The future of fashion and technology

Fashion is really just starting to interact with the information technology world. Today there are already 'cool' gadgets and wearables, but tomorrow, we will see whole new domains where fashion can play a key role.
The biggest of these is the duality of appearance - where we may appear one way in the physical world, and have a whole range of digital appearances in the augmented reality and virtual environment worlds. This will lead to many people designing for themselves.
Along the way, electronics will continue to shrink in size to a point where it no longer significantly need affect the form of the object that carries it. Form and function will be separated, at least as far information technology is concerned.
Fashion is often at the forefront of technology usage. Many new materials and technologies are used in textiles and accessories when they are still too expensive or primitive for other uses.
The next decades will see the gradual convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive technologies. Typical results will be materials with different tensile, thermal and optical properties, integration of onformation technology into fabrics, and linkage of our bodies to the network for medical and communication purposes, via clothing or skin-wearables.
Thin, flexible displays are becoming available already, and we will undoubtedly see them built into clothing with increasing frequency. This will be both for body adornment and functional uses.
A wide range of electronic devices can already be built into clothes and this will increase. New fabrics are already being developed to provide power generation - using solar power, electromagnetic, thermal and mechanical means.
Storage technology is improving extremely quickly and we may expect massive amounts of storage to be available in very small volumes, so that people can take all their files, music and videos with them - integrated invisibly into small devices or clothes.
As local production becomes more widespread, self design may become very popular indeed. How much this affects the market for professional fashion designers will thus depend on how much relative skill and creativity they really have, as well as on how much effort people can be bothered to invest in designing themselves.

For further information and reports- http://www.nanotec.org.uk/finalReport.htm