When technology companies look at goods that are built from the outside in, they generally see irrationality and inefficiency, a broken market just waiting to be corrected and “disrupted.” They believe that they can engineer so much value into these items that people will be swayed to buy goods built from the inside out, that the promise that drives hardware and software—“adopt this and benefit from its utility”—will convince people to upend their sartorial habits.

This is how you get products like Google Glass, which assumes that consumers prize utility so much that they’re willing to look like they have no interest whatsoever in having intimate relations with another human being.

I’m kind of joking about that, but I’m kind of not joking too.

The things that we wear aren’t just an expression of who we are, they are an expression of who we want to be with—as friends, as neighbors, as fans, as lovers. A shirt, a pair of glasses, a necktie, a pair of shoes…these are methods that we use to make a connection between our inner selves and other people. We use fashion to signal our particular humanity to other human beings. Fashion can be trite and superficial and, in my experience meeting members of the industry, it can be a magnet for some of the least interesting human beings on earth. Nevertheless it satisfies a deep-seated need for connectedness, and it’s an indispensable part of living in society.

Part of that indispensability, at least in consumer culture, is fashion’s endless variability, even within the dress codes that align us together into tribes. We could all choose to wear the same thing, and yet we don’t, even within groups who feel very much the same way about the same things. We need what we wear to both signal our belonging and highlight our apartness, to emphasize our individuality. And we find it intolerable when it promises to do that and fails, when someone else shows up in that same cocktail dress at that party that we’ve been waiting all season for.

http://qz.com/226927/google-android-io-are-not-the-wearables-weve-been-waiting-for/#/h/81036,1/