Why did you choose the shirt that you are wearing right now? Is it because you like the tailoring or the color, or because it's fashionable right now? Traditionally, clothes have served the two main purposes of keeping you warm and making you look good, but in the future, you may be choosing your clothes for the technological features that they offer from an MP3 player built into a stylish Levi's jacket, to cameras contained in gloves, to glasses linked to portable computers, to shirts that can monitor a wearer's heart rate, temperature and breathing, to bras that can measure breathing in order to monitor and assess your exercise, to television sets contained in handbags.

Teams such as those at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Georgia Institute of Technology, the French Textile Institute and Durham University in Britain are leading the way for research and testing, and it seems like only a matter of time before their bold experiments enter the mainstream market.

GLOSSARY

tailoring = corte

wearer = usuário

bras= sutiãs

bold experiments= experimentos audaciosos

mainstream market= mercado principal