is fueling a radical change in fashion.

Wearable technology, data, automation,

and lab-grown materials will have a major impact

on what people will be wearing in the future.

We are just seeing a pace of change which is frightening,

but it's also incredibly exciting for the future of fashion.

Since the birth of sewing and weaving,

technology has always led developments in fashion.

The Industrial Revolution mechanized manufacturing,

enabling mass production.

In the 1960s, synthetic materials like polyester took off,

creating new possibilities for fashion.

Now, the convergence of new technologies

is opening up previously unimaginable possibilities.

Self-styled fashion scientist Dr. Amanda Parkes

is in the vanguard of the industry's latest reinvention.

She heads up innovation at FT Labs,

a venture capital firm that invests

primarily in disruptive fashion tech startups.

The future of fashion is a mixture

of combining new material technologies

with all-new forms of business models.

Among these startups, the race is on

to find the next generation of renewable materials

that can be grown in a lab.

So one example of this is Bolt Threads,

which creates lab-grown spider silk.

Traditional silk is produced

from insect larvae that form cocoons,

most commonly silkworms.

But rather than relying on these insects,

Bolt Threads is creating silk in test tubes.

So they've taken the DNA out of a spider,

just the part of the DNA that creates silk,

and transformed that into a microorganism, into a yeast.

And you can think of it like brewing beer.

So as they feed the yeast, as it brews,

it creates silk protein.

Bio-fabricated materials remove the need

for animals and insects, and they are a more sustainable

and efficient way of producing raw materials.

You're able to speed up this process,

put it into a controlled environment

in a laboratory, and have a lot more control

over what you're growing and how.

Other companies are creating

leather alternatives.

Rather than using animals, scientists are creating

bio-fabricated materials from pineapple leaves

and even mushrooms.

Another example is a mycelium-based leather.

So the root structure of strains of mushrooms

can be grown synthetically in a lab,

but they're all-natural fibers.

When you think about the convergence

of what technology can do with this

in terms of the future development of materiality,

and so we really have the opportunity

to make huge global change by changing

the means of production of materials.

The convergence of fashion and technology

also provides opportunities to transform

not just clothes but the people wearing them.

Myant is a company that's pioneering

the creation of clothing that can monitor your every move.

We call it textile computing.

Some other people call it smart fabric.

Essentially, it's an interactive fabric

that could sense data from you.

So-called smart fabrics are being touted

as the next frontier of wearable technology.

Yarns are paired with electronic sensors

so that essential data can be captured from the human body.

This is a men's boxer.

You can see the sensors embedded

on the band and on the body.

Within seconds, it will start transmitting your ECG,

temperature, your movement, your respiration.

To create clothing that can monitor

the wearer's health and fitness,

Myant has brought together teams of people

that have not traditionally worked under the same roof.

We have the advanced research engineers and scientists

at nano scale technology, electrical engineers,

mechatronic engineers, software AI.

We wanted them to interface and to interact

with fashion designers, with pattern makers.

Smart fabrics could radically change

consumers' relationships with the clothes they wear.

But as technology increases the pace of change,

how can the industry keep track

of what consumers really want?

Francesca Muston is the head of retail at WGSN,

the world's leading fashion forecasting agency.

We are just seeing a pace of change which is frightening,

but it's also incredibly exciting for the future of fashion.

The staff here use big data

to analyze political, social, and environmental trends

in order to predict the hot new looks of tomorrow.

If we think back over the last five years

at how the fashion industry has changed,

think about the way that we shop

compared to the way that we used to shop.

Technology is driving an explosion

in consumer choice, as well as the bewildering array

of clothing design and creation.

To keep up, the industry is also turning to technology.

We are for sure in the midst of a digital revolution;

AI, the idea of machine learning and big data.

How do we start to sort of synthesize

all of these new technologies and start

to make sense of it, both in terms of industry

but also in terms of the consumer?

Machine-learning technologies

are now central to fashion forecasting, quickly spotting

patterns among the ever-growing volume of data.

From bio-technology to demographic shifts,

predicting trends is no longer an art;

it's becoming a science.