I’ll confess something unfashionable: I wear an Apple Watch with vintage Ferragamo. My friends tease me about it constantly, and for years I half agreed with them, because most wearable tech looked like it was designed by someone who had never once gotten dressed with intention. A gadget strapped to a wrist is not an accessory. It’s an apology.
But 2023 changed my mind about where this is all going. This was the year tech companies finally started taking aesthetics seriously, and fashion started taking tech seriously, and the results stopped being embarrassing. Let me run through what actually mattered this year, and what I’d spend money on.
Smart Glasses Finally Look Like Glasses
The product that surprised me most this year came out of the Meta and Ray-Ban partnership. The second generation Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses launched in October, and here’s the thing: they just look like Wayfarers. Cameras, speakers, an AI assistant, livestreaming straight from your face, all hidden inside a frame people have trusted since the 1950s.
I tried a pair at a friend’s place in the Design District and the styling problem I expected simply wasn’t there. That’s the breakthrough. Not the specs, the invisibility. Compare that to Google Glass, which finally got discontinued for good this year after a decade of making everyone who wore it look like a hall monitor from the future. The lesson took ten years but it landed: nobody wants to wear technology. People want to wear glasses.
The Watch Grew Up, and the Ring Is Coming for It
The Apple Watch is still the default wearable, and the Series 9 that arrived in September added the double tap gesture, which feels like a small thing until you’re holding a cafecito in one hand and answering a call by tapping two fingers together. Apple keeps inching the device toward fashion legitimacy too, with the Hermès editions and endless band ecosystem doing a lot of the work. You can see the current lineup on Apple’s watch page, but my point is bigger than one brand: the smartwatch question is settled. It won.
The more interesting fight is happening on a different finger. Smart rings are the wearable I’m watching closest, because they solve the fashion problem by disappearing. The Oura ring tracks sleep, heart rate, and recovery from a band of titanium that reads as jewelry, not hardware. Half the wellness-obsessed women I follow wear one stacked between regular gold rings and you would never clock it. Rumors keep swirling that bigger players want into this category, and I believe them. Screenless is the future of tracking. My prediction: by 2025, rings quietly eat a big chunk of the fitness band market.
The Runway Got Genuinely Weird (Complimentary)
Fashion’s own experiments with tech this year went from gimmick to actual craft. The reference point is still Coperni spraying a dress onto Bella Hadid live at the Paris shows last fall, a moment I’ve rewatched an embarrassing number of times. This year the ideas kept coming. Anrealage sent out photochromic pieces that change color in UV light. And at Adobe’s conference in October, the Project Primrose dress shifted its entire surface pattern in real time, like wearing a screen that drapes.
Are these wearable in the buy-it-and-wear-it-to-brunch sense? Obviously not. But runway experiments are how materials research gets funded and noticed, and Vogue covered these moments with the same seriousness as any couture reveal, which tells you the wall between the two worlds is thinning. As an illustrator, I find fabric-as-display genuinely thrilling to draw. A garment that animates breaks every rule I learned about rendering texture.
The AI Pin and the Question Nobody Can Answer Yet
Then there’s Humane, the buzziest and strangest launch of the season. Earlier this month the company unveiled the Ai Pin, a small wearable that clips to your clothing, has no screen, projects onto your palm, and wants to replace your phone with an AI assistant. It even debuted on actual runway models at Coperni’s show in Paris back in September before anyone knew exactly what it was.
I am deeply unsure about this one, and I’ll tell you why as a fashion person rather than a tech person: a pin makes demands of an outfit. It needs a lapel, a sturdy fabric, a place to live. Brooches are wonderful precisely because they’re optional. A device that must be pinned to your chest every day is a styling constraint dressed up as freedom. I’d love to be wrong. I don’t think I’m wrong.
What I’d Actually Buy, and What I’d Skip
So where does that leave a normal woman with a finite budget and an outfit to think about? Here’s my honest scorecard as the year closes out.
Worth it: a smartwatch if you’ll genuinely use the health features, with the most classic band you can find. A smart ring if you care about sleep more than notifications. The Ray-Ban Metas if you were going to buy sunglasses anyway and the camera doesn’t spook you, though please be a decent human about recording people.
Skip for now: anything that requires explaining. The pin, the projector, the apps-on-your-face headsets coming next year. Apple’s Vision Pro, announced back in June, may well change everything eventually, but nobody is wearing a ski goggle to dinner in 2024, and I feel very safe writing that sentence.
The fusion of fashion and technology stopped being hypothetical this year. The good versions share one quality: they respect the outfit. Technology that demands you dress around it will always lose to technology that disappears into what you were already wearing. The companies that understand this are about to make a fortune.
The ones that don’t will keep making gadgets. And gadgets, darling, are not accessories.