Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A historical and critical view of wearable technologies that considers them as acts of communication in a social landscape.

Wearable technology--whether a Walkman in the 1970s, an LED-illuminated gown in the 2000s, or Google Glass today--makes the wearer visible in a technologically literate environment. Twenty years ago, wearable technology reflected cultural preoccupations with cyborgs and augmented reality; today, it reflects our newer needs for mobility and connectedness. In this book, Susan Elizabeth Ryan examines wearable technology as an evolving set of ideas and their contexts, always with an eye on actual wearables--on clothing, dress, and the histories and social relations they represent. She proposes that wearable technologies comprise a pragmatics of enhanced communication in a social landscape. "Garments of paradise" is a reference to wearable technology's promise of physical and mental enhancements.

Ryan defines "dress acts"--hybrid acts of communication in which the behavior of wearing is bound up with the materiality of garments and devices--and focuses on the use of digital technology as part of such systems of meaning. She connects the ideas of dress and technology historically, in terms of major discourses of art and culture, and in terms of mass media and media culture, citing such thinkers as Giorgio Agamben, Manuel De Landa, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. She examines the early history of wearable technology as it emerged in research labs; the impact of ubiquitous and affective approaches to computing; interaction design and the idea of wearable technology as a language of embodied technology; and the influence of open source ideology. Finally, she considers the future, as wearing technologies becomes an increasingly naturalized aspect of our social behavior.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

In this expansion of six earlier SIGGRAPH presentations, art historian Ryan (Louisiana State Univ.) examines wearable technology (WT)--clothing that incorporates digital technology as a core element. These wearables "advance the language of dress ... [and] converge with the cultural dimensions of technology." This book is neither a comprehensive history of WT nor a data-rich snapshot of what is currently available. Instead, Ryan interprets WT in the context of contemporary culture, an approach that she partially defines as "making the body culturally visible." In a chapter titled "Disparate Histories," she discusses how clothing and technology were connected well before the 20th century. In "Wearable Computing," Ryan expands on the dichotomy between WT and the fashion culture at the start of the 21st century. In "Augmented Dress," she looks at emerging design initiatives, including clothing that is being adapted to support social media. This book was difficult to follow, and some sections required multiple readings to grasp Ryan's theories. Because not many books about contemporary dress attempt to interpret clothing as much more than an expression of identity, this is an interestingly different approach. It should be useful for upper-level multidisciplinary studies, especially those with a computer or fashion focus. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students and researchers/faculty. --Catherine Donaldson, North Seattle College