Nowadays, barely a week passes by without at least one new "absolutely life-altering, industry-disrupting, how did we ever survive before this" wearable tech product coming out. Yet most of the innovative gadgetry that you carry on your person ends up being pretty lame: Perhaps it doesn't exactly live up to its too-good-to-be-true description, or it's just not something you've been sorely lacking in your life.
That said, 2015 brought about a handful of high-tech fashion gizmos...that we actually want to wear. Here are the five most innovative and useful items to debut this year. How many of these goods are you currently sporting?
Any conversation about wearable tech in 2015 inevitably starts with the Apple Watch, which arrived, at long last, in April. Since it's essentially a petite iPhone for your wrist, the watch's sleek, pared-down appearance belies how complicated and time-consuming it can be to actually set the thing up. Or parse through over 3,000 apps to figure out which ones will, you know, make life easier. But that's half the fun of scoring a shiny, new gadget, isn't it?
Any Apple product is basically guaranteed to deliver, in spades, on the almost-too-beautiful-to-touch design quotient. But when you add a seriously fancy band by a venerable French fashion house? Game. Over. The Hermès iteration was rolled out in October, to the delight (read: intense coveting and/or obsession) of the fashion industry. We're eagerly awaiting the next crop of designer Apple Watch bands that will roll out, and coming up with a few of our own hopeful guesses in the meantime.
Photo: Courtesy of Apple.
Usually, making the very most of our, ahem, assets is the chief concern while denim shopping. How about a pair that charges your phone (and flatters your butt)? Joe’s Jeans has the perfect pair for those of us always hovering closer to 0% than 100% in terms of our phone's juice level: The brand's #HELLO jeans, which debuted in August in a couple of washes, come equipped with a genius phone-charging slot above the right back pocket.
The jeans were in development for at least six months, but the idea had been around since the smartphone took over our lives, basically: "The on-the-go charging concept had been in the back of our minds ever since mobile devices became so popular," Joe's Jeans founder and creative director Joe Dahan told Refinery29.
The jeans, which have a discreet slot for a slim phone-charging battery, which connects with the adjacent hidden pocket for your phone, "offer a sleek, stylish way to keep [it] charged and connected while on the go," Dahan says.
Customers are all about living that charger- and Mophie case-free life, apparently: "The demand has been so high that we've added more #Hello styles to our upcoming collections," Dahan says. "We will be expanding #Hello in upcoming seasons to include a variety of rises, fits, colors, and prints to give our customer more options for their wardrobes." Warning: these jeans might make you resent the other blues in your closet for not working as hard.
Photo: Courtesy of Joe's Jeans.
This year, hearing aids (finally) got the aesthetic overhaul they deserve, thanks to Audicus' collaboration with Advanced Style, the blog (which begat a documentary) celebrating an older, wiser set of style muses.
"My grandmother was always looking for a more fashionable cane or hearing aid, but options were limited," Ari Seth Cohen, Advanced Style ’s creator, told Refinery29 when the collab launched in April. "When Audicus approached me about doing a project together, I knew that this was a perfect way to honor her."
Available in four patterns and equipped with Bluetooth capabilities that allow users to take calls and listen to music, these hearing aids were first discussed in the beginning of 2015. "Both Advanced Style and Audicus share the mission of eliminating stigmas around growing older," Audicus' CEO, Patrick Freuler, told Refinery29. He added that sales have been split between male and female customers, even though the collection was initially aimed at women, and he doesn't think the momentum will slow down any time soon. "As the demand for hearing aids grows with our increasingly loud world, hearing aids will become an increasingly more common sight."
"By collaborating on a line of fashionable hearing aids, we could further reduce stigmas about what hearing aids look like and who wears them," Freuler says.
Photo: Courtesy of Audicus.
Informal survey: How many times have you been at the doctor and fumbled, humiliatingly, to guesstimate an answer to that pesky "What was the first day of your last period" question? (You're not alone.) Well, this is the wearable tech gadget for you: The Bellabeat Leaf is a not-hideous bauble that tracks your cycle, in addition to your stress levels, sleep patterns, and physical activity. Besides keeping tabs on the, uh, ebb and flow of your period, the ovulation tracker is meant to help monitor your fertility stats.
After a year and a half in development, the Leaf became available in May, with a focus on uniquely feminine health-tracking needs. "When the first wearables came out, they were pretty much oriented to fitness and aesthetically more appealing to men," Urska Srsen, Bellabeat's cofounder and CCO, told Refinery29. " We wanted to make something beautiful and simple...but we also wanted to change the focus from fitness to women's health."
Check out this video for the full rundown of all the things it can do. The company has several women's health-centric wearable tech products in the works, so stay tuned for the next truly useful, health-tracking gadget.
Photo: Courtesy of Bellabeat.
Wriggling into pair after pair (...after pair) of jeans can be a really shitty fitting room experience, perhaps only trumped by bathing suit shopping. Launched in October, startup LikeAGlove is attempting to make the online denim quest less awful. The brand's “smart leggings” contain built-in conducive fibers that take thousands of measurements of your legs' shape and contours. These specs are then sent via a Bluetooth controller to LikeAGlove’s free app, which lets you sift through a catalog of popular denim brands to figure out the very best jeans for your body.
They're also great for the weight and fit fluctuations most of us experience: “LikeAGlove was designed to help customers keep up with their changing figures and ensure they can get the perfect fit each time they need a new pair of jeans,” founder and CEO Simon Cooper told Refinery29. Customers can currently preorder the fit-wizardry leggings, which will arrive in summer 2016.
Down the line, the brand will likely offer additional pieces with the same capabilities. “It’s our mission to help consumers find what fits their shape best, and we know that jeans are not the only apparel item causing serious fit frustration.”
Photo: Courtesy of LikeAGlove.Like what you see? How about some more R29 goodness, right here?
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