“Standing Out While Blending In:” Learning from Experts about Designing Fashionable Wearable Experiences

This study examines fashionability in computational fashion wearables (CFWs) through the reflective accounts of ten academic researcher–designers. While wearables are often studied for technical functions, fashionability, a key to adoption and sustained use, has received less attention. Using semi-structured interviews, we captured designers’ reflections-on-action as they revisited their own prototypes and surfaced forms of tacit, practice-based knowledge that are difficult to access through conventional user studies. Reflexive thematic analysis generated five themes: Desirable Friction, Contextual and Sub-Cultural Relevance, Symbiotic Sensory Envelopes, Narrative Social Performance, and Adaptive Longevity and Circularity. These themes reposition CFWs not as seamless devices but as expressive, situated, and evolving interfaces that mediate sensory, social, and cultural experience. Our findings contribute to fashion theory and HCI by showing how designers mobilize friction, context, sensory depth, and temporality as design resources. We conclude with actionable directions for embodied prototyping, multisensory calibration, narrative staging, and modular longevity.