Some said that exposing our data makes us feel… naked. Opening one personal data to the public is at times undesirable, yet this is happening with the quantified self movement, where by your own volition, or by command of a sentient app, your data is pushed to the cloud. Where NSA looking at your Snapchat pics is a discussion for some other time, the general nudge towards openess is shaping a new vogue — and it is indelibly linked to clothing.

Where people are now playing with wearable devices, they are still constituting a geeky minority where you initiate yourself to the daily regimen of wearing the bracelets and tags and then sift through the data so that it would make sense (most of the time, these are self-evident mirrors of your misbehavior leading you to abandon the tracking experiment).

Most people would happily forget to wear the devices in the first place, but they are not forgeting to wear their clothing. The moralizing role of wearing clothes, apart form just protecting you from elements is that you hardly imagine yourself in the public without wearing anything.

The potential backlash to your bracelet telling you have mail (you would always have mail so the point of reminding you is useless) would make people more willing to forget — as the facts they are being showered with need to be processed by themselves, where they would rather delegate this to a trust entity. So, in some not-so-distant future we would have an AI that follows us without actually carrying anything.

With the Web connectivity being in the air and electricity following suit, it is the fabric that we wear that would be tracking our movement, sensing our chemicals emission, nudging, tickling and making sense of our surroundings.

The original point that made me think about the story is the story in Fast Company, and a followup thought of Apple hiring Angela Ahrendts to lead its retail effort. Not only she is an expert of Burburry push into digital sales and embedding tech into their lineup, as well as creating a great retail experience for a fashion house, she might also be one of the pioneers to drive Apple thinking of connected health and Apple internet of things into the very fabric that we wear.