 In many ways fashion has always been technology, cutting a piece of cloth and turning it into something that can function on such a dynamic and expressive system as the body is an extraordinary technological feat. Technology has and continues to move ahead in leaps and bounds and I think that's a very exciting thing for fashion. Many people have different ideas about what wearable technology is but I like to think about it as interactively responsive garments and interfaces. As technologies advance and as they're explored with they can extend our ability to communicate with each other. They can extend our knowledge about ourselves and what's going on with our bodies. They can communicate that knowledge to others if we want it to. Wearable technology occurs in two spaces at the moment. We have artists and designers doing a lot of highly poetic explorations that are unable to be bought to market but then we have examples of engineering driven wearable technologies that are bought to market. Helen Storey and Tony Ryan for example are major leaders. They're champions in many ways of investigating how scientists and artists and designers can collaborate fruitfully to really innovate and look at how these innovations can play out in everyday life so become products. Susan Lee with her bio couture project is really looking directly at synthetic biology biological systems to create new materials. Pauline Van Dongen is in many regards a younger researcher and she's trained as a fashion designer and she's working with scientists to try to refine ways that wearable technologies can be developed in a fashion context and actually brought to market and this is one of the biggest struggles. We can see around us with some of the sporting applications of wearable technologies. We see microcontrollers paired with the body that can give you data about how you're running or how you're exercising or how your body is responding to situations but as technology is evolving we're beginning to see applications of the biosciences and the life sciences and the material sciences. We can 3D print DNA. How could that manifest itself in a wearable technology? There's a compromise between what's currently possible and what is desired in order to produce things at the moment and hopefully that compromise will be less towards the engineering and a bit more towards the expressive capabilities and extraordinary potential of wearables as we move forward.