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For Opening Ceremony and Intel’s MICA Smart Bracelet, Beauty Beats Brains

The MICA bracelet, a joint project of Opening Ceremony and Intel.Credit...Jennifer S. Altman for The New York Times

FOR A LITTLE LESS than a year, Opening Ceremony and Intel have been working together to create a bracelet that can check your email and remind you when you have a meeting. And what happens when fashion designers and techies work together?

“It was a big learning curve for both of the parties, I must tell you,” said Aysegul Ildeniz, a vice president at Intel.

Both Intel and Opening Ceremony had a rough idea of what the bracelet could look like. It wasn’t the same concept, at least at first.

“Aesthetically, we really wanted this to be a rounded edge,” said Humberto Leon, a co-founder of Opening Ceremony. “And they came back and said, ‘What about square?’ And we said, ‘No one is going to wear a square bracelet every day of their lives.’ ”

The designers at Opening Ceremony proposed that the bracelet be superthin (that was a nonstarter: a radio and various gizmos can’t be squeezed into something too thin) and be made of metal (cellular data would have a tough time penetrating metal). “They looked at us and said, ‘Are you crazy?’ ” Mr. Leon said.

It all worked out, and the result is the MICA bracelet (it stands for My Intelligent Communication Accessory), a bit of wearable technology that will sell for $495 in early December at Barneys and at Opening Ceremony stores.

The MICA bracelet is the latest device in the ever-expanding world of wearable technology. Besides the Apple Watch (which will be available next year), the designer Michael Bastian teamed up with Hewlett-Packard and Gilt Groupe on a smartwatch, and Tory Burch worked with Fitbit to create a wristband that tracks fitness and sleeping patterns.

But if you talk to the Opening Ceremony designers, they would prefer you didn’t realize their bracelet was a tech device.

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The MICA bracelet.Credit...Jennifer S. Altman for The New York Times

“The way Carol’s wearing this, the smart part’s a secret,” Mr. Leon said, pointing to the vibrating wrist of Carol Lim, his partner in Opening Ceremony. Ms. Lim was looking at the bottom of her thick bracelet and tapping at the small display screen (1.5 inches) as if she were looking for her pulse.

“Our woman doesn’t want to scream smart bracelet,” Mr. Leon said. “She didn’t want to announce to the world that, ‘Hey, I’m into the tech world!’ It’s her little secret. She could go into meetings, without her phone, and still be able to do things. The first thing that really came out of this is that we wanted a screen that was hidden on the back side.”

Otherwise, Mr. Leon said, the bracelet looks just like a piece of jewelry. “Semiprecious stones, real pearls, obsidian, water snake quality, different things,” he said. They got their curved screen, too.

And what does the phone do? It receives text messages and emails. It’s loaded with Yelp reviews of nearby restaurants. It notifies you when there’s a meeting (and can sync with Google calendar and Facebook events).

Thanks to a deal with AT&T, it does not require you to be near your cellphone or a hot spot, but if you want texts, everyone is going to have to save a new number for your bracelet-only device. There’s no mini-keyboard, so there’s an offering of canned responses if you want to reply to a message, Mr. Leon said.

“If you’re going out to dinner and you don’t want the phone on the table, you can look discreetly at the message from the babysitter asking, ‘Oh no, where’s the milk?’ ” Ms. Lim said. “And you could do a quick reply, ‘It’s in the fridge.’ ” (“In the fridge” is a canned response one could load, in theory.)

As they set out to work on this bracelet, Mr. Leon and Ms. Lim surveyed “hundreds of women” (the actress Rashida Jones was among them) to ask what they wanted from a wearable. And what was the biggest takeaway from their poll?

“People aren’t going to give up their phones,” Ms. Lim said. “This has to be a complement.”

Nor will it have the sort of fitness tracker (a step counter, a heart rate monitor) that is popular in these devices. “We thought the primary function of this bracelet is for a very busy woman who is on the go, or mothers who need to stay in touch with the people around them,” Ms. Ildeniz said.

Mr. Leon said the experience went well enough that he’s going to take a crack at this again.

“We’re just at the tipping point of what this is,” he said, referring to wearable devices. “Even for us, we know we’ll be working on more projects like this. This isn’t the last.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section E, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: Beauty Beats Brains at Opening Ceremony. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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