Thad Starner, a student at the the MIT Media Laboratory, started wearing a self-made custom computer device in 1993. He would eventually graduate with a thesis titled "Wearable Computing and Contextual Awareness". At roughly the same time Daniel Siewiorek at Carnegie Mellon University designed wearable computing devices, mainly for the military, such as the VuMan3. In 1994 Steve Mann, a student at the MIT Media Lab, started experimenting with wearable devices, which years later will make him the hero of the documentary "Cyberman" (2001). In 1998 Mann built the first smartwatch, a watch that ran Linux. In 1994 DARPA and the US Army funded a project called "Land Warrior" to design and make the clothing of the soldier of the future. This project was assigned to Exponent, a Palo Alto-based engineering firm with roots in Stanford University. In 1997 Carnegie Mellon Univ, the MIT and Georgia Tech organized the first IEEE International Symposium on Wearables Computers.

Then came the pioneers of smart clothes. In 1998 Sundaresan Jayaraman's team at Georgia Tech developed the first version of the "Wearable Motherboard", a smart shirt, and Finland's Clothing+ (aka Mikko Malmivaara) developed a heart-rate sensing shirt. In 2000 Reima commercialized Clothing+'s "Smart Shout", a body belt for hands-free mobile phone communications, and SoftSwitch (England) introduced a fabric-control keypad to incorporate audio communications and heating systems into jackets for winter sports. In 2000 a collaboration between Phillips and Levi resulted in the first wearable electronic garment that one could actually buy, the ICD+ jacket, that incorporates a mobile phone and an MP3 music player. In 2002 an MIT Media Lab alumna, artist Maggie Orth, founded International Fashion Machines (IFM) to make digital interactive textiles. In 2003 Burton introduced the Amp Jacket, a snowboarding jacket incorporating an iPod. In 2004 German chipmaker Infineon introduced another smart jacket with a mobile phone and an MP3 player and Los Angeles-based Vivometrics launched its smart shirt "LifeShirt". Adidas demonstrated its "self-adapting" shoes and North Face unveiled a "self-heating" jacket. In 2006 Eleksen (England) launched a wireless fabric keyboard. In 2006 Sensatex (Maryland), borrowing technology from Georgia Tech that was funded by DARPA for the Land Warrior program, introduced its SmartShirt, a shirt with fiber-optic wires that are knit into the clothing and that monitors the person's movement, heart rate, and breathing rate in real time.

There are two forces at work. One comes from the traditional apparel industry: they think that people will be willing to pay more for clothes if the clothes contain some embedded electronics. Today we are used to buy T-shirts for a few dollars. The profit for the companies are very small. Tomorrow we may be willing to spend ten times more for a T-shirt that also has solar panels and WiFi connectivity. The other force at work is the computer industry, that has moved from the giant room-size computer to the home computer and then to the portable computer and then to the smartphone that we carry in our pocket. The next logical step is a computer that we wear all day long just like we wear a shirt all day long. How many smartphones do you own? Presumably, just one. How many shirts do you own? Ten? Tweenty? Fifty? That multiplies the size of the market by 10, 20, 50...

In 2004 Microsoft launched a smartwatch, that Bill Gates in person promoted as the future: it was one of Microsoft's worst failures. The problem was that the smartwatch came out before the Apple iPhone, when the smartphone was still a weird and expensive product, mostly for business people. Microsoft was asking people to jump from the smartphone to the wearable smartwatch but people were still not sure that the smartphone was a good idea. The smartwatch was resurrected a few years laater in Silicon Valley. In 2011 Silicon Valley-based WIMM Labs (acquired in 2013 by Google) introduced the Wimm One smartwatch. 2012 and 2013 saw the debut of mass-market smartwatches such as the Samsung Galaxy Gear and the Sony SmartWatch, both powered by Android, and the Pebble smartwatch. The latter, introduced by Palo Alto-based Eric Migicovsky's garage startup, set a new record ($10 million) in Kickstarter funding, a record beaten later that year by Laurent LePen's Omate for its TrueSmart smartwatch (LePen lives in China but the company was based in Silicon Valley). In 2014 Google introduced the Android Wear platform, and the first Wear-enabled smartwatches came to the market: Motorola's Moto 360, Sony's Smartwatch 3, LG's G Watch and Samsung's Gear Live. Apple introduced its Apple Watch in April 2015, and this quickly became the bestselling smartwatch in the world.

The resurrection of the smartwatch was also due indirectly to the success of Fitbit. San Francisco-based Fitbit is really the company that made "wearables" a reality when in 2011 it introduced the Ultra. Fitbit now offers a full line of fitness-tracking devices and it has a virtually infinite number of competitors, like Jawbone, Misfit and Moov. In 2012 Nike launched its FuelBand.

The next step was to put intelligence in the eyeglasses. In 2013 Google Glass captured the headlines: it coupled a display with a computer and provided the kind of functionalities offered by Internet-enabled consumer electronics. Thad Starner was the mastermind behind Glass, a project largely implemented by Greg Priest-Dorman at Georgia Tech. It was another embarrassing failure by a big corporation. In this case the problem was "social stigma": many people resented the nerds wearing the Google Glass, which were nicknamed "glassholes" (a bad word that combines "glass" and "asshole"). Imagine a complete stranger who turns on his camera in front of you and films everything that you do. You would probably get upset. That's what Google Glass users (the "glassholes") were doing. And this was particularly annoying in the Bay Area, where people were discussing government surveillance. By coincidence, the Google Glass came out at the same time that a government employee, Edward Snowden, revealed a vast government operation to spy on its own citizens and on foreign allies. Google Glass came out right in the middle of a big scandal about "surveillance". From a marketing viewpoint, it was a really stupid idea to introduce a mass-market product for surveillance just when there was a scandal about surveillance. Google Glass failed, but today it has powerful successors: smart glasses that offer augmented reality like Meta Pro, Epson Moverio BT-200 and Atheer One. Google Glass and Moverio BT-200 are the vanguard of the "smart" wearables: devices that can run third-party apps.

By this time, a lot of startups were getting into the fashion industry: Fitbit partnered with Tory Burch, a boutique specializing in women's designer apparel, Google partnered with industrial designer Isabelle Olsson for Google Glass, and Apple hired Angela Ahrendts, former chief executive of luxury British retailer Burberry. In 2014 Tommy Hilfiger launched clothes with solar cells so you can charge a smartphone or your wearables while they are in your pocket. Similarly, the designer Pauline van Dongen launched the "Wearable Solar" collection of clothes, for example a solar shirt that contains 120 solar-cells. I am quite convinced that wearables have only two choices: either they become fashionable or they become invisible. Wearing something ugly is ok for the first year or two of a novelty, but you quickly look really stupid wearing something ugly when it is no longer a novelty.

In 2016 Snapchat introduced its Spectacles, that were simply a more limited version of Google Glass (10 seconds videos only) but much cheaper and with a more ordinary look, almost the counterbalance to Google Glass' alien-futuristic look.

The fusion of 3D printing and wearables is a big opportunity for the fashion industry. There are two main components to a product: one is the function and the other one is the "look". When a product is first introduced, we care mostly for the function: it has to do what we buy it for. But later in the years we trust that the function works, and the "look" becomes more important. That's why the fashion industry is so rich. Now that 3D printing is merging with wearable technology, the world of fashion smells a big opportunity. The first major fashion designer to use 3D-printed clothes was Iris van Herpen in 2010, followed by a fellow Dutch designer, Borre Akkersdijk, who 3D-printed garments with embedded electronics. In 2014 a New York architect, Francis Bitonti, 3D-printed a nylon gown based on a mathematical formula, and the following year designed a digital jewelry collection. In 2015 the media was full of news like this. Christophe Guberan, Carlo Clopath and Skylar Tibbits from the MIT 3D printed a "reactive" shoe that changes shape dynamically to provide maximum comfort. A company from Vancouver, Wiivv, launched a service of custom 3D printed insoles for shoes. New Balance 3D printed a high-performance running shoe. London designer Julian Hakes 3D-printed shoes for Olympic gold medal winner Amy Williams. Italian designer Paola Tognazzi 3D-printed garments that changes dynamically as the wearer moved. Behnaz Farahi in California 3D-printed a "helmet" that changes shape in response to the wearer's brainwaves. Yet another Dutch designer, Lidewij van Twillert, 3D-printed lingerie. Nasim Sehat, who lives in Shanghai, 3D-printed extravagant eyewear. 3D printing is reinventing the tailor in the digital age.

And now the wearable technology is also meeting the Internet of Things. In 2014 San Francisco-based Logbar introduced the multi-function ring that can be used to control home appliances.

Exoskeletons are a particular type of wearable that has a long history of its own. In 2000 DARPA decided to fund a project at UC Berkeley's Robotics and Human Engineering Laboratory, to build technology capable of restoring mobility to paralyzed people. These "exoskeletons", named BLEEXes (Berkeley Lower Extremity Exoskeletons), were artificial legs that helped a disabled person not only to walk but also to carry a heavy load. The first BLEEX was introduced in 2003. In 2005 the director of that laboratory, Homayoon Kazerooni, founded a company, Berkeley ExoWorks (later renamed Berkeley Bionics and then Ekso Bionics), that in 2010 introduced eSuit, a computer-controlled suit to make paralyzed people walk. At the MIT the leader of exoskeleton research is Hugh Herr, who lost both his legs in a terrible accident, and who started building his exoskeletons with the computer-controlled knee of 2003. In 2009 Cyberdyne in Japan had already introduced a similar product, HAL 5, the creature of Yoshiyuki Sankai. A solitary inventor, Monty Reed in Seattle, has been working for many years on his Lifesuit exoskeleton, that he personally uses at the yearly Saint Patrick's Day race, and another solitary inventor, Steve Jacobsen in Utah, has been working for years on his project XOS, that is being tested by the since 2008. In 2012 Claire Lomas, a paralyzed woman, made the news because she completed the London Marathon using the exoskeleton ReWalk built by quadriplegic inventor Amit Goffer in Israel, which is also the only one available commercially. In 2014 Lockheed unveiled Fortis that is being tested by the navy of the USA; and that year the World Cup of soccer was symbolically started with a kick by a paraplegic, Juliano Pinto, wearing a mind-controlled exoskeleton designed by Miguel Nicolelis at Duke University with the collaboration of universities in Switzerland, Germany and Brazil (the "Walk Again Project"). In 2016 SRI International spun off Superflex, a new startup of exoskeletons for helping the disabled and the elderly, another byproduct of a DARPA-funded project to enhance soldier performance. In 2016 Kazerooni founded another startup, SuitX, to commercializea new exoskeleton to help paraplegics to walk.