Music to your Rears
Americas
The TimesJanuary 13, 2006
It's music to your rears — the latest hip accessory
From James Bone in New York
IS THAT a gun in your pocket or are you just twiddling your iPod? Levi Strauss & Co is updating its classic blue jeans with a built-in docking station and controls for Apple’s ubiquitous digital music player.
NI_MPU('middle');Levi’s new RedWire DLX line of jeans, due to go on sale this autumn at more than $200 (£113) a pair, is just the most dramatic example yet of the trend towards iPod-compatible clothing, which began with haute couture and ski gear.
Fashion houses started offering designer iPod carrying cases shortly after its launch in 2001. Two years later, the outdoors company Burton Snowboards introduced what it called the first iPod-compatible waterproof snowboarding jacket.
Last year, the Los Angeles-based Kenpo launched men’s jackets featuring iPod controls on the sleeve.
Cars are also being redesigned to accommodate the popular music player as it becomes ever more integrated into everyday life, with 42 million sold to date. An estimated 40 per cent of cars sold in America this year will be equipped for iPod use.
The new high-tech Levi’s are a far cry from the original blue jeans invented by Levi Strauss, a 19th-century Bavarian immigrant, for miners during the California Gold Rush.
The jeans will come with special side pocket designed to conceal the bulge of an iPod, and equipped with a built-in retractable headphone to prevent tangled wires.
The music player will dock to a wired red ribbon so that users can take it out of their pocket to check the screen without disconnecting.
But the most sophisticated feature is the joystick remote control that will be built into the watch pocket to allow wearers to play, pause, track forward or back and adjust the volume on their iPods without having to remove them from their pockets.
The market for the new blue jeans will be tech-savvy hipsters, not the cowboys once associated with America’s national dress.
“In designing the jeans, we considered both function and fashion — the result is a uniquely functional — yet stylish — great-fitting jean,” Robert Hanson, Levi’s US brand president, said. Steve Jobs, the Apple chief executive, told an industry conference this week that the company had sold 14 million iPods in the fourth quarter of last year.
) , with violence and crime such a widespread thing in society...it's hard to imagine now but I"m sure electronics in clothes will play a much more significant role than alot of people initially thought...just like mobile phones, we'll one day be saying 'I don't know how I ever lived without...'
