Ariel Garten made a jacket with concrete between its layers. She also made a skirt with 37 little pockets, an invitation to carry around an unreasonable quantity of things. These were clothes with ideas sewn into them. In 2003, her Toronto Fashion Week debut sent models along a conveyor-belt runway and off its end, onto a concealed high-jump mat. The audience got a surprise. The clothes got an argument about the world they were entering.
Long before Garten co-founded the company behind Muse, she was asking an awkward design question: how do you give an abstract idea a shape somebody can encounter? A shirt, a performance, a headband. The materials changed. So did the scale of the undertaking. The habit of making an idea visible stayed with her.
A skirt, a shirt, a scientific question
Toronto was home. Her mother, the painter Vivian Reiss, worked on large canvases; her father worked in real estate. Garten grew up around people who made things happen for themselves. She has described watching her mother turn a blank surface into a colorful painting as an early lesson in what an imagination could do. In that household, an idea could become an object. It was a fairly persuasive introduction to a working life.
Her interest in science acquired somewhere to go in high school. In 1996, a teacher introduced biotechnology equipment, including a PCR machine, into her class. A research co-op followed, then a summer position. It is a small, concrete detail in a career usually described by its unusual combination of disciplines. Somebody brought the equipment into the room. Somebody made a place available in a laboratory. Curiosity had something to get its hands on.
She graduated from the University of Toronto in 2002 with a science degree spanning biology and psychology and a neuroscience designation. Clothing was already part of her life. She went on to open Flavour Hall on College Street, giving her designs a storefront in the city. A shop adds its own discipline to an artistic ambition. People can come through the door, examine what you have made, and leave.
At 19, during a summer at Club Monaco’s design studios in New York, she took her own work around the city’s stores. She remembers 48 refusals and two acceptances. Two was enough to get started. The exercise supplied an early education in how an idea meets a buyer: one conversation at a time, with a great many conversations ending quickly.
By 2004, her clothing was available in 15 shops in Canada and the United States. Its unusual details carried some of her scientific interests into everyday objects. Fashion gave those interests an audience who had no obligation to attend a lecture. It also made room for a joke. A concrete-lined jacket takes the phrase “urban clothing” rather literally.
“Thinking inside the box makes us more efficient, but a lot is lost.”
Ariel Garten, 2004
Another early project gave the relationship between science and clothing a more direct form. For DECONcert Hertz, Garten conceived shirts printed with participants’ EEG patterns. Concertgoers contributed brainwave signals to an interactive performance, then could take their own patterns home. Band merchandise rarely makes the audience quite so responsible for the band. Here, participation became something you could fold and put in a drawer.
The project placed a signal on fabric, giving people an object through which to discuss an unfamiliar experience. It also joined Garten’s interests without requiring her to retire one of them. A scientific process could supply the raw material for a piece of clothing. Clothing could carry the explanation outside the gallery.
The idea leaves the laboratory
In the early 2000s, Garten collaborated with Steve Mann, the University of Toronto researcher associated with wearable computing. Chris Aimone and James Fung were part of that circle. In Garten’s account of one lab experiment, a participant put on an electrode and changed the volume of music through changes in focus. The signal became a sound. An internal activity had acquired an external consequence.
These experiments offered an appealing way to introduce a complicated field. You did something, the room responded, and you could hear the relationship. They also encouraged a question with a much longer working life: where could this go outside the laboratory? Garten eventually joined Aimone and Trevor Coleman to build InteraXon, founded in 2007. A company gave the experiment an organization and the founders a new set of obligations.
For the Vancouver Winter Olympics in 2010, the team made those consequences considerably larger. Its Bright Ideas installation connected visitors in Vancouver to the lights on the CN Tower in Toronto, the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa, and the light tower at Niagara Falls. Changes detected by the headset became computer signals that changed the lighting. Garten later put participation at more than 7,000 people across 17 days.
There is a certain comic satisfaction in a person sitting in one Canadian city and making a building in another behave differently. The demonstration gave the company a way to explain itself without beginning with a technical vocabulary. Visitors could see that the interface was doing something. Turning that experience into a product for repeated use was a separate assignment.
In September 2011, Garten took the question of understanding oneself to TEDxToronto. Her talk, “Know thyself, with a brain scanner,” paired an old philosophical instruction with a new interface. The title made a technical subject approachable before the demonstration even started. It is also a useful description of her public role: she gives an audience a familiar place from which to consider something unfamiliar.
The customer gets a vote
The road to a consumer device brought much smaller objects into view. Someone would have to wear the thing, understand it, and decide that it belonged in their day. Garten’s clothing experience had already acquainted her with the distance between liking your own design and having another person choose it. A wearable adds electronics to that encounter, while keeping the encounter itself.
She initially imagined a more futuristic appearance for Muse. Feedback changed the design. Users wanted symmetry, and the object’s feel and function mattered alongside its appearance. “The design is not simply about how it looks,” she said. A headband is in close quarters with its owner. It has to live there after the conversation about its technology ends.
An idea you can wear.
A signal you can see.
A product you can use.
In December 2012, Garten reported the close of Muse’s Indiegogo campaign: $287,472 in pledges from 1,613 people. Those were prospective users making a commitment before the device reached a shop shelf. The campaign had taken the team through six cities and three conferences. It even included a three-part mockumentary called Brain Cat. Apparently, introducing brainwave computing to the internet required allowing a cat into the discussion.
Her account also emphasized a less flamboyant detail: anyone who contacted the team received, at minimum, a personal thank-you. Alongside the demonstrations and videos, there was the work of answering people. A campaign makes an idea public, then exposes its makers to the public’s questions. The conversation cannot be left entirely to the promotional film.
The original Muse arrived in 2014, with a Best Buy Canada launch that November. Garten has described the first customers as the point at which the undertaking became real: the team was handling bug fixes while reading responses from people using what it had shipped. A prototype can stay inside a friendly room. A product goes home with somebody who has expectations.
The company drew on University of Toronto engineering graduates and interns, as well as support from organizations including MaRS and the National Research Council. Its origin story has several people in it, and its progress required more. Garten’s public visibility helps tell the story; the work of bringing a physical device to market remains a team undertaking.
A founder changes her job
In 2015, Garten stepped down as chief executive. Derek Luke, previously the company’s chief operating officer, succeeded her. She continued as Chief Evangelist, with responsibility for communicating the work and contributing to the company’s direction. The change gave a founder who had spent years explaining the idea a job that made explanation central.
She spoke directly about trusting Luke and about his understanding of the organization. She also made his authority clear. The handover allowed her to choose a different balance between family life and work while continuing to contribute. It is an ordinary human consideration inside a story filled with unusual inventions. A founder has more than one thing to build.
Garten remained involved in raising money, too. In a March 2022 LinkedIn post, she described leading a $10 million investment round, with $7 million filled at that moment. The figures describe an effort in progress. They also show how much work can sit behind a title whose most visible duty is appearing onstage.
Keep a door open
Her public work continued through interviews in 2025 and 2026, including a September 2026 appearance on the Real.Raw.Authentic Podcast. Recent profiles identify her as Muse’s co-founder and Chief Evangelist. The explanation has kept evolving with the company. The thread back to her earlier life is still easy to follow: she talks to people about an idea that she and her collaborators have given physical form.
Asked what girls interested in science should do, Garten offered practical starting points: study relevant subjects, join robotics clubs, and contact scientists about volunteering in laboratories. Her own story gives that advice some texture. A classroom equipped for an experiment had opened a route into research. The person answering a young student’s request may be helping to open the next one.
Garten has also described a possible future startup in environmental sustainability. For now, that remains an expressed interest. Her career already provides plenty of evidence that an interest can travel through several forms before it becomes a business. There is room for a question to stay open while the work in front of you continues.
The shirts, the concerts, the lights, and the headband belong to the same biography. Each placed an idea where somebody else could respond to it. That response could be a laugh, a purchase, a pledge, or a request to change the design. Garten kept putting things into the world and listening. Somewhere between the laboratory and the shop, the idea had to become wearable.