BEYOND THE HYPE: THIS IS DIGITAL FASHION

In the beginning of August, I sat down at my desk – littered with Vogue magazines and crinkled Post-It notes filled with old doodles and pitch ideas – getting ready for one of seven final Zoom classes. Feeling excited and a bit overwhelmed, I logged on. DMM 555: Digital Media Management Capstone. As daunting as it sounds, I was confident in what I was going to do my project on. Digital fashion.

It was something that I had mentioned in my previous class, yet I was still met with dazed looks of bewilderment as I rattled off my topic to the professor. I explained digital fashion as something along the lines of: AR filters on Snapchat or video game skins and I might’ve mentioned NFTs and the Metaverse. You lose people at the mention of the last two words alone. I get it, we’re sick of new technologies. New anything, for that matter. “When everyone around you is confused, that usually means you’re doing something innovative – or you need to come up with a better way of explaining it,” says my professor. He’s right.

Immerse yourself in the world of digital fashion through Twitter Spaces and LinkedIn for long enough and you will start to feel like an alien – talking about things from interoperability to phygital (no, this is not a typo) pieces and thinking about Web 3 to what this means for fashion’s sustainability initiatives and society in general – imagine how it looks and sounds to someone on the outside looking in. They’re curious, but they shut off.

Day in and day out, we’re surrounded by noise – incessant chatter from those living in the hype bubble and the naysayers calling it a waste of time.

I thought, “How can I explain this [digital fashion] in a way that can not only be understood, but can get people to think about the big picture?” You have to go beyond the hype.

Digital fashion has finally made its way into mainstream consciousness, now that brands see it as the new lipstick or perfume of the future. Instead of buying one of those products that’ll run out in a couple of weeks, buying a digital twin of a Balenciaga coat will last you forever and give you perks. If you’re more of a gamer, buying a designer skin for League of Legends is right up your alley. Looking to try something new and exciting for social media? You can go to DressX and purchase a digital piece to be tailored to a photo of yourself. Not into the idea of being tied down to anything? Simply try-on digital pieces from designers with AR filters, like this one from XTENDED iDENTiTY. If you’ve always wanted to be a designer, you can co-create a garment in The Fabricant Studio and the opportunity to list it as an NFT.

To put it simply – digital fashion is the virtual representation of clothing items and accessories using computer technologies and 3D software.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: Why the hell would I, or anyone for that matter, buy a digital piece that can’t be worn physically? And what does it mean for fashion as we know it?

Fashion As We Know It

If you were to pull back the glamorous and mystifying curtains of the fashion industry, you will find an unsettling reality. From being hailed a global pollutant to an incessant violator of human rights, the trillion-dollar industry is facing a crisis. Mass production coupled with restless trend cycles has resulted in mass consumption, made evident by the 80 billion clothing items that are acquired annually by the global population.

On average, one of those clothing items will be worn 7 times before being discarded. That’s right - seven times, and that number varies across the world. Fast fashion, as the name suggests, is the speedy production of trendy, low-quality clothing. Every two weeks, new arrivals sections at the world’s most popular brands, such as H&M and Zara, overflow with regurgitated designs (or as the Internet loves to call them, dupes) from the latest fashion week, or concepts plagiarized from independent designers on the Internet, or from the most recent paparazzi picture of Kim Kardashian.

To keep up with consumer expectations, the supply chain is outsourced to the world’s poorest countries to produce high-volume, low-value products. The presence of fast-fashion in these countries have managed to add millions to its economy, yet the livelihoods of garment workers continues to be an afterthought. Rather than shifting focus to providing extra value to workers – livable wages, upskilling workers, investing in technology to advance digital transformation, demanding transparency – brands see countries such as Bangladesh and Myanmar as sources for cheap labor.

In reality, the cost of production is not cheap. The environment pays a hefty price in the process as well. From producing clothing in countries with loose environmental regulations to flying designers and models across the world for fashion week, the industry’s ecological footprint is substantial.

To produce one cotton shirt, it takes approximately 3,000 liters of water and creates about 20% of wastewater worldwide. That’s significant impact coming from something that has the potential of being worn only seven times. And that’s just cotton. Many of the fibers used in the production of clothing items are synthetic, which when broken down cause microplastics to enter the oceans creating a toxic environment for marine life (but keep using those paper straws). In the era of greenwashing, it’s difficult to pinpoint where true progress has been made.

In 2020, Ordre conducted a research project measuring carbon emissions during four fashion weeks (New York, Paris, Milan, and London). It was discovered that 241,000 tons of carbon was emitted by the travel during that time, which is the equivalent to 51,000 cars on the road, lighting up Times Square in New York for 58 years, and lighting up the Eiffel Tower for 3,060 years.

The pandemic sent the industry into a frenzy – with brands scurrying about to figure out how to reach audiences from a distance and designers scrambling to showcase their collections without fashion shows. Isolation spurred innovation. Hanifa, a contemporary women’s brand founded by Anifa Mvuemba, had its digital fashion show in 2020 on Instagram. The same year, Helsinki Fashion Week took an experimental approach to the event by hosting it in Digital Village, a social metaverse.

The industry had finally come to the conclusion (one that we all have been screaming at the top of our lungs for quite some time) that the industry, as it stands today, is not sustainable. We don’t need alternatives. We need an entirely new way of doing things – from production to showcase.

Fashion of Tomorrow

To be clear: Digital fashion is not a separate entity from physical fashion, but an addition. Physical clothes are a need and will never be replaced. What can be replaced, however, is how physical clothes are made.

Digital fashion offers a solution to the inherently toxic and wasteful practices used in the production process of clothing today. Instead of shipping samples back-and-forth between designers and manufacturers or mass-producing pieces of clothing with the hopes that people will buy them, brands and designers use 3D technology to visualize the garments prior to production – saving time, money, reducing waste and reducing the exploitation of workers. Conducting business this way changes the business model completely, making demand for the garment priority over production. Swedish fashion company, Atacac, has a process in which sales happen before production, presenting the garments virtually before sampling using demand to determine how much of an item is made.

Digital clothing has the potential to revolutionize the way we express ourselves by offering tools to participate in this free-form of expression that is not limited by the physical – it doesn’t have to be practical. You don’t have to wear an oversized blazer, a white tee, 90s jeans and a pair of New Balance 550s (seriously, why does everyone like the grey ones so much?). Now, you can stand up and stand out with an avant-garde digital garment or if you’re in the mood to actually be something else, like a fire-breathing dragon decked out in Balenciaga, that is also possible. We can truly be anything we want to be at any time and we have the variety of options to do so. Or at least, that’s the hope. Considering our virtual avatars act as “us”, it is important that various clothing options, from everyday outfits to simply bizarre, are available for community members to choose from.

The Fabricant, the world’s first digital-only fashion house, sees digital fashion as a form of democratizing the fashion industry by giving everyone “the fashion industry on their hard drive.” Software used in the digital process – CLO, CLO 3D, Blendr, Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator – gives designers and creators the permission to visualize, experiment and create without the lingering thought of time, money, and ecological footprint.

One-Size-Fits-All Solution?

            That’s a hard no. Talking about digital fashion in terms of luxury gaming skins, avant-garde adorned Instagram photos, or NFTs oversimplifies the impact digital fashion will have on the industry and society at large. Although the main talking points in support of digital fashion are sustainability, inclusivity, and accessibility – there are several challenges that need to be addressed, such as the skills gap between traditional fashion designers and digital designers as well as ties between capitalism and overconsumption. The hard truth about innovation is that it may be beneficial for most, but not all. Technology can only take us so far. If we are serious about creating a better industry, it is important that we remain focused on tangible benefits and find ways to carry each other forward into the next frontier.