The most sought-after sets are beautiful, hugely expensive, and sound pretty good too, says Alexander Fury
Heady days Master & Dynamic?s £490 MW60 model
During New York Fashion Week in February, the Metropolitan Museum of Art unveiled the thinking behind its next costume exhibition, ?Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology?. Eighteen months previously, a bunch of fashion editors were absent from the spring/summer 2015 season of New York because they were on a 36-hour flying visit to San Francisco to witness the unveiling of the Apple Watch. Why" Because fashion and tech are closer than ever before.
It isn’t so much about houses such as Chanel eschewing stitching in favour of selective laser sintering (read: 3D printing) to craft garments, although that makes great pictures (and, by all accounts, a wonderful Met exhibit). It’s more about pumping up technology we already have with fashion kudos ? such as a cheap iPhone case glitzed with silly bits, as spun out by most designers to great commercial gain. A more interesting luxury subset, however, has emerged in the form of headphones ? not only are luxury merchants chasing the bandwagon, but entire brands are emerging to satisfy this perceived niche in the marketplace, appealing to audiophiles and the fashionable in equal measure. Dolce & Gabbana are at the forefront: they have created headphones that recall the crowns that adorn Madonnas in regional Italian Catholic shrines, attached to re...