What if….our clothes adjusted to always keep us at the most comfortable temperature?

Our clothing has evolved from skins to natural fiber fabrics to synthetic fabrics. We add layers and weight to be warmer; jettison layers and heavy fabrics when we want to be cooler. The changing external environment and our own internal heat (from increased activity or ‘hot flashes’) means that we may need to make changes to our clothing during the day or wake up during the night to throw off blankets. The basics of clothing have not really changed very much.

What if our clothing detected changes that indicated we were hot or cold and changed subtly to warm us up or release heat, perhaps even overtly cooling us? We might learn more detailed information about ourselves - as a population and as individuals - once we started experimenting with the new clothing. Maybe some of us prefer to be warmer than others…perhaps everyone instances of higher metabolism producing more heat but we have simply ignored the extra bit of warmth in the past because it was not significant enough to change clothes.

If we had the clothing to keep us at the temperature we preferred, would we stop heating and cooling our dwellings? That might imply that ‘clothing’ would cover us completely. Would it filter the air we breathed and the food we ate?

Would style of clothing be important enough that the technology would need to include the ability to shift into different ‘looks’? Would color be structural and thus be programmable? Would we choose to shimmer like butterfly wings or peacock feathers if we had that choice?