Welcome back to the Interline Podcast. Today, you’re catching me in a bit of an introspective mood. The kind where you find yourself questioning some fundamental things, asking yourself whether you have a dim or an optimistic view of the future in a general sense. If that sounds like the next 40 minutes or so won’t be much fun, trust me when I say it’s worth taking on these kinds of questions head on sometimes because the answers you get, especially when you have someone unique to bounce them off, might surprise you.
If you’ve been listening and reading long enough, you’ll know that at The Interline we’re not blithe tech optimists and evangelists, but neither do we trade in doom and gloom. Our coverage is always designed to walk a pragmatic, practical line, and we always try to focus on what’s real, what’s tangible, what’s ready to implement, and most likely what’s ready to deliver value. For most of that analysis, it’s pretty clear what we mean by technology. We mean software, hardware, material science, process innovation. And it’s pretty clear what we mean by fashion, which is apparel, footwear, and accessories, and increasingly beauty.
But there’s a weird, harder to analyse space in the middle that we don’t talk about quite as much because it’s more cultural, it’s more experimental, and that’s technology that is itself fashionable and fashion that’s made up in part or whole from technology. And then there’s the related and very cultural question of what exactly is going on in a general sense in how we interact with technology, both as individuals navigating the world and as professionals whose job it is to feed culture through the prism of fashion or beauty and then to try and end up with products and brands that fall on the right side of history.
Is technology something that just happens around us or gets done to us and it’s our job to try and make the best of the consequences? It can certainly feel that way if you spend any time looking at the endless march towards commoditisation of identity, personal information, autonomy and control that Big Tech seems to have in store for us. And from that gloomy point of view, we might get some cool devices and experiences along the way, but it’s definitely tempting to buy into that kind of fatalistic framing, especially now that Big Tech is looking at fashion as a way to buy design credibility and cultural cachet and to find its way onto people’s bodies with a pretty uncertain value exchange for the person doing the wearing.
But then there’s the other framing, the one that says that, actually, if you integrate technology into fashion and you do the same in reverse, is that the kind of platform shift we need to get those two things to comfortably coexist and to benefit the people who engage with them without those people needing to drop every piece of information about themselves in a box on the altar?
Today, I’m joined by Dr. Sabine Seymour. And we’re talking about a whole bunch of that. We’re talking about what this all means for fashion brands across design, manufacturing, marketing, and a lot more. Dr. Sabine has led computational fashion initiatives. She’s founded initiatives like creative science think tank Moondial, and the new Re.punk, which we’ll talk about later, which employs experimental design, artificial intelligence, and data science to advance the cause of women’s health.
Dr. Sabine describes herself as a creative scientist, a cultural strategist, and a data economist. She’s also an extreme athlete, an author, and there’s no shortage of other strengths she’s added to her bow in her decades of thinking about the kind of questions I’m mulling at the moment, which makes me feel pretty unaccomplished in comparison. I’ve sat here writing about technology for fashion for 15+ years.
This is a conversation about wearables to some extent, but even more than that, it’s a discussion about a delicate moment in the history of fashion, the history of consumer technology, and what fashionable technology actually means. Let’s get into it.
NB. The transcript below has been lightly edited.
Dr. Sabine Seymour, welcome to The Interline Podcast. It’s great to have you.
Great to be with you.
I want to start by acknowledging that it feels like we’re in a bit of a precarious consumer moment when it comes to the way technology interacts with our bodies and with our identities. Now, that’s one of those weird sentences that probably would have sounded pretty ill-defined and far-fetched a couple of years ago, depending on what crowd I was standing in and who I was speaking to, but we’re now at the point where people are being asked to share their likenesses with AI labs as a matter of basic procedure so their friends can generate videos or we can unlock virtual try-on. And then the same companies are on a trajectory to make wearing AI devices powered by models that have been trained on our unlicensed collective output, trying to make that the next platform shift.
I think this has all been a concern for information security privacy advocates for a long while. It’s been a concern at the sort of state surveillance level, but it’s now barreling straight for the mainstream. So as someone who cares deeply about personal autonomy and about understanding and safeguarding our bodies, our identities and our information, what’s your read on where we are right now culturally? Big question, but a good place to start.
It is a very big question and I definitely want to separate two things. One is all that personal information being for consumer applications that you had mentioned before, where it’s not really required to share any personal information because whether I do it or not, I will not die. I will just not get that product. Versus if it is in the space of healthcare, you’re talking a completely different ballgame. However, what I think culturally is happening right now is people are paralysed, extremely uninformed. Also, there are no alternatives to the software applications that are out there. And I feel that the population at large is complacent, which unfortunately for somebody like me is deeply concerning. And you mentioned it properly. The current AI models are trained by data that’s just out there on the internet per sé, but there is a lot of data that’s not out there. So what is with that? Where’s the bias coming from?
Also, the data that it’s trained on, is it actually correct? Is it accurate data? Then of course, it’s data, it’s not willingly given very often, we just don’t, or the population just doesn’t, realise how much of their personal data is actually taken. And also people have absolutely no understanding how contextualisation correlations work. If I have my cell phone on at a certain location and I already have a pattern of buying certain things, I have a pattern of using the phone in an exciting manner physically, like I’m scrolling really rapidly or pressing on something, you know, three, four, five times, there’s already a psychological profile made of every single person on this planet that is using any type of this medium. So that to me is concerning.
Yeah, and I think the way that some of that manifests itself, that complacency versus kind of a gnawing idea that everybody has that big tech is watching them. The way I see that manifest sometimes is people who are convinced that their phone is recording their audio when they’re not explicitly consenting to it. Everybody’s met someone who says, my phone was on the table at a dinner party and we were talking about X health condition or X product or this thing about babies (because my wife’s about to have our third child) and all of a sudden I’m shown ads for baby products or health products or what have you. The thing is, that’s actually not the most direct way to do it. If anything, it’s more insidious than that because of the correlation and everything else that you just spoke about. You don’t need direct surveillance. What you have is a pervasive culture of indirect surveillance. And like you said, it’s not life or death in most scenarios. But it is the norm. It is the paradigm that in order to access exciting consumer products and devices, this is the trade we have to make.
Exactly. Where I think it’s becoming really questionable, is if it’s not necessarily for us as a consumer or to the benefit, but it is a tool that at one point becomes geopolitically dangerous. And this is when, you know, I’m going a little bit off the fashion stream here, but this is when data per sé and personal data is used not so much to gain access and to push you information or push you advertisement but on the other hand also push you information that might be skewed. And so this is where I see a huge problem. That’s one. And again, the other is through your psychological profile, you actually can be receptive to a lot of different things. And we have to be very aware as a consumer that the information is not just given to one company or one company is basically using that information, but it’s disseminated to hundreds and hundreds and thousands of different companies out there. If you make a PayPal payment, you give your credit card information, you give your name, you maybe give your address, if you have a chip too, etc etc. All that information is going to a few hundred companies worldwide. And that is, from very specific data that again, might be used to create a profile from you. So this is where I see a huge problem.
Yep, and I think to recontextualise that into fashion, consumer products in general and retail a little bit, you take that world and you slot advertising into it, which is the paradigm that most brands, whether they sell garments, accessories, eyewear, or whatever, that’s the world that they’re familiar with. You take that psychological profile and you apply it to the business model that works for most technology products, which seems to be advertising driven. That’s when you get to where we are now. You get to where the value exchange between the person being advertised at and the company that’s doing it is lopsided. I think a lot of people don’t necessarily realise just how many data brokers there are or that that’s even a business function that is out there.
But that’s the flywheel that keeps so many consumer industries and so many technology products moving forwards together.
Exactly, and I would actually argue that the business model of advertisement is not going to die, but be very different. It might not be as relevant in the future. However, now if you are a fashion brand, beauty brand, particularly if you are a brand that actually sells a product that you not only wear, but you put on your skin, there might be different information that you would like to get from your customers to basically serve them almost like a digital twin. But that now goes through the current social media models, the current, big players in that space, which is only three or four, five? So that is questionable in the first place.
And they will always take a percentage of that information that you actually want to have directly from your consumer. So you actually don’t need that middleman. You would love to go directly to the consumer. That means big brands need to create completely new ways of digital.
I would say brand digital know-how, digital strategy that allows them to understand their customers in a very different way. And it’s almost like you want to go back to a hybrid model where the physical and the digital really become an interesting way to gather information from your customers and also push them the product that they would actually need, and much more trust, and much more authenticity. So I think that sooner or later, this is going to become an interesting way of thinking about customer retention.
Yeah, I think taking a model that is currently owned by intermediaries, which that consumer channel is, and having it be self-owned and self-governed from a brand or a retailer’s perspective has a lot of logic behind it and a lot of analogues in how we’ve seen companies that have migrated away from selling through marketplaces in order to then own their own consumer channel. Some of them have gone back, not all of them.
There’s also the consumer side of that to think about. So if you think about brands wanting to eliminate the intermediary, that brings me to what it means for us as individuals to try and do the same. So in both cultural and practical terms, what would you encourage our listeners to be thinking about as individuals and putting into practice when it comes to retaining some degree of ownership or sovereignty over their personal data? Because it seems like all of the use cases where we’re being asked to give up or part with biometric personal information to obtain some kind of return. There’s so many more of those and they’re moving so much quicker than any kind of standardised market, any sort of framework for value exchange or any codified standard is being brought into being that would allow us to self-govern from that point of view. I think some of this is fundamental to what you’re talking about when you talk about the advertising model going away and things being done directly.
I agree. This will take quite a while. So in the meantime, the consumers really need to watch which applications they actually use and need. Very simple. WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, you know, are all owned by one company. And so this is questionable in terms of my privacy. So, what if I now don’t use WhatsApp? There are so many alternatives out there, like Signal. So it’s switching to this alternative. I, for example, use Signal and there are areas in the world where you can’t live without WhatsApp because everybody is using it. South Africa, even in Portugal, areas in regions where WhatsApp was ubiquitous before Meta actually bought it. There you have a WhatsApp that you have to use, but only because there is no other alternative. But if there is an alternative, use the alternative. The same with your browser, the same with different types of applications on your phone. I’m even reluctant to use Apple Siri, you know, in some instances I just switch it off if I don’t think I need it. If I’m driving, it’s amazing. If I don’t drive, I don’t necessarily need it. Do you see what I’m saying? So it’s about, where is it really important to gather that information?
So of course, if you have wearable devices, it’s the same, you know, you have devices where you want to wear every day. You have devices that you might just wear when you do your sports, then you take it off. You take the data, you make sure that that data stays within a local framework. I don’t know, we have to educate the consumers. And what is very important from a policymaking perspective is that we actually need to have barriers in place that require large technology companies to make it very easy for consumers. So the current interface of the phone, of any type of wearable, even of your computer, is so complicated nobody really understands. Is it now switched on? Is it off? Is the location tracking? Which app is location? Et cetera.
All of this is a requirement that needs to be put in place, but it needs to put in place through policy. And this is now questionable because we’re sitting in Europe, you in the UK, I’m currently in continental Europe, but we are using American governed software. So here you have a disconnect again between culture. You had mentioned in the beginning culture. And I think this is another thing where our cultures are extremely different. And this also is something that seems to be so bland. If I now go from one big city to the other, it’s the same brands, whether it’s fast fashion or high fashion, and it doesn’t really give me any personal emotion.
And if I use Siri at the same time, it’s like whether I’m in Paris or in London or in Lisbon or in Vienna or in New York, it’s the same.
Yeah, I’ve heard that described as a monoculture before. That’s the operating term for it. I think that’s interesting from a consumer point of view. I think it’s also something that brands need to bear in mind is that if your consumer goes to ground, so to speak, if your consumer decides that they don’t want to engage with these platforms the way that the current prevailing behavioral model says that they should and that everybody does. All of a sudden, what you as a brand have at your disposal, tools-wise, when it comes to engaging your consumer, personalising content, trying to determine which products to make, a lot of that disappears. A lot of data sources for you vanish. And I think that’s, more than anything, a reminder from both a consumer point of view and a brand point of view not to cede so much control to third parties.
Absolutely. Honestly, Amazon is an amazing example. Amazon started with books. Everybody knows they’re an online seller. Now the mom and pop shops, those really amazing little shops all over the world, they’re disappearing because nobody can afford to rent anymore. And everybody is worried about the sales because they say, well, people are buying it online because online it’s cheaper. But then again, what is it that you can buy online, right? You still don’t have that feeling of mom and pop. You don’t have the local products. You don’t have the revenues within that country or within that region. You have employment shrinking. So I think it’s very important that we also educate the consumers in terms of: cheap is not necessarily cheap for you because at the end of the day, your son, your mom will lose their jobs because you were shopping online from some places where things can be produced in a way because they don’t have the same social economic framework that we, for example, have here in Europe. And then you have Amazon, they want you to buy as much as possible online because if you buy particularly through your mobile, through AWS, that’s where they make most of their money. It is digital. So it’s not the online store where Amazon is making the money, it’s the digital AWS, the storage on their phones. I mean, the storage for the phone applications, right? So, it’s an oxymoron to think that it’s only because you buy from the online shop, the mom and pop guys, it’s also, they can’t be so cheap because they don’t need to make that much money, from the online, they make money through the digital.
So it’s just crazy to, again, keep this monopoly afloat. When I actually went to business school 30 years ago, we were taught this is illegal.
Yes, and I think at least one of the big tech giants has been accurately captured in court filings as a monopoly. I think the situation that you have now, to get too far off track, is you have administrations that are less willing to engage with, well, it’s not illegal to have a monopoly, it’s illegal to abuse monopolistic position to advantage yourself. Do we do anything about that? That’s the big question, I think. We’ve so far talked about software and data in the abstract and in the intangible. You mentioned, I think, wearables, and those are interesting to me as both somebody who’s interested in tech in my personal life, but also somebody who runs a technology publication for the fashion industry.
You started talking about wearables as “fashionable technology” as the central idea, well before the current wave of interest in kind of brand and big tech collaborations started. Walk me through what you see as the distinction between a wearable and fashionable technology. Is it just a case of better design and greater desirability? Because that’s something that big technology companies are trying to buy, beg and borrow through collaborations and mutual investments with existing brands? Or is there a deeper and more fundamental difference between technology that you wear and technology that’s actually fashionable?
Well, to me, fashion is still a reflection of society. So it’s deeply emotional. It used to be deeply personal as well, in particular if you identified a certain designer and were subscribing not only to the fashion in terms of its design, but also the materiality, what the designer was standing for. I mean, look at Vivienne Westwood’s story, for example. I think that it would be fantastic if we go back to that again, that we actually think about fashion also as an identity. And what technology is doing right now and what we see with wearable technology.
I would like to have technology also be fashionable and not just think about technology as something that you just wear and is very functional. This combination I had written down in my second book, I called it functional aesthetics. I think this is something where I think it would be great to thrive to where you combined it to. Currently, I think technology or when we talk about hardware in the context of wearable technology, in the context of using digital data to then really create a quality that is interesting for the consumer. A wearable just to wear, and it doesn’t give you any information is pretty irrelevant other than you talk about accessories, that’s a very different category again. Where again, you have the beauty and the aesthetics and the design being on the forefront. So this to me is a distinction, right? I think this is why you have now a lot of devices, the glasses together with Ray-Ban, you have these collaborations going on just because the technology companies – I mean, they’re smart, don’t get me wrong – they understand that they don’t have that cachet. They don’t have that, but the fashion brands have had this for many years. If you wear a certain brand or if you wear a certain style, again, you have a reflection of the society that you live in.
Yeah. And I think Ray-Ban is an interesting example because I think there’s another practical distinction to be made between technology that’s small enough, sufficiently miniaturised and deployable enough that you can slot it into existing fashion categories that do have that cachet without too much alteration. So eyewear is a good one. Watches is a good one. People are accustomed to what a pair of glasses looks like. They’re accustomed to what a watch looks like.
Coincidentally, there is space in those things if you engineer them correctly to fit in sufficiently miniaturised technology. But there’s a difference between that and technology that is either desirable as its own category or the other way, technology that just needs to completely disappear into non-rigid products where there isn’t that room traditionally in a way that requires a much more fundamental rethink about how those products are made.
So I’ll go with the first question about this one, which is do you think there is the potential for new categories of fashionable technology to emerge that aren’t pre-existing? You know, they don’t have direct analogues in existing garments or accessories because it’s smoother on ramp and it’s easier for me as a glasses wearer, for instance, to think, I’m going to buy glasses anyway. Let me buy some smart glasses. Or I wear a watch anyway. Let me pick a smart watch. That’s an easier on ramp than it is for somebody to be convinced that they need to wear something completely new, like a completely new form factor, a completely new function, something that’s not just an enhanced version of a pendant or a bracelet or a ring or what have you. Do you think there is that extra category to come for fashionable technology that doesn’t have a direct analogue in something we already know?
I think this depends on the functionality. The phone is a handheld, and it is in itself, I would almost argue, a fashionable technology. So, there could be, but again, I think this requires a new functionality. I would argue that certain things that we now wear in a device like a watch will then sooner or later be integrated into maybe a fabric because you only need a sensor and the computational device that might be a pendant or might be something else – might also be an implant if you have a health issue. I mean, we currently see the last five or six or seven years you had to have diabetes patches. We’ve been talking about those 20 years back. People were like, nobody will ever wear that, you know? So I think, yeah, this will definitely happen. But I don’t think the form factor will be such a surprise. because with AI and speech recognition, it needs to stay close to where you speak. Otherwise, if you use it for certain medical sensing, it needs to stay directly on the body most of the times. So the garments, the textile, will be that interface. The computational device, it depends again. You have 5G now. It’s going to be 6G, 7G, 8G, So, the devices can be anywhere. And it’s more of edge computing in the beginning, edge computing in general. And then when you go home, you basically load up to the cloud. It’s conceptually already long, long, long there.
Yeah, and I think it’s fair to say that the big tech industry is very much trying to figure out what’s next from a form factor and function point of view. I think everybody’s coalesced around the idea that talking to an AI assistant seems like a valuable activity. It seems like something that people are going to want to do and are already doing through their phones. How much of that you can miniaturise and pack into local models that run on small devices versus how much of it needs to be done in the cloud, how much of it can be done on your phone as a partner and so on. But I think I’m with you in that it’ll be, it’s a pen, it’s a brooch, it’s a necklace, it’s something that does have an existing analogue for that to emerge.
I think maybe if the functionality picks up and becomes revolutionary in some way, which is what a lot of people are betting on with AI, it may be you get a revolutionary form factor eventually, but in the first instance it feels like the Trojan horse for bringing more technology onto our bodies is existing product categories that we’re familiar with.
Yeah, and like I said before, what you really just need is a microphone. That’s one of the things that you need on you. And, you know, if you need to capture sensory information, that you need those sensors on you. So the sensors can be in the fabric, the microphone can even be something that’s implanted. That’s all, you know, I don’t need anything else. Again, it depends on which functionality, what do you need right away. There’s the lenses.
Yeah, and I think the other element, the one that we just hinted at before is, and you’ve mentioned that, things could be built into the garment. What would it actually look like to integrate more technology into garments in a way that is not purposefully showy, in a way that’s invisible? Because when we think about fashion’s upstream supply chain, you know, the way that garments get made, I’m wearing a shirt jacket, a shacket, let’s just use that as an example. I think it’s fair to say that the company that made this jacket is probably not set up with chip fabrication and circuit making in mind. They don’t have that muscle. So if the future is for technology to become more tightly integrated into soft garments rather than these discrete and kind of rigid accessories we’re talking about, what does that mean? What’s the outlook for that for design, development and production? Is fashion’s only option to partner with technology companies who already do this?
Or are these capabilities that you think are going to be so important from a sensory level, from a capability level, that fashion should actually be trying to aim to build these for themselves?
Well, I’ve been in this space for 20 years and 10 years ago, I set up a company called Super. And this is basically where we were talking about making sensors like a trim. So you can just, as a fashion brand, sew it into the garment. But that was because I’m much more interested in the actual molecular structure of a smart fabric. And this is when you don’t necessarily have to talk with digital technology companies, but you have to speak with fabrics companies. So this is when you talk about nanotechnologies that are used in order to manipulate the fibre, make smart fabric.
And this has huge potential, but has not yet at all be exploited. And I had worked with Aalto University in Helsinki, with Professor Juan Hinestroza up at Cornell, the nanotextile lab. And we all agree: this is not a typical VC startup. What we would like to build is, you know, 10 million seed funding and up. Because you need to have big laboratories that work with you. You need to have the ability to pay those labs. You have the ability to create on a much larger scale the chemistry. And so this is a very different ballgame. And that’s why this hasn’t really gone places. So, I think the technology companies, we’ve seen this with Curie, for example. I remember we had done quite a few projects with Intel and at one point I was shown the Curie. And Brian said, this is going to be for fashion designers. And I looked at this and I’m like, listen, I mean, I didn’t say this out loud, but I was like, this is a chip. None of my fashion design friends will know what to do with this. So this will not happen. And if you correlate the two, I mean, if you have a fashion designer and a hardware technologist and a software engineer work together, then you may be getting places, but until the vocabulary is even the same, it takes a long time. And again, I don’t think that we want to employ any hard, typical current, chip sensor, battery or so forth. It all needs to be soft. I need to be able to take that shirt and put it in the washing machine, wash it, and then dry it. So there’s none of the electronic components, and this hasn’t been possible for the last 20 years I’ve been working in this space.
Okay. Interesting. I think whether we’re thinking about soft, that kind of massive step change in integrating technology into the very fibres of soft garments, or whether we’re thinking about the wearables that exist today, there’s also the innovation around the interaction layer of it. So if we take it as read that through glasses, smartwatches, other wearables or a future state of kind of soft garments, there’s a lot of sensory input for the device from that. And then what you have is an output afterwards. So the data that you’re capturing through the wearable, through the technology integrated into your fashion and what it’s useful for is also, I think, pretty wide open space for a lot of people.
And I think it’s interesting because right now, I am wearing a watch. I am wearing a smartwatch. It does count my steps. It counts my heart rate. It counts a bunch of other things. I’m still the person who has to go and do something with that for the most part. That information’s for me, the interactivity layer is opening an app on my phone and getting a summary of that information. It feels like there’s a lot of potential for that layer to change now, particularly when you think about AI, because when you think about the conversational stuff, that lends itself much better to fuzzier, more personal interactions with that sensory information. I think it opens the door, then, to more individualised relationships that people have with technology as embedded into their garments or on their bodies. What’s your take on that? Because I think that brings us full circle to where we’ve talked about AI, personal information, we’ve talked about the sensory suite that lives on your body or could live on your body to capture some of that. I think we’re now talking about what do you do with it? What does the application layer look like? Is it me? Is it an AI assistant? How do I interact with all of that?
That’s a very good question. I think it’s a combination. So one, my dream when people are asking me now, what’s your next book? What do you want to do next? Right? I said, well, I would like to actually develop a bio-based, agentic wearable. So what is that? Bio-based means that it is something that is biodegradable, it’s using materials that do not harm the planet, do not harm me, my physical human body, no toxins on the skin. So that’s number one. Number two is agentic. That means that I want to have an AI agent that is completely personalised and works with me. So it basically is almost a little bit like a car that’s now very computerised and sensorized today. So you drive your car, but when you get too close to another car, your car actually is stopping or is reducing its speed. It’s almost like I want the agent to be a helper. And the third, and that agent actually is my agent. So I think this is very important when I talk about edge devices, when I talk about the computation that is happening on the actual device, it’s happening with me, it doesn’t happen somewhere else. So I don’t have to give the data to somebody, the actual code is coming to me, that’s the computation. And so I never lose my privacy. I don’t lose my authenticity. And that’s that.
And in terms of wearable, and that the conversation we already had before is what can that wearable be? For me, of course, I’m a strong believer that in particular, because I’m so interested in healthcare and in sports, primarily in healthcare now, is that all the information that I have from the body, need close on my skin, but at the same time, I also need to look into environmental factors like allergies, like toxins, like glyphosate spraying, etc. So this is again where you have your agent with you, right? Your agent is with you at all times and can help you to avoid, or the fabric that you’re using, the smart clothing you’re using is actually helping you to stay safer. If there is a certain poison around or if there’s a level of humidity or if the actual garment is reacting. And you don’t have to. Again, this is a very specific use case, but it’s one for a lot of people.
Yep. I agree. You mentioned it, this is actually one of my final questions is the health side of things. So you’ve been focusing a lot of your attention on what you call regenerative health and the relationship between that and technology, especially AI data science and particularly for women’s health. Right now, I think you’re working on that angle with a viewpoint for healthcare and chronic disease under Re.punk, which I’m interested to hear a little bit more about.
At the same time, I’m also interested to see what applications you see for that work in fashion and beauty, because those are industries that are also leaning pretty heavily into health and wellness as growth categories. And there are also industries that are, particularly in fashion’s case, becoming increasingly aware that selling short-term disposable clothing is not the model of the future, but rather we’re thinking more in long-term circular, durable, modular garments that should be permanent fixtures in people’s lives instead of things you throw away. I feel like there’s an opportunity there for an industry that is thinking about health but also thinking about how to create stuff that people keep and own for longer. So tell me a little bit about what you’re doing with Re.punk and tell me if you think there’s any analogues between the work that you have going on there and maybe how fashion brands should be thinking about their health and wellness pushes?
Absolutely. So, Re.punk, basically, I developed it over the last year. I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis 21 years ago and I was in a wheelchair. And what I did was I tried hundreds of different things and anything from an aphorism to organic food to of course a lot of sports because I’m an athlete. And now I surf and I ski big mountains again. My recovery was a few years and was really, really dramatic, but I recovered and I regenerated. So I actually used a lot of devices also to monitor at the time, my activity levels and my heart rate and whatever I was able to monitor at that time, which wasn’t much. People have to understand this was 20 years ago. It was just because I was able to do it.
So that’s one. And the second is out of this, I basically decided to create a zine. That’s like in the 80s, this punk version where we were really about, okay, we want to personalise, we want to have a rebellion. That’s why I call it biological rebellion, bodily autonomy, and organic resistance.
And it’s for women. So it’s for women with chronic conditions, particularly focused on autoimmune. 10% of the population have an autoimmune disease in Europe and in the US, and almost 80% of those are women. And we want to look good. So this is very important. So it’s not only a media format, but it’s literally a platform. And we also think about design products. So again, like you said, for the fashion industry, it’s extremely important to create something that is bio-based, that is non-toxic. So if I am now looking to buy some product, I look at what is in the product, how it is dyed, is it bio-based? Because suddenly we have an understanding that a lot of the products that have been available over the last 20, 30 years have not been healthy. It’s not that a lot of the brands knew, it’s just because nobody really thought about it. Nobody really thought about the effects and they are now tested. So this is basically why it’s so important for me to publish this and also work with brands, with pharmaceutical companies, with creating retweets, you name it. There’s a lot of collaboration that needs to happen. But I think what is important is that we always think about, now, women in particular understand that they have been completely disfranchised from the healthcare space. I mean, we have to be clear that women have not needed to be included in clinical trials in the US until the 1990s and in Europe until the early 2000s. I mean, that’s crazy to think about it, that there are drugs out there that have not been tested on women. And so, you know, things like that, this is why I want to create this publication.
Yeah. I think to just thread the needle a little bit to what we talked about at the beginning as well, where you have a paucity of data like that, where you’re talking about a decades-long disconnect between the amount of information that exists when it comes to men’s healthcare and the amount of population level information that exists when it comes to women’s healthcare, there’s clearly a big gulf there.
Bridging that gulf doesn’t feel like just an exercise in saying, well we came we need to redress the balance and we need to gather as much broad population level information in the US, in Asia, in Europe or whatever as we can to bring more women’s representation into healthcare. It feels like the additional opportunity is to get personalised information, to leapfrog to have that chance to say do this differently. Instead of just kind of replicating the same thing. And you see that in size sets, you see that in a bunch of different things in fashion where you have a very traditional way of gathering broad brush information, then you have an opportunity that presents itself to do things at a more personal level, provided you’ve got the right framework to do that and you’re not going through those intermediaries we talked about at the beginning.
That’s exactly it. So, I mean, this is a huge market. If we just really focus on women that actually have an autoimmune condition or have an autoimmune disease and want to figure out what’s happening with them, first of all, we don’t really have enough real world evidence at all. So it’s not even the clinical data, it’s about the real world evidence. That means that the data that I can capture every day for my lifestyle. Again, this is what I wanted to do with Super 10 years ago. And everybody was telling me I was too early.
Well, it’s an interesting one. I think you recently said that you’ve been too early to a lot of things for basically your entire life. To bring us to a close, if you had to guess, what do you think you’re too early to right now that’s going to become relevant for fashion and beauty in that kind of 10 year period?
It’s everything I just said before. I think it’s bio-based materials. It’s connecting the sensory smart textiles. It’s how do you maintain it, getting rid of chemicals, non-toxins, a digital data infrastructure that allows for the brands to capture data that is maybe important that they can actually “use that data” to disseminate to the healthcare industry. And at the same time also garner and make sure that the women that are using their products think that, they actually feel heard and you can create personal profiles and it’s the right colour, it’s the right style, it’s the right texture. So it’s almost like you can have the fashion industry become an intermediary between the female body and the healthcare industry.
Perfect, that’s a great place to bring us to an end. I think there’s a ton more we could talk about, so maybe we get an opportunity to revisit this somewhere within that 10-year period and see how early you were to some of this stuff. For now though, Dr Sabine Seymour, thank you so much for joining me for this conversation. It’s been a fun one.
Absolutely, thank you very much, Ben.
That brings us to the end of my talk with Dr Sabine Seymour. Hopefully it’s got you thinking about some things that you might not have been thinking about otherwise. Hopefully it’s got you pondering some stuff you can take into your personal life or back to your desk at work this week. I’m going to be back in the coming weeks with some very different conversations to these ones with Fashion Week founders, technology thinkers and plenty more. For now though, thanks for listening as always and, as always, I’m going to speak to you again soon.