But a number of companies are developing wearable sensors designed to appeal to a wider population. This summer, for example, the start-up Athos plans to release a line of formfitting sportswear with embedded sensors that will tell users exactly which muscles they’re exercising during a workout and how hard they’re working them. For clothing with sensors to go mass-market, however, companies will need to accommodate customers’ divergent tastes by giving them lots of options. “If there’s a smart-shoe category, you’re not going to have just one pair of smart shoes,” says Mary Huang, a technologist whose New York design studio, Continuum, has been a pioneer in 3-D printing. Shoes, after all, are differentiated by where they’re worn—you wouldn’t hike in heels—so you’ll want multiple pairs, with multiple functions. Hiking boots might have a pedometer and a GPS receiver, while dress shoes could monitor muscle stress points. Other sensors might wind up only in certain garments. A Netherlands-based firm recently made a prototype of a parka that alerts its wearer to poor air quality (it also has a mask with a built-in air filter).

Most of the people I spoke with predicted a proliferation of ever-tinier sensors. Crystal Beasley, a technologist turned clothing entrepreneur, imagines modules small enough to fit in a necklace; presumably, they could log health data, or buzz when you get a text. One day we might forgo wearables and implant microchips in our bodies. But well before then, Huang says, we may stop thinking about wearables as technology. “Where the technology starts to disappear is even before it gets embedded into people’s arms,” she told me. “It’s where it gets embedded in products you don’t even think about being technology.”

Bespoke for All

Even wearables’ fans predict that, going forward, sensors won’t be the main technological force changing fashion. In fact, they say, some of the production and distribution processes that will come into play—customization, just-in-time manufacturing (whereby only a small amount of inventory is kept on hand), and online shopping—aren’t new at all. But the entrepreneurs I spoke with said that most clothing makers are lousy at maintaining tight supply lines and using data to predict demand, practices that are standard in other industries. In the short term, start-ups like Everlane, an online-only clothing retailer, hope to take advantage of this deficiency by better managing (or rather, minimizing) inventory. Things could change even more dramatically with a new kind of manufacturing—let’s call it “just after time.” If something isn’t made until you order it, it can be customized. And customization could lead to a totally different experience for all consumers, not just the technologically inclined.

Beasley, a former user-experience designer at Mozilla, recently spotted a business opportunity in the fact that few women think their clothes fit them well. “There’s an industry stat that women try on 11 pairs of jeans before they pick one,” she told me. “We don’t look at that many houses before we buy one.” So she founded and crowd-funded Qcut, a Portland, Oregon–based company that, instead of producing 10 standard sizes, will soon offer more than 400 different “patterns” of jeans. To be matched with the best possible pair, a woman will provide familiar measurements, list the jeans brand and size that fit her best, and explain which parts of most jeans don’t fit her well. Beasley has insourced, by creating her own factory, because she couldn’t find an apparel contractor capable of accepting an order for, say, 70 pairs of jeans a day, each one a different size. Instead, most contractors expected her to order jeans in batches of thousands.