by Jason Snell
‘What the Tech World Doesn’t Understand About Fashion’
This essay by Leslie Price, editor-in-chief of the fashion site Racked, is worth a read. As someone who writes about tech and knows nothing about fashion, it provided me with some valuable insight into how the fashion industry works and how people in the fashion industry think.
But I have to admit, some of the value in Price’s piece is that it also exposes just what the fashion world doesn’t understand about technology.
Apple stresses how hyperfunctional its watch will be, though the functions that it performs won’t prove revelatory to anyone who owns an iPhone, which it must be paired with. (That’s right, it’s a $350 accessory of an accessory—and both must be charged nightly.) The iPhone, it should be noted, is ubiquitous not because it’s cool, but because smartphones are considered necessary in our modern times. As it stands, the Apple Watch is neither. A “dirty secret” of the wearables market is that at least half of consumers abandon them within months, no doubt realizing how pointless they truly are.
I suspect both industries still have a whole lot to learn from one another.