How much will the most expensive Apple Watch cost? Latest speculation suggests that the top-tier Edition collection could cost more than $5,000 (£3,080), which is certainly a luxury price. Its solid gold case doesn’t exactly make it a diamond-encrusted Rolex (that’s about $27,000), but Apple would have you believe that it’s closer to one than any other smartwatch on the market.

So it’s the world of luxury fashion, not the tech industry, that we should be looking at to explain its latest campaign - which most recently saw the device, still with no announced release date, put on show at high-fashion boutique Colette for one day only during Paris Fashion Week.

First, the most important thing to know about luxury wristwatches is that their primary function has been completely displaced by mobile phones. As a time-telling device, they are redundant; yet this has had scant impact on their sales. Why? Because there’s a currency operating here that always trumps utility: fashion. The desire to separate ourselves from the pack, and signal our status, lifestyle and good taste will always win out over rational assessments of efficacy.

It’s therefore an interesting twist on the phone/watch story that Tim Cook’s Apple Watch looks as though it aims to restore the primacy of the wristwatch over the iPhone as a timepiece, and simultaneously enter into the market of luxury watches. The company’s campaign has conspicuously avoided the term “smartwatch” - its staff haven’t uttered the word, it doesn’t appear in any literature - in a bid to avoid comparisons with its technology competitors. Instead, Apple is aligning itself with the traditional world of mechanical watches and jewellery.

It seems an odd move for a 21st-century tech company, but it’s undoubtedly a smart one.

Where wearables went wrong

To understand why, we must first grasp where other wearable technology products have gone wrong, because Apple has clearly learned from the story of smart fashion’s stunted success in the marketplace.

Wearable computing has been around since the early 1980s, with Steve Mann’s early maverick experiments in wearing his own clunky cyborg garb (though the relationship between the body and technology dates back to the early industrial era). Since then, there’s been a lot of interest in wearable technology from the electronics industry and academia, but very little uptake in fashion.

Only in the past decade or so has the development of “smart fabrics” pushed wearable technology into fashion’s court. Hussein Chalayan is the most prominent early example of a fashion designer who embraced wearable technology on the runway in a sophisticated way. But his work is a conceptual, rather than a commercial, gesture, a meditation on the relationship between technology and the body.

In a similar vein, Richard Nicoll’s optic dress – a collaboration with Studio XO, who has been working in the fashion/technology space for a while, producing dazzling costumes for Lady Gaga, such as the elaborate jet-pack “flying dress” – debuted at London Fashion Week in mid-September. It was ethereal and beautiful, but again, was obviously designed as a showpiece for the runway, not your wardrobe.

This year, we are told, London Fashion Week went digital. Tellingly, it was more about using social media and online shopping to boost sales than about wearable technology. The reality is that wearable technology is still very much on the margins of fashion.

Glass, interrupted

We’ve recently seen some commercial gadgets try to bridge the gap between electronics and fashion, but are there any true crossovers from gadget to fashion accessory? Not yet. The recent collaboration between Diane Von Furstenberg and Google Glass is a case in point. Evidently, the idea was to extend the aura of the fashion designer to the Google Glass to make the clunky gadget therefore fashionable.

But fashion doesn’t quite work like that. Von Furstenberg’s frames are fine, but they don’t enhance or thoughtfully integrate the gadgetry, which is still an inelegant, bulky and lopsided appendage. No fashion brand alignment will fix the awkwardness of the technology. Until it can address that, Google Glass is always going to be more Steve Mann than Steven Alan.

In a small way, fashion has incorporated some technological enhancements, particularly in textiles, with digital printing and antimicrobial treatments the most common examples. But in terms of gadgetry or computing, very few fashion designers are making technological innovations, and most fashion designers aren’t even interested. Their criteria for good design tend to be about aesthetics, and elusive concepts like style, glamour, romance, cool, and nostalgia. It’s less about what a garment can do for you, and more about how it makes you look and feel. Wearable technology won’t be at odds with these aims once the gadgets become so small that they disappear, or become so ubiquitous that it necessitates a shift in thinking. But we’re not there yet.

Mummy, let’s go to the World’s Fair!

At this point, the majority of wearable technology takes its cues from 20th century science fiction, with technologists pursuing outmoded ideas about what fashion of the future should look like. In this pursuit of a retrograde future, wearable technology developers have failed to recognise that consumers aren’t excited by the technological advances of smart fashion for the same reason that a World’s Fair doesn’t move anyone in 2014. Cynicism and disappointment with the failed utopian promises of 20th-century technology means that the futuristic narratives of science fiction are less desirable than the stories of unchanging tradition used by the luxury fashion industry.

This is why Apple knows that the more important message about its, ahem, smartwatch is not its battery life, but that the bracelet took nine hours to cut and has been hand-brushed. It’s using the language of luxury fashion (expertly delivered by the former execs of Yves Saint Laurent, Tag Heuer, LVMH, and Burberry now in its employ): time-consuming artisanal processes honed to create a precise and beautiful product. It’s the human labour and ingenuity, not the technology, that elicits an emotional response. And Apple wants people to have an emotional response to its products. (Some are strongly positive; some are negative. But for Apple, that’s better than indifference.)

As each iteration of the iPhone has amply demonstrated, it’s not so much the advances in functionality that captivates consumers. What matters is the fashionable qualities of desire, novelty, status, and – as Apple would put it – a sense of “delight”. In other words, Apple recognises what other smartwatch makers on the market have overlooked: the critical importance of design, and the irrationality of fashion and consumer behaviour.

The fashion gap

Design has been a letdown of many of the smartwatches released this year, including the Samsung Gear Live and LG G Watch. At the better end of the scale, Motorola’s Moto 360, which runs Android Wear, offers a familiar round face and leather band, as opposed to the awkward, shrunk-down-tablet oblong face that dominates the market.

The Moto 360’s simple and classic approach of a round face has proved to be quite popular, but there are some serious flaws from a style standpoint. The face is too chunky to be considered elegant, and the design concept of a circular interface is obstructed by a black band at the bottom. Fitness is still the top application for smartwatches, so lightness and durability are priorities, but given that activewear is huge in fashion at the moment, these practical considerations shouldn’t excuse poor design.

The fickle concerns of fashion tend to upset the hard-headedness of the tech industry. Some commentators have rightly pointed out that the Apple Watch isn’t as futuristic or tech as some other wearable technology applications that have recently hit the market.

But if you look closely, the wearable products they compare appear to be limited, one-note or single-use novelties. A polo shirt you can use to measure your heart-rate? You’d have to buy a number of these expensive gym clothes for a hygienic washing rotation, whereas there are many standalone portable devices available that offer this functionality and don’t require washing.

Function and form

It’s not that the Apple Watch really offers much more in terms of functionality, but that the watch itself is a much more versatile fashion accessory. The fact that you can wear it all day, every day (except at night when your watch is charging!) helps consumers when they need to rationalise their decision to invest their hard-earned savings in one wearable technology product over another.

Why is 2014 touted as the year for wearable technology, when smart textiles have been available to fashion designers for well over a decade? Until now, wearable technology has not been taken seriously by the fashion world for the simple reason that it’s rarely fashionable. When wearable technology developers start to understand the way that fashion operates, consumers will too start to take notice. Fashion ultimately is about beauty, desire, identity, and social standing; increasingly wearable technology will also be about these things. Apple seems to understand that. The question is how quickly its smartwatch rivals will.

• Madeleine King is a fashion writer and researcher and the co-creator of The Fashion Archives, an online publication looking at the history of fashion in Queensland, Australia.