The revolutionary high-tech suit you wouldn't be seen dead wearing
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The $12 Zozosuit promises to bring custom-made fashion to mainstream shoppers.
Photo: Nico Perez/ The Telegraph Media Group
Never mind ice-cream pastels or selvedge denim. The outfit I’m squeezing myself into in an empty boardroom in Tokyo is, apparently, the mother of all Japanese fashion trends: it is black, shiny and completely skin-tight, stretching unforgivingly from neck to toes, and it’s covered in white polka dots. Once dressed, I feel like an unglamorous cross between a ninja and a dalmatian – yet if its creators are to be believed, this slinky black number could revolutionise the global fashion industry.
It’s called the Zozosuit – comprising lightweight leggings and a top – and it has a purpose far more inspired than it may appear.
The name is derived from the Japanese word sozo, which means creation and imagination. The suit itself is covered with roughly 300 high-tech sensors (the polka dots) and, when linked up with a smartphone app, can capture dozens of precise body measurements. Rather than visiting a shop or browsing a website to buy new clothes, shoppers just pull on their Zozosuit, open the Zozo app on their smartphone, and do a very slow twirl in front of their phone, while it takes a series of 12 photographs measuring 24 parts of their body. These measurements can then be used to buy jeans, T-shirts, business suits and other clothes direct from the app that are custom-made to their exact size.
If the suit catches on, the implications for the fashion industry will be enormous. After decades of arranging garments into rigid sizing systems, digitally bespoke clothing would throw these restrictions out of the window. And imagine for one blissful moment a world where you don’t need to squash into a tiny changing room with glaring lighting and unflattering mirrors, and squish yourself into off-the-peg clothes that never quite fit. Then there are the benefits for the retailers: reduced return shipping costs, fewer storage requirements and, ultimately, less waste.
In the first 10 hours after the Zozosuit launched in Japan last November, roughly 230,000 orders were placed. Since then, there have been more than a million. The company behind it, giant e-commerce fashion site Zozotown, says it expects to distribute up to 10 million suits by next March, not entirely unrealistic given that Zozosuit has launched in 72 countries, including Australia.
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