WELCOME TO 2009, MOOD RINGS

Instead of depleting your local bodega's supply of Ben & Jerry's next time "that dickhead" gets drunk and sleeps with your neighbor, nurture your feelings in a different way. Welcome to the epitome of the 21st century: emotional clothing. Long past are the days of mind games between you and the opposite sex, when "guys are too stupid to see when a girl is pissed" and "girls are too naïve to realize what's bro-time." You can now wear your heart on your sleeve, literally. Since the 1990s

Phillips Design

has been researching what makes us stressed, happy, focused, and how to use our minds to help our bodies behave in the way we would like. Recently, they've taken our sudden obsession with looking like extras from

Kids

and run with another craze of the 90s: memory of the mood ring. Needless to say, when I came across the idea of clothing that is essentially one giant mood ring I put down the ice cream. Phillips Designs have developed a series of garments that through "emotional sensing" can read and project wearers' feelings through the LED lights installed in the garment. The creations are part of the SKIN research project, in which scientists and designers are trying to predict the future, and somehow clothing is part of this. Cool on one hand, but on the other: WOW. Isn't it bad enough that we can barely go through a day without updating our Facebook status to make our lives seem far more interesting and witty than they are, without become such a derelict that we need our clothes to tell other people what the hell we are talking about? Good luck to all you four-year-olds out there, your future is bright.

But it isn't just Phillips who fell in love with the mood ring concept. Gregory Sotzing, a professor of polymer and organic chemistry at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, has also developed advanced new fibers that will be able to change color with a flip of a switch. These threads are created from materials known as electro-chromic polymers that change color in response to an electric current.

"Scentimental Space" as part of the

FUSEDSPACE DATABASE exhibitions

in the Netherlands and London calls this notion "Re-cabling Fashion Re-cabling Space." These guys may not have a clue how to talk to the generic human about what they're doing, but they have figured out a way of embedding senso-cells (body sensors) into multisensory clothing and responsive environments. They say that it concentrates on a more active approach to fashion. I am pumped on the fact that instead of telling you piss off when I wake up and realize that you're 90% less attractive in the daylight, you can simply look at my all-encompassing bodysuit for the clues to get out, and it involves 0 effort on my part. Just another ingenious way scientists are putting their eight-plus-year university degrees to work: finding new ways for us to be lazy and less articulate.