Desire Machines: How wearables like the Apple Watch tap into the language of fashion 

If you flip through computer magazines from the 1970s, you'll see pictures of ladies posing next to large computing equipment, such as modems, PCs, and printers.

In this era, ads clumsily resorted to positioning models next to these new gadgets in an effort to introduce an element of sex appeal because the allure of computers and technology wasn't yet strong enough to draw people in on its own two feet. Sex could sell everything, even 1200 baud modems as well as vehicles and clothing.

Although there is a huge visual difference between those awkward advertisements and the ones of today, in some respects the marketing of technology has completed a circle. The hardware in today's wearable and connected gadget advertisements is insignificant in comparison to the promises of what they can do for your life, health, and even sex life. Advertising is also growing more emotive and personal as technology progressively takes the lead in dating, love, and health.

Towards the future

However, pause for a second. Dust off the old, grey box in the attic, take the monitor out, and carry it downstairs while holding it in both hands. That's right, 1995. The world then was less complicated. Your computer had a beige colour. It was definitely not sexy. You needed a project to work on at home, therefore it was sitting on your desk. You chose it because it featured a CD-ROM and 4MB of RAM.

In 2023, there is an advertisement for the Apple Watch Hermès above your head. The watch is wrapped around the wrist of a woman who leans her arm up against her baggy white shirt. She has some hair near her lips that has fallen out. You are presented with the computer on her arm in a completely different way. Not even as a computer is it marketed. It is wearable, an adjective without a corresponding noun.

The Hermès advertisement doesn't overwhelm you with details because there aren't any; instead, it draws your attention to the strap, the woman, and how you will appear after purchasing the watch. This technology is being promoted solely on the basis of how beautiful and alluring it appears to be.

The emphasis is more on the matches between technology and lifestyle, such as between smartbands and attractiveness and smartwatches and health, compared to the PC advertisements of the 1990s and even the smartphones of recent years.

sex allure

I had a conversation with Leslie Hallam, a psychologist at Lancaster University who teaches a course on the psychology of advertising. Hallam informs me that the change in technology advertising involves more than just a few trendy commercials.

Desire Machines: How wearables like the Apple Watch tap into the language of fashion 

"Millennial narcissism," the sex appeal of oneself, is likely to drive a sexiness, not just of devices but increasingly of software and especially, interfaces, as avatars increasingly become the means by which individuals show themselves to the world," Hallam told me. This is in addition to a simple display of wealth, [which] in itself is imbued with sex appeal.

The sex appeal of the machines we will have sex with instead of the sexiness of the ones we are familiar with now will be the next big thing in this field.

Smartwatches to sex robots may sound like a far-fetched transition, but it is not altogether unrealistic. The author Zadie Smith claims in her introduction to JG Ballard's 1973 novel Crash that Ballard's well-known work about a group of people who are sexually thrilled by vehicle accidents subverts the world that is shown to us via advertising. Smith claims that we are offered a world in which unreasonable associations are established between "speed and self-esteem, leather interiors and family happiness" in vehicle commercials. Ballard insists on a different, harsher set of links in Crash. It capitalises on the suggested linkages between technology and desire.

How might Ballard's novel adapt to the 21st century if the car—the dominant technology of the late 20th century—is Ballard's mode? Technology today is more about distributed devices than ever before. In contrast to Hallam's suggestion, the convergence of humans and machines is now about bodies and a network of connected avatars, such as our Facebook selfie, Tinder persona, and LinkedIn profile picture, as well as devices strapped to our wrists, sitting in our pockets, or displayed on our screens.

The gadgets we wear are starting to incorporate our romantic life. A Tinder smartwatch app utilises your heart rate to match you with potential partners, and there are waves of apps that search for lovers via devices in our pockets. There are also app-controlled sex toys. The current era is more like a tangle when it comes to technology and our bodies.

What do we discuss when we discuss technology?

Let's go backwards a little bit from the cyber-sexual abyss. The distributed nature of the Internet of Things and wearables places less emphasis on the things themselves and more on how they interact with us as physical people, where desktop computers focused on the attributes of one specific object—their ports, power, and upgradeability. As a result, our conception of the word "computer" is radically altered.

(Above: a commercial for fitness trackers from Jawbone)

With Apple Watch Hermès, the focus is on style and sex appeal, and even the way it alerts us when we have a text or a phone call feels a little personal — a gentle tap on the wrist as opposed to a frenzied buzz in the pocket.

With a gadget like a Fitbit or Jawbone, our attention is focused on physical fitness and health. If you watch the advertisement for a Jawbone fitness tracker, the gadget and the app fade into the background. Instead, our focus is on the aspirational lifestyle choices that come with purchasing that technology, such as the healthy breakfast, the morning run, and the sound sleep.

Dominik Donocik, a design technologist at Native Design, informed me that the way a technology is discussed greatly depends on what its initial goal was. "Consider the distinction between essential life-saving technologies and prestige symbols. When something suddenly does both, as with contemporary fitness trackers, that is when it gets intriguing.

"New types of experiences are largely made possible by the seamlessness of data collection and response across many devices and formats. I believe there will be more, but only time will tell what that may be.

(Above: LG Watch Urbane advertisement)

Tech body

In general, we are more interested in what a computer can do for our lifestyle than what it can do for our work habits, and this is something that advertisers are well aware of as evidenced by advertisements like this one.

The language of technology advertising is evolving. Over many years, personal computing created its own dialect, one based on specifications, features, and capabilities. That language is going further than it ever has before, away from the product and towards what it signifies for our look, with the introduction of wearables and the Internet of Things.

Smartphones are embracing this new focus as they battle function saturation, which leaves little to distinguish one phone from another in terms of capabilities. At the end of the day, these are just rectangles with brilliant screens, and when internal capabilities fail to attract customers, firms must struggle to stand out through advertising and design. This entails deviating from the advertising language of smartwatches and moving into the realms of fashion, sport, and luxury, all of which heavily emphasise attractiveness and sex appeal.

The new generation of fashion-conscious smartwatches shifts that notion of want towards aesthetics and sex appeal, where our desktop PC from 1995 was designed to be desirable in terms of technical competence. In a broad sense, this represents a transition from work to pleasure, but it also shows how computers is permeating more and more areas of our life, moving from offices to our bodies.

If there is a shift towards the emotional appeal of technology, it will mean a significant shift in how computers are interwoven into our daily lives rather than just sitting on our desks.From the office to the living room, our automobiles, our bedrooms, and from our pockets to our wrists, they have steadily creeped in.

Thanks for Reading:
No matter who you are, what you do, or how much importance you place on looks, the advantages of the convergence of Desire Machines: How wearables like the Apple Watch tap into the language of fashion are clear. Either join the movement and welcome the future, or you'll fall behind.

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Desire Machines: How wearables like the Apple Watch tap into the language of fashion