Toronto Men’s Fashion Week and We Are Wearables bring tech to the runway

Wearable computers live at the intersection of fashion and technology. It’s a dangerous corner, and collisions aren’t pretty — think first-generation Bluetooth earpieces.

But Tom Emrich wants to change all that. His group We Are Wearables, a free monthly meet-up that celebrates the growing wearable technology movement, wants to merge high-tech menswear with clean lines and smooth style at Toronto Men’s Fashion Week, (TOM) Aug. 12 to 14 at the Evergreen Brick Works. The show will feature menswear designers and local wearable tech manufacturers. There will be a prize for emerging menswear design with the winning designer collaborating with a wearable-tech maker.

Emrich, 36, is one of a handful of local test drivers of the latest in wearable tech; a category that includes smart watches, exercise monitors and, of course, Google Glass, the cyborg-like cellular eyewear that, until Tuesday (when it was released in the U.K.), was still only available to U.S. residents.

While Canadians still can’t get their hands on Google Glass (without using a U.S. shipping address), wearable tech is one of the fastest growing markets in Canada.

A June forecast from International Data Corp. Canada predicts “hockey-stick” growth in the wearable-tech market over the next four years, estimating a 62-per-cent gain by 2018.

“Wearables represent an exciting category in Canada — one expected to be valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars in just a few short years as we begin to re-imagine everything we put on ourselves,” said Krista Napier, manager of mobility and consumer research at IDC Canada. “They must add value and be perceived as seamless, simple, and secure but cannot do so at the cost of looking good.”

Wearable’s rise hasn’t been without friction, however. Concerns about privacy and civility tend to crop up whenever new technologies involving personal cameras, GPS tracking and an Internet connection are introduced.

“I’ve had a lot of whispers and stares, so I’m not quite sure what they were whispering or staring about, but I’ve never had someone come up and say ‘Take that off,’ ” said Emrich.

Typically, if someone does approach him about his strange-looking glasses, they ask to try them on, he said. That is the inspiration behind the partnership with TOM.

Expect to see fashions featuring advanced biometrics that measure heart rate, breathing, sleep quality and exertion in real time, at the menswear show.

“Fashion is the number-one challenge I like to talk about when I talk about wearables today,” Napier said, calling out some of the clunkier smart-watch and exercise-band designs of the past decade.

“If you’re working on Bay St., or even on Queen St., you spend a lot of time putting together whatever it is you’re going to wear that day, and do you really want to put a plastic band on your hand that you then take off to go to work? Probably not. So I think there’s a lot of improvements and we’re already seeing a lot of improvements right here,” said Napier.

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