Meadow, is growing leather in a lab. I'm just going to say that again. They're growing leather in a lab. This is a little tiny strip of it that you can see here.
And it's kind of the same basis as Bolt Threads in they are imitating nature. So biomimicry is what we call it. And they're doing so by recreating the same proteins and fibres found in skin rather than taking it from the animal, taking it from livestock. The result is material that's not only more environmentally friendly, but aesthetically and functionally more advanced than what we find in nature too.
All of this combined is the beginning of a new material revolution, and never before has it been more necessary. The fashion industry is the second largest polluter in the world after oil. It accounts for 10 per cent of all global carbon emissions, uses a quarter of the chemicals produced worldwide each year, and comes just after agriculture in the amount of water it consumes.
Those soft cottons that you love, they're almost as bad as the man-made fibres we now tut over because of their petrochemicals. It takes 20,000 litres of water to create one pair of jeans and a single t-shirt.
And then we've got to get it to the pace that it needs to be. And let's face it. We'll probably all throw them away when we get bored of them. Our greed for new clothing now sees a 100 billion items produced worldwide each year. That's a 60 per cent increase since the year 2000, a 100 billion items. What's worse is that three out of five of those then end up in landfill or incineration within the same 12-month period.
Fashion, no matter what angle you look at it from, is seriously damaging our planet, so we have got to do something to change it. We need to produce less, on the one hand, but we also need to look at alternatives. Because the commercial side of this business is never really going to change the argument around volume.
This is what I really care about. This is when we go from frivolity to sustainability. This is where an innovation steps in so that fashion can really change the world, or certainly its world. This is when I realised how important technology is to the future of this industry.
For one that is fundamentally so intelligent, as I hope I have proven to you today, there is an incredible amount of unintelligent behaviour going on, and I just don't think it's good enough anymore. The fashion industry has to take more responsibility, and it has to start actioning greater change. We need a future of more innovative textiles and sustainable textile production in order to protect the world in which we live.
So I challenge you today to go away and think about what you're wearing. Appreciate the science behind the clothing on your back already. Fantasise and get excited about what that might look like in the future, because that vision is so important to drive this forward.
But more importantly, start demanding better choices from the brands that you buy from so that fashion as an industry has no choice but to reduce the damage that it does. Innovation and sustainability has got to be the thing we take for granted in the future, even if this industry is still perceived as a completely frivolous one. Thank you.
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