Part 1: Fitbit, Meet Fashion …

On a crisp Sunday during New York Fashion week in February, inside a downtown gallery, a buzzy fashion brand called Pubic School unveiled its Fall 2016 collection, and it wasn’t just the clothes that had people talking. As models glided by in oversized shirts and cropped leather jackets, their wrists were adorned with metal and nylon wearable technology accessories made using Alta, Fitbit’s latest product offering.

What Fitbit's collaboration with Public School makes clear is that hardware companies are waking up to the fact that they can't ignore fashion. What's not clear is what that means exactly. Are we talking about the industry, with its catwalk shows, editorial calendars and elite circles? Are we talking about a consideration for aesthetics and form factor? Perhaps what we really mean when we talk about "fashion" is design, and with that, a consideration for the body that goes beyond just counting its steps.

Up until this point, wearable technology has been stuck in the information age. Our devices have counted our steps, measured our heart rates and brain waves, and tracked everything from our sleep habits to our breathing patterns. This data-focused phenomenon, known as "The Quantified Self," was crystallized by Wired editors Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly when they coined the term in 2007. The rush to translate the human body into data sets that can be processed by our machines has resulted in an explosion of hardware devices – many of which do the same thing and aren't always that technologically interesting.

While these wristables may have catapulted wearable technology into mainstream consciousness, they haven't resonated within fashion circles. Even in headline-grabbing collaborations (think Apple Watch x Hermès), fashion seems slapped on top of hardware like an afterthought. In their focus on function, wearables have lacked a deeper appreciation of form.

Part 2: The social age of wearable tech

We've only begun to scratch the surface in terms of what it means to wear our technology. As Manufacture New York CTO Amanda Parkes put it, "Where we are with wearables is about where we were with the internet in 1993." If, as Parkes suggests, the history of online media can provide a roadmap for thinking about wearable technology, then we should be able to get a sense of where we're headed, at least for the not-so-distant future.

In 2009's The Social Factor, IBM's Maria Azua describes our transition from the Information Age towards the Social Age. Azua says the Information Age was marked by "increasing efficiency in the dissemination of information via the internet from producer to consumer." Instead, the Social Age which follows is marked by "a fundamental change in the way we communicate and socialize." While Azua is talking about the evolution of computing, this model can be useful in thinking about the evolution of wearables. The wearable technology we've seen up until this point belongs to a kind of Information Age – data-driven, aiming to be as efficient as possible, and primarily one-to-one in its focus to deliver wearers information about their bodies.

The next wave of wearables promises to usher in a Social Age, which is marked not necessarily by a movement away from information, but towards communication and self-expression.

"I think the notion of the Quantified Self was for a very specific demographic,"says garment engineer Billie Whitehouse, the co-founder of Wearable Experiments, a company which creates social wearable concepts and clothing. One of its recent projects is the Fan Jersey (below) a Bluetooth enabled shirt which connects sports fans to their favourite players by delivering impacts via haptic feedback.

"The skin is the largest organ on our body, and it's an under-utilized communication system," explains Whitehouse. "Technology can be used to play songs on the body."

Much of her work leverages sensors and haptic feedback to connect people to one another. Her Fundawear project, for example, is a set of his and her underwear for couples in long-distance relationships. The smart pants facilitate a kind of virtual play where touch gestures on a smartphone screen are translated into vibrations in the underwear.

Part 3: Towards an emotional second skin

It's no coincidence that it is female designers who are cultivating an empathy towards the body in wearable technology. Women are socialized to be more interpersonal and have long been associated with the flesh (see Simone de Beauvoir, Elizabeth Grosz). As more women break into an industry that has traditionally looked predominately white and male, they bring not only their experiences of inhabiting bodies but also of expressing and analyzing emotions.

"When I started to combine fashion and technology together I dreamed of an emotional second skin – something that is sensory, something we can use to breathe new life into fashion," says fashion designer Anouk Wipprecht.

Wipprecht’s "speaking" garments, such as her Spider Dress and Smoke Dress, are social wearables that react in proximity to other bodies. Come too close to her Smoke Dress, and you'll find it emitting a substance, not unlike an octopus spraying ink.

Similarly, her Spider Dress explores notions of proximity and personal space by including an embedded protection system which keeps others at bay with animated robotic arms that look like the legs of a spider.

 Wipprecht has in the past remarked that traditional fashion "felt dead to her." She imagines a future of clothing that has a mind all its own: "When fabrics are combined with sensors, they become something we can express and communicate with.”