WIRED & Branch’s smartwatch concept blends classic design with modern technology. Image via WIRED.

For WIRED’s January 2014 issue, the publisher reached out to product-design company Branch to conceptualize wearable gadgets that sensibly brings together fashion and function. WIRED’s Cliff Kuang writes:

The watch and glasses are meant to be fashionable enough that the technology is a bonus rather than the big sell. That’s important. If we’re ever going to want to wear computers on our bodies, they’ll have to be stylish enough that we’d wear them even if they weren’t computers.

That, as my colleague Bill Wasik points out in his essay, is the key thing about fashion that tech companies fail to understand. It’s the difference between glasses so cool you want them even if you don’t have bad eyesight and, well, Google Glass, which you couldn’t pay most people to wear.

Yesterday evening, John Gruber said something similar in regards to the new Pebble Steel.

If Pebble, or any “smartwatch” maker, wants to succeed in the real world, they need to make watches that look good compared to any watch, not just “looks good compared to other even uglier smartwatches”.