Skip to main content

Cosmecuticals: The trigger to an injection of innovation in fashion to come?



A recent post posits that the time for Men in the Western world to give up the embrace of the beard is nigh. The author of that article probably hasn't noticed something interesting about the last 20 years of fashions evolution.

It is safe to say that starting around the turn of the century we haven't created any fundamentally novel innovations in fashion. Everything is some type of remix of what came before...I see this clearly when I walk down a street in Brooklyn or Manhattan or the Bronx.

Different people freely wearing what ever style era clothing they feel comfortable with, there is no clear distinction to clothing of 2015 as distinct from clothing of 2010 as distinct from clothing going back I'd say to about 2005. 10 years of relentless remixing of what came before rather than anything really new.

thick tie or skinny tie, fitted shirts or loose shirts, skinny jeans or bell bottoms...just walk through Williamsburg to see what the hipsters are wearing.

Everything. From every Era.

Over here some guy wearing plad!

Over there some girl in a hoop skirt.

Over here some guy in baggy 90's like grunge jeans.

Over there some girl in super colorful tights.

Same with hair and makeup...tons of mixing. thick eye brow on one girl, pencil brow on another sitting next to her on the train. Big 80's hair on one girl , next to short pixie crop from 90's (or mid 60's if you paid attention) on another girl. Now I am sure that depending on where you are population density varies the variety of fashion forms that can be found (a small town is likely to have very homogeneous fashion trends) but it is clear that the trend in large cities has moved toward any style as the norm, a rainbow mix of fashion from eras going back to Victorian times in some cases.

It's all rather fascinating ...I wonder if this is just a intermediate period before some sudden break into something completely unique and different emerges....possibly enabled by radical injection of technology into our fashion?

As I've written in the cosmecuticals chapter in the Future of Business book, the ability to change our hair texture and color will be a huge industry that there is a ton of demand to embrace, interesting novelty will be possible that is currently not possible once we can modify those genes in various non natural ways...and those will shape what designers come up with to compliment the new combinations of humanity that we'll be providing them as inspiration.

So that's my bet....that we are just at a point before a state transition occurs as enabled by this technology to come. Links: http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2014/02/cosmecuticals-are-closer.html http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2014/07/tyras-cloudy-fashion-crystal-ball.html

Comments

Anonymous said…
Come chat about gene editing on the google group DIYBIO!

Popular posts from this blog

the attributes of web 3.0...

As the US economy continues to suffer the doldrums of stagnant investment in many industries, belt tightening budgets in many of the largest cities and continuous rounds of lay offs at some of the oldest of corporations, it is little comfort to those suffering through economic problems that what is happening now, has happened before. True, the severity of the downturn might have been different but the common factors of people and businesses being forced to do more with less is the theme of the times. Like environmental shocks to an ecosystem, stresses to the economic system lead to people hunkering down to last the storm, but it is instructive to realize that during the storm, all that idle time in the shelter affords people the ability to solve previous or existing problems. Likewise, economic downturns enable enterprising individuals and corporations the ability to make bold decisions with regard to marketing , sales or product focus that can lead to incredible gains as the economic

How many cofactors for inducing expression of every cell type?

Another revolution in iPSC technology announced: "Also known as iPS cells, these cells can become virtually any cell type in the human body -- just like embryonic stem cells. Then last year, Gladstone Senior Investigator Sheng Ding, PhD, announced that he had used a combination of small molecules and genetic factors to transform skin cells directly into neural stem cells. Today, Dr. Huang takes a new tack by using one genetic factor -- Sox2 -- to directly reprogram one cell type into another without reverting to the pluripotent state." -- So the method invented by Yamanaka is now refined to rely only 1 cofactor and b) directly generate the target cell type from the source cell type (skin to neuron) without the stem like intermediate stage.  It also mentions that oncogenic triggering was eliminated in their testing. Now comparative methods can be used to discover other types...the question is..is Sox2 critical for all types? It may be that skin to neuron relies on Sox2

AgilEntity Architecture: Action Oriented Workflow

Permissions, fine grained versus management headache The usual method for determining which users can perform a given function on a given object in a managed system, employs providing those Users with specific access rights via the use of permissions. Often these permissions are also able to be granted to collections called Groups, to which Users are added. The combination of Permissions and Groups provides the ability to provide as atomic a dissemination of rights across the User space as possible. However, this granularity comes at the price of reduced efficiency for managing the created permissions and more importantly the Groups that collect Users designated to perform sets of actions. Essentially the Groups serve as access control lists in many systems, which for the variable and often changing environment of business applications means a need to constantly update the ACL’s (groups) in order to add or remove individuals based on their ability to perform cert