Wearable technologies are increasingly present across everyday life, from infancy to older age, from moments of wellness to periods of vulnerability, and across cycles of sleep, work, and leisure. Yet despite their growing pervasiveness, wearables remain difficult to situate within a coherent design discourse. They are often framed either as technical systems to be optimised or as products defined by market readiness, leaving limited space to consider how they are lived with, cared for, and made mean- ingful across the lifespan. This special issue of The Design Journal emerges from the Wearables Collective Symposium: Weaving Innovations into Stages of Life, a two-day interdisciplinary event organised by the University of California, Davis, in collaboration with the Royal College of Art, London, on 25–26 March 2024. The symposium was conceived not simply as a venue for presenting wearable technologies, but as a space for sustained, cross-disciplinary inquiry into how e-textiles, smart clothing, and tangible interfaces intersect with health, wellbeing, and care across diverse bodies, abilities, and life stages. Rather than treating wearables as isolated artefacts, the symposium fore- grounded them as systems embedded in lives, shaped by material choices, cultural practices, institutional settings, and changing bodily needs.