is when Koka Chanel spoke the words fashion passes style remains she couldn't have known how relevant it would be 50 years on with every season we see more colors Collections and styles than ever before but while fashion moves faster and faster the concept of clothing hasn't changed much in over a 100 years textiles still cover bud and signify social codee Fabrics are still sewn with needles and sold in stores maybe it doesn't make sense to disrupt a $1.7 trillion industry but shouldn't there be something more Progressive than design and style changes shouldn't there be Innovation that alters the entire concept of clothing this is a film about the people behind the scenes who are working to shape the next big step in clothing history so this is Studio XO we're here in London in our lab uh basically it's made up of four quarters so we do all our coding and programming over on this side of the room and we have our kind of more traditional fashion uh sewing machines Pat and cooking table and then in the hybrid space we've got our 3D printers all of our kind of lathes and and um tools to to mix the hard and soft materials together inherently we're designers so we we are interested in the Artistry of design and you know very much EXO we explore science fiction we begin with a narrative we imagine a world but for us it's really about making science fiction science fact Nancy Tilbury is one of the pioneers of emerging technology and fashion together with her team at Studio EXO she works to actively develop what they call digital Couture experiences which in basic terms means creating garments that are interactive and evolving her ultimate goal is to bring these ideas and Concepts to the streets but as a first step they're creating extravagant outfits for the likes of Arcade Fire black black ey pece and of course Lady Gaga so Lady Gaga had done the iTunes Festival and it was the first time that she' played Art Pop you know many of the new singles it's a really exciting exhilarating night and we decided that we would create this almost like performance art we created a dress called anemy which she wore in the evening after the event and as she was leaving to leave the venue we set up a performance using an enemy where she came out to the crowd and the dress animated and released bubbles she almost glided down the hill so the conditions were beautiful the Press had to be very silent cuz it was very late so you could just only hear the clicking of the cameras and the woring of the dress together these beautiful bubbles came out of nowhere popping making these structures the fans are all clapping having been a designer that's been working with technology for nearly 15 years you you learn these these really great tricks and those tricks turn into a methodology and that methodology determines the authenticity of Studio so you know that's what makes our work special that that the we start with an effect we build a narrative in our minds you know we work out what it is that we want the machine to do and everything else really falls into place it's amazing the sound you know the fact that it's a garment with a factory inside that the sound that it makes the the fact that it's building and producing bubbles that you have these transformative pieces so everything throughout the Garment is 3D printed so all of the mechanics of it are 3D printed and then we have an architecture inside that's transforming the liquid across the the the Garment into the varying places so you really you know it is pure design engineering that happens to be dressed up as fashion you know philosophic as a as a project we we're really really Keen to to tell people about this transformation in textiles particularly in textiles and technology and um that even though it's fun and playful and it has all these kind of curious elements it it is a machine that's that's transforming the way we dress while Studio EXO are at The Cutting Edge of fashion they're not alone in putting machines on our bodies historically this Bas has been perceived as two Cyborg and science fiction but recently there's been a rapid breakthrough of products grouped under the term varable Tech most of today's Solutions are limited to head and wrist display behind the scenes however the race is on to integrate technology with mainstream clothing in Germany Sports rare icon Adidas has spent the last few years developing A system that can monitor an athlete's realtime performance via their clothing so here we have our techfit Elite underlayer so this is the shirt that has the part rate sensor is integrated and you can see here you can see a little bit from the outside but we'll uh we'll have to take a closer look at that on the front of the shirt as you can see here on the outside is that this is where our fabric hot rate sensors lie and you see they're not very easy to see and it's all part of the Garment this is the back so you can see it running around these two pieces together are essentially what the athlete wears we are currently at the spot where we have heart rate in there we're looking at adding things like respiration um and obviously you're seeing a lot of other things coming into the market at the moment with integrating movement sensors and accelerometers into fabric which are very very small and non-invasive and I think for us working in Elite Sport is that's really the key is that it has to be something that the athlete cannot feel and it doesn't interfere with what they're doing I mean I think when we first had our first prototype we went to AC Milan and they're a very close partner of ours and they've worked a lot on us on in terms of user interfaces and how we display data they're one of the most advanced teams in terms of physiological monitoring and they they use a lot of systems they collect a lot of data they do a lot of testing on their players and they're really considered as being on The Cutting Edge when it comes to uh this sort of Technology I think the first time we went there with the Prototype is we had these shirts with sensors in built them and at that time we actually still had a physical wire running through the shirts and not and not in buil fabric sensors uh and we had players cutting off the sleeves of A500 handmade shirt and guys not wanting to wear the shirt they obviously have to be tight to get the heart rate we have systems out there with uh the German national t team we've just delivered to Mexico Argentina Colombia um we're out there with the entire Major League Soccer as well and we're really getting a feel for this technology and and really just starting to understand where we need to take it to to really get things to the next level and take performance and sport in general to another level total time 1 hour and 56 seconds active Time 1 hour 30 seconds distance 8.49 km high intensity distance 965 I think sooner rather than later you're going to see more and more sensors and more and more clothes and not just in sports I think in in everyday life as well um I think just in terms of normal Health monitoring and understanding what your body is going through and then your health care uh and just in in general I think people want to understand more about what they're going through and how they can improve move on on how they live so I think we're starting this at an elite level and at a level at which people are getting paid a lot of money to perform but at the end of the day is we are just measuring things so it's it's all about how you use the data and how you present it hey guys can we just come down here can I just get you guys in a line on the end there and just just like warm up so jog end to end so here here today I mean really we're looking we've had some software updates recently and I'll be looking at some of the the changes we've made to user interfaces so some of them very slight some of them a bit more major um looking at how we display acceleration as an example so what we're going to do here you can see that these guys their heart rates are in the Blue Zone at the moment so you can see we're down in in the lower ranges for their heart rate and we're going to warm them up and bring them up to a level at which we can get them playing a game and having a bit more intensity in my opinion I really think we're in the in the bacteria stage um we haven't evolved uh very far we're just starting to see the beginnings of of what you could call life I suppose in this space uh you're going to see things get a lot smaller a lot faster a lot smarter and again you're going to see the platforms evolve I think to make more use of these and I think when when people talk about wearable Technologies there's so much focus on the actual devices and the sensors and it's it's a watch that does all this but that's not really the important part and I think uh you'll see these whole wearable environments not just devices or or Fabrics or or or things is you'll see environments and platforms growing and it's really I think these things become more accepted as they become more seamless uh easier to integrate into everyday life and and actually getting and seeing value from it so it's I think it's it's really it's going to explode we're in its infancy and there's going to be some exciting things come out of it when envisioning the future it's easy to get caught up in the marvels of Technology but could the most groundbreaking of future Innovations be organic embracing nature rather than dominating it bio Couture is a design consultancy focused on bringing living and biological materials into fashion and sports SAR founder Susan Lee is currently heading one of the most thought-provoking initiatives in the industry today I was writing a book about the future of fashion trying to discover what might be happening in fashion in sort of 50 years from now so I was talking to lots of scientists and engineers and one of the people I spoke to was a biologist he was the first person to suggest to me that if you really want to completely rethink how you might create a piece of clothing that you could imagine growing a dress in a vat of liquid using bacteria I'm just going to go wash my hands it just blew me away as an idea and we just carried on the conversation and began to collaborate we started just growing small trays me in my bathroom him in his garage um and you know just kind of comparing notes on what we were doing with temperature and covering and you know um but very quickly we could see that there was something there that was really promising the process we used was incredibly simple and actually I realized that it wasn't so difficult to produce something that Not only was textile like in but that I could sew together like a normal piece of clothing and it just shifted my whole thinking in terms of how you might create fashion in the future our basic recipe is green tea sugar some acetic acid like a cider vinegar and then the startic culture and that's yeast and bacteria but it comes in the form of a mat and that mat is is basically your mother it's called a mother culture so that will give birth to something that will grow on the surface of the liquid and it will take on the shape of whatever your container is so if you had a star-shaped container that would be the the shape of the material that you grew this is this is the the strange thing to get your head around is that this is a method of producing fashion which is closer to brewing beer or making food food than you know any kind of traditional textile process yes so this this is this is fading now it's not as strong as it was as when it came off the laser cutter um but the there's no smell really once they've been dyed yeah when it's come straight out of the vat and it's wet smells sugary sweet um once this is this was dried dried down it's um we created a pattern um for the laser cutter and it's based on the bacteria and the yeast cells that were used to to create the material itself so the Long Rod shape here I mean it's kind of an abstraction but the the rod shape is the bacteria and then there are rounder ones that represent the yeast cells that were used so you know the pattern is somewhat abstract but it's to represent actually what the material how the material was made in the first place we collaborate with all sorts of other companies scientists who are growing materials in the lab using living organisms and we're helping them to take those materials from the lab to the market so how do we take these living materials so these materials that have been made from living organisms and imagine the future products for fashion for apparel for sportsare um that's what we do we're a design consultancy the clothing industry has grown heavily reliant on precious natural resources be it CAU and picked from gigantic fields in India or nylon derived from petroleum products once the fabric has been manufactured cut sewed and finished into ready to wear clothing most of its leftovers are simply disposed of creating a chain of waste in each step of the process but with bioengineered clothing we have an opportunity to reduce the impact of these old world practices when you think about something like fermentation and a living organism um there's kind of no waste because it's producing both the fiber organizing that into a material for you and then ultimately potentially what you're looking at is being able to grow that material onto the form that you want it to take shape as right now we're not genetically engineering that bacteria to produce the material for us but the future will be about designing the bacteria to spin the thread to give it the qualities that we want so if we want it to repel water we design that into the cell if we want it to deliver some kind of nutritious quality to your skin perhaps that could all be designed into the material how do you figure out what we're going to be wearing in 50 years well one way of thinking about that is by talking to scientists and Engineers who are working in the lab today on new experimental materials or new ways of thinking about manufacturer 90% of the planet is covered in cellulose material everybody's so excited about 3D printing but what I'm excited about is not today's 3D printing which is still using oilbased petrochemical nasty Plastics and filling the world with more plastic you know plastic is my Nemesis you know I want it to be organic and natural and compostable most people in fashion textiles are not hanging out with Scientists you know really doing geeky research and you know asking these questions because you know fashion is is actually just concerned with what's happening in the next 5 minutes and that's become you know increasingly the case over the last sort of 20 years you know the time frames for thinking and you know making stuff happen in fashion have got shorter and shorter and shorter it's why we call it fast fashion now you know um there is no time for R&D in fashion over the last 100 years clothing has transformed from the traditional maj to order into the mass-- produced standard sized and fixed pric of today where more often than not it's designed in one country manufactured in another and sold worldwide this model known as fast fashion has completely changed the face of the industry so much that in the Years between 2000 and 20 our consumption of textiles increased the Staggering 47% but while new Styles at low prices are abundant this Relentless production and consumption is accused of having a much higher cost on the environment I've been a a mountaineer and a climber since I was 15 years old and people sometimes ask me what's your favorite climb and that's hard to answer because there's a lot of favorite climbs but one of the ones that I remember best that I love the most was a route on Mount Kenya in East Africa the second highest mountain in Kenya uh it was a magical climb right on the equator a ribbon of ice it required ice axes and crampons and it was difficult um it was very Steep and there was one place in fact where you had to go behind a hanging curtain of ice and actually go inside an ice cave and climb up and chop your way out of the top of it and exit onto the summit it was like magical but magical as it was it's in the past tense because now with climate change the ice is all melted and the ice window is gone like it's just not there anymore it fell off all the ice just fell off the mountain so that's like a dagger in your heart when that's one of your favorite climbs in the world and it's not there anymore because of climate change how did we end up with fast fashion where did this come from perhaps uh the answer is in uh the ability of companies to deliver fashion faster and faster you know with the ability to deliver inexpensive clothes because they're made uh in places where the costs are the lowest and they can be turned around uh with the the fastest speed possible and um change uh weekly or monthly maybe that's uh just from having that capability you end up with fast fashion because you know that's satisfies a a desire and a need in people if that's the case then it's that that desire with from the consumer that's driving it and that's where the change has to come from since 2005 Rick has been responsible for environmental initiatives at pagonia the outdoor clothing company founded by fellow rock climber 40 years earlier took an environmental approach from the outset among other things they commit 1% of their annual sales to environmental groups and have founded programs to help and encourage consumers to recycle their clothes in 2011 Rick and his team launched an advertising campaign with a consumption message that goes against everything you learn at business school so what about this folks in the most potent environmental appeal of the Season Patagonia just placed a full page ad in the New York Times on the holiest of sales days Black Friday don't buy this jacket says the headline along with the retailers R2 coat the ad ask people to think twice before buying Patagonia products since our clothing consumption as stated in the copy puts the economy of natural systems that support all life firmly in the red well how's that for a Black Friday ad the campaign to try to convince our customers to buy uh just what they need came out of the recession that began in in 2009 when we started to realize that people were responding to the recession by redefining their relationship to stuff including clothing and there were a number of people that were recognizing that you actually save money if you buy things that last longer and you buy fewer of them as a consequence and we wanted to figure out well how can we uh provide a service to those people I was able to convince uh Ivon shenard who owns the company uh that he wanted to do this but then it took both of us to convince others inside the company uh quite a while uh especially the people in sales and and Merchandising you can imagine you go to them and say want to run this ad to ask people not to buy our stuff unless they really need it and they go you want to do what they think you're crazy but then you have to explain the reason for it and you have to bring it into the context of the company's responsibility to the environment it's not don't buy the jacket but it's don't buy the jacket if you don't need it and that's what the real message is that's what we're asking people to think about you know of buying just what you need of taking care of it fixing it reselling it if you're not using it recycling it was completely worn out and the fact is that our our sales went up after that ad and they've continued to go up and the company's continued to uh grow but we hope it's growing because more people are buying our products because they last a long time and that they're listening to what we have to say about consumption and deciding in their own lives to not buy as much stuff if they don't really need it I'm a little suspect about uh making any product that is climate positive but it's possible to make it approaching climate neutral uh but even there that's a very very difficult uh chore not only with consumer goods but even with food you know take food as an example Farmers have been trying to uh develop farming techniques that use no more energy than the sun can put back on on the land and they can't do it manufactured goods are even more of an impact than than farming uh with those kinds of um Technologies so you maybe can't make clothes that are climate neutral or climate positive but you can certainly make clothes that have an absolute minimum impact on climate change even though the planet has activists like Rick in its defense their actions risk being just a drop in the ocean every year the process of water dying our textiles disposes the equivalent of half a Mediterranean Sea into our rivers and streams add to that the 200,000 tons of toxic chemicals that escape wastewater treatment and end up in those very same waterways that environmental impact while huge comes solely from adding color to textiles I was traveling through China doing a factory visit and I was driving through an area that was farming watermelons up until that point I ate a lot of watermelons until I drove past the river that was feeding the Watermelons the water nobody would want to drink anything from that stream and obviously you know the impact of industrial factories in the area was just polluting the farming and people were obviously eating that so I think it's visual things like that that make me really passionate about what I'm doing Sophie mether is a former head of innovation at Nike Asia and an industry expert when it comes to sustainable textiles a few years ago she began working together with the Y group a Bangkok based textile manufacturer and Pioneers of a revolutionary new technology called dry dye a solution that can color Fabrics without using a single drop of water the technology uses a highly Compressed Gas known as supercritical carbon dioxide to dye textiles and although the main sustainable feature is water less dying the process also uses 50% less energy and 50% less chemicals than traditional methods still in an early stage of development there are seven machines in commercial use today each with the capacity to color about 1 million yards of fabric per year the first time I held the Fabrics um gosh it was a long time ago and I expected them to be very stiff and very bodyy and I was just kind of like are you sure you know it feels exactly the same as a a regular polyester dyed on conventional jet dying as far as dying I just look at traditional wet dying and I I look at the amount of extra water that comes out and the extra color that goes out um and it to me it just seems historical um it's kind of a no-brainer dry dye is clean you know everything about it is clean the fabric is dry the stuff that comes out is dyed Fabric and we're kind of putting a steak in and saying look this is what you have to Aspire to we're not happy with x% less we want zero we're really striving to get as good as we possibly can when I first start started looking at it it was dying Fabrics with zero water and zero effluent that was exciting but now I can see the the potential if you can use super critical carbon dioxide to dye Fabrics I ask the question what else can we do with super critical carbon dioxide in our industry to make really phenomenal changes for me the future of this is taking dry dye and Mar ining it together with other areas of like future fibers to come up with this this solution that hasn't even been dreamt of today um a fiber that comes from renewable sources a fabric that is dyed without any water less energy less chemistry um and also that we can use as a high value end products into new product when it comes to the end of its its life I think there's a huge amount of inspiration we can take from nature um looking at the way that say butterflies the morphous butterfly how the the refraction of the way that their wing structures put together reflects light in a different way to give them color how much more of that can we actually do in the textile industry to put less impact um on what we're doing when it comes to sustainability it's easy to place the blame on unethical Brands and polluting factories in Far Away lands but to make the clothing industry anywhere near sustainable the responsibility is not only with manufacturers retailers and Brands the responsibility is also with us the consumers because as Rick pointed out earlier while we need to buy less we also need need to care more for the clothing we already own take this jacket that I'm wearing for example half of the impact of this jacket on the planet over its lifetime was with Patagonia that made the jacket the other half of its impact is with me the person that bought it and how I use and care for it in past Generations people would take care of their own products their own clothes they would fix them they would sew patches on them they would repair them if they're broken to get the most out of them and in fact Patagonia back in its very early days made repair kits uh and now we're making repair kits again for our customers and not only are we having offering repair kits but we also have made repair videos in partnership with a small company called iFix it that teach people how to fix their clothes uh if they're broken I fix it is a free repair manual for everything our goal is to teach everyone how to fix all their stuff so we have free repair manuals for everything from cell phones to cars to clothing and we do everything we can to teach people how to make the stuff last longer I think it's fundamental to learn how to work on the things that we consume rather than being a passive consumer Society wouldn't it be great if we could all be more actively involved in our things and one of the Fantastic things about repairing things is that you start to get more connected to your products and and maybe I I I fix a jacket and I put different different zipper on it than came with it or I I change some of the colors and now rather than that being something that I bought it's something that I own thinking about it or talking about an environmental problem I think once you actually do something once you actually sew something once you actually fix something it becomes a real tangible experience and I think that that changes the way that you feel about it and the way that you interact with it and suddenly this becomes a part of your skills and your learning and your persona that's not that wouldn't be if you were to just buy a new jacket there used to be fashion houses where every garment was handmade one of a kind and then we hit this Industrial Age in the 20s and 30s where suddenly garments were being mass-produced and I think once people get back to feeling the value of having this jacket be my unique jacket and having that be sort of the Cure I think we'll be in a much better place you know with the clothing that we have it's it's I mean intimately connected to us our clothing suffers more wear and hair than anything else that we have and it seems Preposterous if we want to move to a more sustainable society that we don't start with the things we're most closely familiar with so we started getting going teaching people how to fix clothes uh we started with basic things like how to put a button back on and then some more complicated repairs like working on zippers we empower millions of people every month to learn how to repair things it's been exciting to see people stretch themselves and learn how to repair things they never would have been able to repair before we see moms fixing iPods for their kids and now we see kids fixing jackets for their moms and it's really exciting to see us connecting families and connecting people together through things that used to separate them this more emotional connection to clothing appro named slow fashion has gained some momentum in the recent years but it still has a long way to go in the UK alone people own roughly 30 billion worth of clothing that they haven't worn once in the past year buying less and caring for clothing is one part of the solution but there could be other ways too if you believe in studio EXO's vision of the future a wardrobe may not be needed in the first place I think fashion future is a little bit more like fashion past so we will invest in garments that may be higher price point we'll look at uh other types of models so maybe subscribing to our clothes which is really interesting you know the idea that we may pay a subscription fee to have vessels that we can consume content and ultimately I believe that generation digital want to consume like that you know actually the reason why they're going into these big shops is because of the speed at which they want to switch up their fashion now if the surface of their clothes is transformable would they really need to do that we really believe in Tumblr for the body and I think that this is a really interesting time as kind of remix culture emerges what you know what will that mean to Fashion I can recall a time with a very very very accomplished fashion designer who's runs one of the biggest houses who literally shuffled me out of the the room and told me I was absolutely barmy at the r college and um I stood and stood my ground and said you are wrong the digitization of clothing will happen technology will integrate one day we will wear the the surface of the computer on our bodies he told me I was literally a mad thing and I needed to leave the room I continued to argue with him until my professor told me time out and and I if I got to meet him again I would have the same argument with him I'm sure what we will want as fashion technology companies is to drive forward towards technology that feels like Silk you know technology that is as soft as wool that is washable that has all of the affordances that it's had historically and that's going to be the hard job because we're still dealing with silicon hard components and and and and that's the transformation we imagine in the future that as microcomputing happens and Fibber science transforms that that this will just be a nod this is a nod towards a a new world that's coming you know it's almost like a Brave New World of fashion what's exciting for for us as designers is to see this future on the horizon and know that something better is is you know is on its way we have two paths in front of us one of those paths is to a future that is pretty Grim but the other road is towards a better future where we actually reverse those indic cers in our planet gets healthier and in our business making clothes we can do that by making the clothes with the least impact with no unnecessary harm and on the part of our customers who buy our clothes to take care of them to fix them to wear them out to recycle them to launder and clean them with the best practices possible it's very difficult to make people change their behavior you know a whole new generation have grown up going into Primark and H&M buying things so cheaply that they don't have any understanding that it should be any other way cuz that's all they've ever known I don't think fashion is really really almost prepared for um computation mechanics hybrid design you know it's it's it's coming like a tsunami out of nowhere ready for it or not the concept of clothing is going to change this film is a mere snapshot of the people and innovations that are helping to shape the future of clothing and whether it moves in the direction of Technology biology sustainability all of the above or something completely different nobody can know but once the dust has settled we'll reflect on this time and think that what we ended up with was obvious the same way we look back at any other transformation with we've ever experienced