ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to deepen theoretical understandings of wearable technology by drawing upon the resources of Frankfurt School critical theory to explore wearable technologies and smart garments from the perspective of personalisation, understood in terms of the individual's capacity to modify aspects of their life in line with their own desires and contexts. It examines how personalisable aspects of wearable technology and smart garments can be considered as empowering and emancipatory, on the one hand, or dominating and repressive, on the other. The chapter reconceptualises Walter Benjamin's concept of the 'aura' surrounding artworks in terms of notions of personalisation in the context of wearable technologies and smart garments, and in so doing salvages important ideas from the thought of both Adorno and Benjamin within a wider, Habermasian framework. Personalised fashion choice can therefore be seen as a potential source of empowerment, although Habermas also emphasises the unavoidability of the imperatives of economics and state power.
