Will Trends in Technology Echo Fashion Life Cycles?

The funny thing about trends in fashion is the way we can live through them, get a number of years beyond them, regurgitate it and make what was once inherently uncool very cool.

Take a look at these guys:

The dual-shade spectacles, skinny tie and over-the-top patterned dress shirt scream out hipster to me. In 1984, these guys were meant to scream dweeb in the movie Revenge of the Nerds.

Then we have the matronly Christmas sweater. What we may have loathed to wear as youngsters - turtle necks with boughs of holly on them, dangly wreath earrings and wooly knits with reindeer on them - are now ironic. They’re also the hottest item at the charity shop this time of year.

(Yes, that’s yours truly on the left.)

This idea that we’re recycling ideas with a sometimes decade-long lag period makes me wonder: what in our technology product cycle of new-old-obsolete could be reinvented now to be the new improved thing?

Some things were always cool - vinyl records, first gen iPods, and one could argue, typewriters. But are we on the verge of the old-to-obsolete product cycle in any technologies of the past 20 years where we may be about to see some obscure resurgence? Here’s looking at you, fax machine…

We’re in an age where technology and fashion are colliding. We’ve got t-shirts that charge mobiles, dresses that stream tweets and gloves with conductive threading to activate touch screens in the cold. More and more, fashion and technology are catching up with each other. I wonder if this trend in fashion will echo for aging technology devices.