The Rule That Needs To Be Broken: Smart Fashion Is for Gadget Junks or Special Needs author Natalia Berger natalia.berger@inholland.nl Inholland University of Applied Science, The Netherlands keywords Smart fashion, framing, mass media, consumer, fashion discourse ABSTRACT Numerous market studies predict each year significant growth of the wearable technology market and a massive increase of global spending on wearable devices. Simultaneously, market analytics are talking about “the uncertainty of consumer receptivity”. Till now the popularity of wearables is limited to a number of gadgets as smart watches and fitness bands, health and self-care wearable devices. Mass production of smart fashion items is still out of question. Whether this “rule” will be broken any soon, depends on a lot of technological and social factors. One of these is mass media. Researchers emphasise the crucial role of the mass media in the fashion discourse, where the media has been seen as “an important basis of the ideology of consumption”. The objective of the presented research is to show how smart fashion has been presented in the modern journalists texts published in English. The principles of the critical discourse analysis and framing theory were applied to the coding system of our content analysis of 448 relevant texts retrieved from LexisNexis database. The biggest amount of the analysed journalistic texts are reporting about the relies of the new smart product; the articles about the future potentials of the wearables and the reviews of the latest e-tex- tiles market research are also among the most popular subjects of the media. A consumer self attracts very little attention from the media, when they publish about smart fashion. Texts about the topic can be de- scribed as a multi-discursive, where the technological discourse has been explored most intensive, followed by the fashion discourse. Against our expectations, the economical context has been also rich presented in the items about e-mode. The medical & healthcare and sport & fitness have been illuminated as the most common fields of use of the innovative clothing and gadgets. In the articles we can hear the voices of de- signers, experts, scientists and industrials; only consumer has been hardly presented in the texts. Remark- able, when consumers speak, they find wearables “too invasive”, “mind blowing”, “a media-hype”; the pub- lic wants to know “how technology will change our life” and is worrying about privacy and safety of personal data. Right now the mass media frames smart fashion as a niche market for minorities. The conclusion is, without a systematic and properly framed coverage of the subject in the mass media; it will be very difficult for the hi-tech fashion to find its way to the mass consumer. Introduction “Smart fashion” sounds fashionable! But are you ready to buy it? To begin with, the term itself has a very broad range of interpretations (from the umbrella expression for all kind of technological wearables to the exclusive fashion collections for smart women). There are two major usages of the concept smart when it 3