A whole new meaning to “power dressing”
Business Futurist | Foresight Strategist
If you’ve read this far, something probably connected.
Maybe it put words to something you’d been sensing but couldn’t quite land. Maybe it made something complicated feel clearer. Maybe it unsettled a position you thought you’d settled.
Good. That’s where this work lives.
Not forecasting. Not scenarios at 2050. Not more noise. What’s already moving. The shifts most organisations can’t yet see, name, or understand the full weight of. What it means. What to do about it while it’s still a possibility, not a problem. Short term and long.
Morris Misel has been doing this for 30 years across 160 industries, with boards, executive teams, and leadership groups in Australia and internationally. More than 2,800 engagements. Over a million people a year through conferences, boardrooms, and media.
If you want more of this thinking while it’s still a signal, not a headline, subscribe to Immediate Futures.
If you want ongoing access to everything I do for clients, packaged for you, with direct access to me, join the Signal Room.
If you’re considering bringing this work into your conference, boardroom, or organisation, enquire here.
Choose Forward.
It signals a fundamental reframe, the human body as part of the energy grid rather than simply a consumer of it. Fabrics that harvest kinetic or thermal energy distribute power generation to the individual level. That has implications well beyond fashion: self-sufficient devices, off-grid capability, reduced dependency on fixed infrastructure. What counts as an energy source expands considerably.
Significantly. Devices designed around fixed charging cycles assume a plug-in world. If clothing can sustain a low-power charge, the design brief for wearables, hearing aids, health monitors, and small sensors changes. Battery capacity and recharge convenience stop being primary constraints. Product designers and electronics manufacturers need to rethink what portability actually means when the wearer becomes part of the power system.
Energy yield is the first challenge. Power generated by movement or body heat is modest enough for sensors, not yet sufficient for demanding devices. Durability through washing, wear, and environmental stress remains an engineering problem. Cost per unit is high relative to alternatives, and consumer adoption of clothing with embedded electronics requires a level of trust and convenience the category has not yet earned at mass market scale.
It is part of the same pattern. Solar on rooftops, batteries in homes, microgrids in communities, the direction of travel in energy has been toward distribution and local generation for years. Wearable power generation takes that logic to its smallest unit: the individual. It is not yet a mainstream energy solution, but it reinforces a structural trend away from the assumption that power must be delivered from a central source.
The sharpest question is whether this becomes a feature or a distinct category. Will power generation be one attribute among many in smart textiles, or will it define a separate product segment? Answers depend on energy yield improvements and regulatory clarity around embedded electronics in garments. Organisations building materials partnerships and testing use cases now will have a significant advantage over those waiting for the technology to prove itself commercially.
