Free | 6:30 p.m. | Located at Herberger Stage at Scottsdale Waterfront

What happens when fashion meets the wild? See exciting looks from students in the Wearable Technology course at ASU FIDM during the live Wearable Wilds fashion show.

In Wearable Wilds, students explore the American West, not simply as a landscape but as a living system of extreme environments, desert ecologies, adaptation, survival, and transformation. Through fashion and wearable technology, students investigate how the body might sense, respond to, and interact with its environment. Drawing inspiration from desert organisms, shifting landscapes, heat, light, wind, water scarcity, and the remarkable adaptive strategies of plants and animals, students translate ecological observations into speculative wearable concepts. Technology becomes more than an electronic addition to clothing—it becomes a tool for creating a dialogue between body, garment, and environment. 

During the Concept Development phase, students move from observation and research into experimentation: developing narratives, material studies, sketches, responsive systems, and wearable propositions that ask: What can fashion learn from the intelligence of the desert? 

Wearable Wilds imagines the West as a laboratory for the future—where fashion, technology, ecology, and human adaptability converge on the body.