Cool Clothes Make the Geek

This month's Power Architecture challenge is to develop the most outlandish, outrageous chip-controlled clothing you can.

Do you remember the 1980s (outside of the context of VH-1's I Love the '80s?)? Here's one thing I remember from the 1980s -- mood shirts, shirts that changed colors based on temperature. The shirt would be a pastel shade, see, and then in response to heat, it would darken to, well, a darker version of the same pastel shade. I thought they were pretty nifty because, I mean, it was a shirt, but there was science involved! I loved science! And here was a scientific shirt!

I wanted one really badly, but my mom, who (I can't believe I'm about to type these words for publication in a public forum) made most of my clothing decisions for me, vetoed the idea presumably because they were too expensive or some reason like that.

Also, I think they may have only been for girls; my memory is kind of fuzzy on that part. Maybe it's for the best that my mom was still in the driver's seat when it came to my clothes at that point.

Anyhoo, the mood shirt wasn't the first intersection of high tech and high fashion (low fashion?). Synthetic fibers like nylon represented some of the most advanced technology of its day. But what we're interested in for this challenge is not necessarily the clothes that took smarts to build, but rather the garments with the smarts built in.