For most of the last decade, health wearables have been designed to disappear.

Slim profiles and neutral colours. Presented to consumers as products that can track everything, without letting your friends know you care that much. Optimisation happened privately, invisibly, somewhere between your wrist or finger and your phone.

The newly announced partnership between Whoop and Samuel Ross suggests that era is coming to an end.

This is not just a collaboration. It is a reframing of what health technology is for, and who it is meant to be seen by.

Wearable tech has long sold restraint as virtue. The best-designed products were the ones you forgot you were wearing. Health, by extension, became a silent project of your own. Measured constantly, and rarely expressed outwardly.

But that seems to be changing.

Health is no longer just about prevention or longevity. It has become a proxy for discipline, clarity, ambition, and control. In the same way gym culture moved from functional spaces to lifestyle environments, health has stepped out of the background and into the foreground.

You can see it in how people talk about routines, recovery, sleep, and performance, caring more about their Sunday morning run than their Saturday night at the pub. You can see it in the aesthetics of wellness spaces. And now, you can see it in what people wear.

Bringing Ross in as global creative director is a statement of intent from Whoop. It suggests the brand is no longer content with being a quiet utility. It wants to become a visible framework for how modern performance is lived.

Project Terrain is positioned not as a seasonal drop, but as a long-term design language. Industrial. Architectural. Purpose-driven. Aligned with Ross’s work across A-Cold-Wall* and SR_A. These are not aesthetic flourishes. They are signals.

This is health technology presented publicly, as part of a person’s representation of themselves.

Fashion has always been a shorthand for values. What you wear communicates how you move through the world, what you prioritise, and how you see yourself.

Health wearables are beginning to do the same.

The shift here is subtle but important. Wearing a visible health device is no longer just about tracking steps or sleep. It is about communicating participation in a certain worldview. One that values optimisation, structure, and intentional living.

In that sense, wearables are becoming closer to uniforms than accessories.

Not status symbols in the traditional sense, but markers of alignment.

What makes this partnership notable is not the bands or the apparel, but the ambition behind them.

Whoop is positioning itself less like a hardware company and more like a cultural platform. One that understands health not as a feature set, but as a designed experience that intersects with identity, work, and aspiration.

The future of health technology will be clear in what it stands for. Clear in how it looks. Clear in the values it expresses.

The move from invisible to intentional is not about vanity. It is about ownership. About making health something that is not just measured, but worn, designed, and shared.

Project Terrain feels like an early marker of that shift.

Not because it makes wearables fashionable, but because it treats health as culture, not background noise.

Shot of the good stuff.