Jony Ive Talks Fashion and Apple Products in Vogue Interview

Apple watch edition packaging 03

From the very beginning, the Apple dream was “to make technology personal,” explains Jony Ive, the company’s design chief, while speaking with Vogue. “In what we do,” adds Apple CEO Tim Cook, “design is crucial, as it is in fashion.” Apple stepped closer to that dream with the launch of the Apple Watch:

“Nine years ago, the iPhone didn’t exist, and the most personal product we had was too big to carry around with you,” he explains. “The technology is at last starting to enable something that was the dream of the company from the very beginning—to make technology personal. So personal that you can wear it.”

Following the Watch’s official launch, Apple made a bold move: for the first time in 40 years, it collaborated with a fashion house to design a product. The result was the Apple Watch Hermès.

“That watch,” says Ive, “is the result of two temperamentally, philosophically aligned companies’ deciding to make something together.”

Actually, Apple’s products, like the iPhone and now the Apple Watch, have become fashion accessories and are so connected that Tom Ford, who previously used to outlaw cell phones at his fashion shows, now designs with these products in mind. “I even created silver and gold pocket chains for the Apple Watch,” he says.

Apple is sponsoring an exhibition entitled “Manus x Machina,” which explores the relationship between fashion and technology. Here is how Jony Ive teased the exhibition: “Both the hand and the machine can produce things with exquisite care or with no care at all,” says Ive. “But it’s important to remember that what was seen at one time as the most sophisticated technology eventually becomes tradition. There was a time when even the metal needle would have been seen as shocking and profoundly new.”

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