Clothing is the first human technology, underrepresented in the archeological records due to its limited durability. Taking from Marshall McLuhan’s idea of media technologies as extensions of the human body (McLuhan, Understanding Media), it is not far-fetched to view clothing as the paradigmatic exosomatic prosthesis - a wearable technology. What hampers this realization is the “softness” of textiles (Tripaldi, Parallel Minds) - they do not fit into the dominant cultural imagination of technology coded as either big humming machines or sleek, discreet, objects connected by wires and invisible electromagnetic waves. The things we wear simply seem to be too inconspicuous to fall under the category of “technology” proper. Yet, anthropology and the history of technological infrastructures provide ample evidence that being ordinary, everyday, or unassuming is exactly how excellent infrastructure manifests. In this respect, clothing is indeed one of human history's most pervasive and successful technologies.

Thinking about clothing as the ancestral technology of the human species unlocks a parallel history of technical evolution that does not begin only with fire, stones, or bone tools, but includes soft materials, textiles, and weaving. It brings technology closer to the communicative acts clothing has always been imbued with - signaling cultural and social identity, providing aesthetic and ceremonial ornamentation, communicating reproductive availability, and expressing individuality. Yet, the technological perspective on clothing also hints at a much more important aspect of wearables as functional gear - as tools of protection, supporting armatures of work and innovation, and provisions of accessories and technical augmentations to bodies. Clothing is unique to the human species, allowing expansion, migration, and travel to regions across the planet with diverse climate extremes. After all, the fundamentality of clothing’s functional dimension has been noted by Christian Dior himself in the principles of the New Look: “Without foundations,” - the silhouette-shaping garments and underwear - “there can be no fashion.”

Today, climate transformations and emerging technologies are changing the earth at unprecedented scales and speeds. Earthsuits insist that the shape and function of what we wear must respond to these changes. We aim to probe the history of wearables as technologies to imagine possible futures, speculating on augmented interactions with the ecosystems, atmospheres, infrastructures, and species around us. As the alterations of planetary ecosystems demand new functional interventions that begin with the body and its gear, clothing becomes the essential infrastructure of climate adaptation. Smart materials, wearable electronics, synthetic biology - follow the lineage of the Earthsuits’ paradigm- clothing always and already was a wearable technology that negotiates the threshold between the planet and the body.

As long as the echoes of Sun Ra’s voice keep reminding us that “space is the place,” we must always ask about the Earth’s place in outer space. Seeing the planet through the cosmic perspective enables us to position climate change as a planetary phenomenon that was conceptualized and discovered only thanks to technologies of sensing and modeling the Earth as a whole, starting with the first satellite and human-made pictures of the planet, and expanding way beyond the visible light to automated monitoring of infrared heat emissions or spectral analysis. While images such as the 1972 photograph of the Blue Marble (Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog) yield multiple contradictory interpretations, our choice is not to appeal to the one-worldism of the imagery’s early proponents, but to the importance of the position from where these images are taken: the void of outer space, which reminds us that the Earth with all its human and non-human inhabitants is also in space - out there - orbiting a star in a quiet corner of an unremarkable galaxy.

Separating the Earth from outer space faces the risk of undermining the core theoretical tenet of climate adaptation: to see the Earth as an exemplar of the larger astronomical category of habitable planets, and to understand human technological agency as being primarily oriented towards securing its close alignment with its planetary environment, thus maintaining the conditions of habitability. Only then it is possible to see the planet as the foundational layer of any design practice, fashion and wearables notwithstanding. If space is the final frontier, clothing is the first frontier, and this holds true especially when it comes to climate adaptation.

Earthsuits asks: “For what Earth do we design?” (Likavčan, Introduction to Comparative Planetology). The aim is to expand the scope of design, to focus on the interactions between physical bodies and environments as mediated by clothing and wearable technologies, to stretch the time frames of fashion, to focus on the entire operational system as a form of redistributive design. This design task turns out to be the groundwork for any meaningful climate adaptation. Just as spacesuits enable the fragile human body to inhabit the cosmic void, Earthsuits demonstrate how clothing and environments form a dynamic loop of enabling, modifying, filtering, conditioning, and transcending each other, leading to the renegotiation of the terms of their mutual dependence.

Historically, space agencies invested their research & development into micro-ecosystems so that humans could navigate unfamiliar and uninhabitable areas, developing systems for supporting air, water, communication, and waste circulation while separated from Earth’s atmosphere. Famously, the design of the NASA spacesuits was pioneered by women who worked at the Playtex underwear company, possessing precision sewing skills and material insights to develop flexible and robust isolated ecosystems, distinct from the hard metallic imaginaries of the space age. The design of these suits reflects a combination of innovative materials, small-scale cybernetics systems management, precision production, and technologically augmented interfaces that enabled humans to inhabit unfamiliar atmospheres and back to bases near and far (Nicholas de Monchaux, Spacesuit).

This iterative development in the complexity of spacesuits is matched by wearables and gear that has enabled humans to explore the environments on Earth not immediately hospitable to human life. Scuba gear and atmospheric diving suits for the deep sea, from wetsuits to goggles and fins, skis for moving swiftly down mountains and across terrains, climbing gear for scaling cliffs and resting on their sides, hiking and camping gear for navigating forests and jungles. Over time, thanks to material innovations, this gear got lighter, smaller, and more robust, enabling further human infiltration of originally alien terrains. These developments have infiltrated more everyday life circumstances, from sportswear to jackets. It also reflects the legacies of the containers which enable travel for force or leisure, from the slaves that used to carry trunks for colonizers to the personal ride-on automated suitcases that entertain present social media feeds.   

This deep function is also intimately connected to the role that uniforms have historically played in generating collective purpose and signaling shared mission. While dress codes establish conformity and normativity as implicit or explicit regulation, uniforms automatically compose a social body through a shared costume that adopts the tropes and expectations of a field but also establishes collective commitment. These uniforms include standard issue garb that also provides ways to signal and differentiate status and subdomain (through badges, colors, or augmentations), such as for military or combat. But uniforms are also critical for emergency or exception respondents, from police to medical workers, to park rangers to scouts and sports teams, from prisoners to pilots and flight attendants to waiters and school children. The uniform replaces the premise of clothing as an expression of individual identity with an expression of collective identity. However, individuality is not lost, it is expressed through other forms of style related to size or subtle actions (rolling to reveal appendages, undone buttons, etc.) to conceal and reveal the body, the body itself (hair, tattoos, piercings) as well as accessories that respond to shifts in temperature, bodies, and status. 

Fashion is defined as the dynamic phenomenon that encompasses the design, production, and dissemination of clothing and accessories that reflect cultural, social, and individual identities; it also commonly connotes, as Veblen first analyzed, conspicuous consumption and novelty driven by culture codes of class and status.  Earthsuits imagines modular forms of standardization that transform fashion into a protocol rather than as an arena focused on expressions of identity, culture and class alone. Style has historically also traded comfort for aesthetic enhancements that advance sexual appeal, like corsets for women in the 1800s, high heels that destabilize ankles, tight jeans that undermine sperm count. “Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.” (Oscar Wilde, “The Philosophy of Dress”) Couture houses, born in the 1850s, still exist as the centre of luxury, propelling exquisite design vision and material craft. The other end of the fashion system is replete with “fast fashion” arising from cheap globalized labor and transport, bottom up adaptation and innovation, creative copy and imitation, automated production and supply chains, providing a surfeit of style at prices affordable to the middle classes, transforming fashion into possessable entertainment, temporary and disposable. It is undeniable that mass production was synonymous with democratization which largely has been synonymous with capital extraction, save for the Soviet experiments which have plenty of visionary contributions to make in Earthsuits (from proletarian uniforms to constructivist theatre costumes). Because fashion shifts in response to the conditions and circumstances of the world, it follows the structure of capital desire, infinitely generative and unquenchable. When capitalist systems of extraction, production, and distribution are applied to clothing, they manifest as "fashion," transforming identity expression into a celebrated mode of exchange and driving an over-differentiated pursuit of persona-hood, reflected in the constructed images of the socius. 

Universal Basic Luxury shifts luxury from the premise of exclusivity for the few to luxury for all. The climate crisis casts into relief the ways that luxury also means rarity, scarcity, and transforms something like water, once copious-understood as a universal right- to something that requires guarding and protecting. Universal Basic Luxury also means that the infrastructural systems established by capitalism can be repurposed into supply chains that enable mass redistribution of goods, deployed to ensure basic services and supplies to everyone on the planet (Phillips, People’s Republic of Walmart). This does not mean that these goods need to be of secondary quality, but instead focuses luxury on what should be the equitable redistribution/reallocation of material resources. The resources themselves are not scarce (92 million pounds of textile waste per year), they are just disproportionately distributed with fewer of high quality and overabundance of poor quality. Luxury itself should become an abundant convenience: qualities of durability, repair, modularity, breathability, responsivity, and self-cleaning.  

Fashion as protocol (the rules of the operational system of fashion as opposed to its isolated products) proposes a fundamental pivot not only to what people wear, what wearability provides, and how these wearables are distributed and procured, but also how fashion can provide direct access to previously exclusionary infrastructure. It imagines high quality standard issue products that provide enough deviation to prevent and preclude boredom, enough simplicity to enable continuous care, and that allow for new protocols for engaging with wearables, whether those wearables be materials, clothing, gear, synched with various data-driven and technological augmentations. Liberated from fashion decisions as personal expression, humans find new freedom from the banality and confusion of arbitrary choice and identity expressions in exchange for precision temperatures, bodily augmentations and interactions, and continuous adaptation to new circumstances. Meanwhile the landfills of second-hand clothing continue to get repurposed into new textiles. Earthsuits insists that these not be replenished, slowly restoring places of exquisite beauty to other uses beyond mountains of daily discarded identities. 

Climate is first and foremost a form of planetary agency, understood as a lived abstraction that one is intimately immersed in (Hannah & Selin, Unseasonal Fashion). Earthsuits echoes and expands this view by seeing the planetary climate as a metabolism - a self-sustaining stream of energetic, material and informational exchanges that constitutes a partially closed system. According to Ervin Schrödinger, to be a metabolism is an essential definition of life as we know it, but our intuitions lead further than that: a planet, a city, or a building is also a metabolism of sorts. If we are faced with an option to approach a design of human shelter either as a design of a container, or as a design of flows that permeate both the inside and the outside of the shelter’s physical boundaries, we unanimously choose the latter option.

This metabolic perspective suggests a view of architecture as an action of air conditioning, from the level of apartment interior to the world interior of the Earth’s critical zone (Sloterdijk, Spheres). Wearables, however, shift the premise of architectures from the fixed and stable modulation of indoor conditions to dynamic, mobile architectures where personal atmospheres (and their integration and interoperability) play a critical role. These mobile architectures should not come at the behest of the entire ecosystem, rather they should be seen as means for augmenting contingencies. Why do we temperature control a building, when this puts demands on bodies to adapt in low-tech ways to uncomfortable modulations? We waste energy, dumping it carelessly into the atmosphere. Earthsuits instead imagines more specific modulations that also feed into the design of larger habitat units. 

When it comes to heated debate in contemporary fashion theory, the metabolic viewpoint allows us to reframe the troubled relationship of fashion with sustainability anew. At the planetary scale, the whole industrial factory system represents a cascade of metabolic systems, and its value proposition should not lie in the seasonal untimeliness of its end products, but in its timely synchronization with the rhythms and flows of the planetary environment. Fashion and brand value is more interesting as a derivative of sound service provision protocols, not of commodity aesthetics.

The viability of any organism lies in its ability to sustain its internal structure by constantly tapping into environmental flows - breathing atmospheric oxygen, synthesising organic molecules by exploiting the abundance of solar energy, or arranging supply of water that makes up for a large amount of internal environment of many organisms. Crucial to all these kinds of metabolic exchanges is the organism’s ability to distinguish itself from its surroundings by building an intricate web of filtering membranes, with the ultimate function to facilitate these exchanges. 

Membranes work as permeable interfaces - they are busy with selecting what molecules can enter the body’s interior and which should remain outside, as well as managing the disposal of heat or waste products (among many other functions). This metabolic view on membranes also suggests they are not trivial - as interfaces, they are structured, autonomous: “[t]he interface is not an imaginary line that divides bodies from each other, but rather a material region, a marginal area with its own mass and thickness, characterised by properties that make it radically different from the bodies whose encounter produces it.” (Tripaldi, Parallel Minds) Interfaces thus present complex surfaces enabling of interactions between objects and agents, since “the interface is the product of a two-way relationship in which two bodies in reciprocal interaction merge to form a hybrid material that is different from its component parts.” (Tripaldi, Parallel Minds) Wearables are perfect examples of such interfaces - the qualities of a fabric, cut, or different layers of garments determine its interaction with the environment - the filtration or heat retention functionality of the whole, as well as its capacity to manage air flows or shield the body from external elements.

As far as metabolisms are not only movements of energy and matter, but also of information, wearables (clothing, gear, devices, accessories) inevitably enter the realm of signaling, communicative, biosemiotic flows. Your noise-cancellation headphones are the supreme modulators of your internal psycho-climate - your “vibe” - as they shield your sensory apparatus from external soundscape and allow you to immerse into a private universe of sonic signals. Similarly, with the progressive embedding of portable electronics into garments and wearable accessories, your clothes undergo computational onboarding into a semiotic realm mediated through electromagnetic waves and digital information exchange. For this reason, the upcoming integration of AI into the algorithmic affordances of smart clothes or wearables is again a non-trivial expansion of the interface’s autonomy and thickness: it introduces an additional layer that seemingly turns the peripheral “accessory” into a sovereign agent. Smart glasses enabled with ChatGPT API that provide real-time multilingual translation are Earthsuits too, as they foster the possibility of the cosmopolitan, planetary social life, as well as easing language difficulties pervasive in migration and travel.

Clothing belongs to the earliest manifestations of technosphere - a proposition that echoes Alfred Lotka’s vision of technologies as extensions of human organs, later rehearsed by McLuhan (Otter, Socializing the Technosphere). Our favourite artifact to demonstrate the fruitfulness of this vision is shoes. Shoes are the primary interface between the planet and the body: we literally stand on the planet’s surface wearing shoes most of the time. In this sense, they are also primordial instruments of terrestrial mobility, predating the wheel. At the same time, the metaphor of expanded bodies finds its pop-cultural articulations everywhere from cyborgs to anime mechas - gigantic robots piloted by ordinary teenagers, such as Mobile Suit Gundam and Neon Genesis Evangelion. The relationship between these robots and their human pilots exemplifies the complicated interplay between the clothing and its user; as in the story of the Evagelion’s main character Shinji, sometimes it is the suit that pilots the human, and sometimes, the functional interaction between the suit and the environment takes precedent over the dimension of symbols and desires projected on the gear by its users.

Think about shoes again. They enhance walking range or speed, provide extra support and maintain the anatomy of the foot arch. As a piece of high-end technology, their integration into the body’s structure expands beyond the simple fact of their attachment to the bottom of our legs - shoes respond to and work in tandem with muscles all the way up to the head, influence the activity of spine or pelvis while exercising movements, and they provide also a psychological interface that makes the sensation of walking on the planet’s surface–built or “wild”–much more comfortable than without them. Shoes thus exemplify the logic of prosthetics - they do not fix apparent deficiencies (seen from whatever normative outlook on human body and its affordances), but augment and expand the body’s intrinsic extremities - the peripheral organic “devices” such as limbs, skins, biosemiotic systems and sensory apparatuses. Tilly Lockey’s prosthetic designs capture this well - they seamlessly unite ornamentality with function, turning jewellery into a genre of prosthetic technologies.

Shoes kickstart a long history of devices transforming the nature of mobility, including roller skates, ice skates, skis, or snorkel fins. The same applies to helmets and goggles- appendages that allow for respiration and visibility in vulnerable conditions. Think gloves with extra hands and arms. It’s not about imitating the human form, it's about adding things to test what it can do. If clothing facilitates moving through environments, then it also connects nomadism to the hybrid and diverse cosmopolitan movements that imagine the planet as a city. (Liam Young, Planet City) 

Prosthetics and extremities are not only about physical enhancement and augmentation. The mobile phone in fact is already a mental prosthetic, as is the hearing aid, eyeglasses, and arguably medicine. There is an engineering of the human internally, a bricolage of the socio-technical - be it physical or chemical - slowly entering the biological. The absurdity of the extensions on offer is as much science fiction sounding and feeling as a reflection of the world we inhabit today. In the band Tracy and the Plastics, for example, a group of girls ran a pawn shop and replaced parts of themselves with hyper-colorful pieces of plastic. Their town was never-ending, gray drab, surrounded by super-tall mountains that people lived on top of. Bits of plastic debris would fall down the mountains, and the Plastics (Nikki, Cola, Tracy, and Honeyface) would find and use the debris, like a red toothpaste cap for a tooth or something like that.

Imagine that the Earth would come attached with a care label. Judging from how poorly most of the Western population cares for its clothes, it would probably not make that much difference. Still, the idea of maintenance as an act of reproductive labour that connects clothing and environmental care is worth additional probing, since it touches upon parallel and closely aligned questions related to fitness and health, whether of fabric, body, or planet. As an interface, for example, a face mask is an apparatus of personal hygiene that filters out the unwanted elements in the local atmosphere, and at the same time an instrument of collective maintenance of respiratory commons, as it prevents the open air disposal of pathogens or body fluids. By doing so, it points at something much more complex than a defensive posture towards one’s personal health - it is a constructive act of relationality, acknowledging the inevitable contextuality of one’s fitness.

Medical textbooks define immunity as an organism’s ability to maintain its integrity in the face of external threats: a mechanism that prevents “invasions” from the outside. Clothing thus could be seen as a natural expansion of the body’s immunity strategies - as we all learned during the Covid-19 pandemic. However, contemporary scholars problematize this defensive notion, thinking instead about immunity as a contextual mechanism of constant negotiation between self and non-self (Ed Cohen, Self, Not-Self, Not Not-Self But Not Self). Immunity is then not the property of the body, but a property of the network of relations between the body and the environment, facilitated through metabolic interfaces. In this respect, the design of wearables is entirely interdisciplinary, entering into critical dialogue with sociology, neuroscience, medicine, meteorology, and systems dynamics. For example, responding to how urban environments make us prone to respiratory diseases caused by air pollution or virus circulation. The open question then is: What should be the purview of collective environmental safeguards, and what shall be delegated into the realm of personal hygiene or self-care? Shall we consider planetary health and human health as but different facets of one total health?

Another pivot to health, care and maintenance takes as its starting point sports and athletics. Humanity is an exercising species - a species of habitual behaviours that induce strife for physical excellence (Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life). Sports training thus belongs in Sloterdijk’s philosophy to the genre of anthropotechnics, i.e. the design of the human, alongside architecture, urban planning, or control of interior atmospheres. The role of clothing here is again the enabling and enhancing one. A packable windproof running jacket is an invitation to jog in grim weather; football cleats give you extra stability on the football pitch’s slippery grass. However, from the vantage point of total health (as the integrative perspective on the planetary and human health), the quotidian dimensions of training, exercise and enhancement of abilities mediated by wearables become much less about individual fitness, and much more about collective fine-tuning of parameters of viable inhabitation of the Earth: the absolute fitness. One is only as fit as the more-than-human assemblage one belongs to.

Billions of humans roam the Earth, at once affecting climatic conditions and reacting to them, but their motions and computational insights are not leveraged back as planetary information itself. While the current conversations typically focus on how to protect and privatize data, here the question rather is how to ensure data capture may take place while also making it into a public endeavour. Earthsuits allow humans to become the sensors that feed planetary data, for the benefit of both humans and the planet. The Earth suits up, transforming humans into wearable devices for the planet. 

Some people might at first find it abhorrent to imagine themselves as planetary instruments, appendages of a larger system set up to feed, record, filter, but also maintain and repair aspects of the planet through the functional systems/protocols that Earthsuits mandate and enable. In many ways this reactivates humans vis-a-vis their most animal and most cognitive capacities. Just as the insects interact with the garden as pollinators and pests, the physical labors of human moving, reorganizing, building, processing, prompting, all become mechanisms for powering the earth informatics. 

The hormones and chemicals and neurons coursing through our bodily systems are not only secret indicators of our general health, ailments, or  unknown conditions that could be automatically modulated and explicitly indicated by Earthsuits. They are also general indicators of climatological conditions. This information, taken at aggregate scale, provides unprecedented metrics into how ecological developments (whether in biological, technospheric, psychic or other hybrid domains) reflect one another’s evolution. Just as we might adaptively reuse fashion industry infrastructure for global material redistribution, anonymized health data (from smart watches etc) might be reconsidered for health and homeostasis on the planetary scale. 

The Earth has been both a protection and challenge to us. Earthsuits activates the intentionality and the automated capacities of that challenge. “Tracing what is a prosthesis of whom is open to more perspectives than master-control chains of command. As we wear our skins on our bodies and as our buildings, held under an atmospheric skin in waves of foam (as Sloterdijk would have it), that naturalized arrangement is disturbed by how urban sensing seems to approach proto-sentience. "A person is not only a Vitruvian actor at some phenomenological core who wears the city; he or she is worn as well. We are also the skin of what we wear. The garment being cut and sewn is not only for us to wear; the city also wears us.” (Bratton, The City Wears Us)  

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