An Intro to Digital Fashion

I’ve been a massive fan of video games since I can remember, playing Star Wars Battlefront II on my XBOX classic in my sisters room when I was 7 to then video game development in college some 10 years later. Many of my favourite games over the years have been so good because they allow you to escape reality, you can fly through space, fight aliens or relive life in the stone age, all through a screen. The excitement still gets to me to this day… Something that I’ve been excited to see evolve and develop through the pandemic was fashions ways of innovating virtual and augmented reality to reach their consumers in ways we’ve never seen and well I think about ¾ years before we were all expecting them to, but their hand was forced to do so and I think its been such a positive action to do so.

Firstly, we’ll start with virtual reality, this in its simplest form is an immersive experience in which you are transported to a new reality that has no bearing on the physical world around you, good examples of this would be using an oculus rift headset that have been around for a decade now, this technology isn’t necessarily ‘new’ per say. But this has been greatly enhanced by the power our phones have, so it’s more readily available on more technologies. Brands within fashion have used this to great success, holding VR fashion shows and showing more conceptual and innovative designs through Decentraland…

“The first fully decentralized world, Decentraland is controlled via the DAO, which owns the most important smart contracts and assets of Decentraland. Via the DAO, you decide and vote on how the world works.” (Decentraland, 2022)

This has many aspects to it, including digital real estate (yes, it’s exactly what it sounds like), digital building and avatar creation. A re-occurring theme to virtual and digital fashion is the openness and the ability for anyone and everyone who is willing, to participate in the building blocks of the future, hence why we’re here today, to hopefully educate and let you know things you didn’t know before, because more the merrier when it comes to this digital malarky, in my opinion.

Another aspect to digital reality is augmented reality (AR), this is something that we’ve all been partaking in whether know or not, have you ever used a filter that alters your face on Snapchat or Insta? Something that maybe adds funny animal ears or makes your hair grey? Sadly I’m not going to need a filter for that one soon…

An image showing Maison Margeila’s fashion show in 2018, featuring VR headsets. (Hartmans, 2018

This image is from Clo-Z and shows an augmented reality digital outfit (McDowell, 2021) That is augmented reality, something digital that appears in the physical world in front of you, through a phone screen or other similar technologies. One of my favourite examples of this has been previously mentioned in this book, when we discussed the IoDF and their virtual showroom that was completely available through an Instagram filter. This technology has also been used many brands, one of the more famous brands being Gucci and their collection of clothing to try on through Snapchat specifically. This has also opened a new way of purchasing clothing, with Snapchat announcing that “Shoppers can then purchase the shoes directly from the app using Snapchat’s ‘Shop Now’ button.” (Stevens, 2020). This has a further knock-on effects that helps the likes of Gucci and other luxury brands, reaching a younger audience, gaining affiliation with younger generations whilst their current consumer loses some disposable income or moves on to other things.

We’ve discussed the basic idea of digital fashion and how it has been shaped in recent years through a more direct transfer from physical to digital, but how does it revolutionise fashion? How does digital fashion differ from the physical world? Well, one of the biggest worldwide trends of the past 2 years has been cryptocurrency and NFT’s, but what are they exactly and what does this have to do with fashion?

Something that seems to be a priority for everything and every brand is money, as well, it does make the world go round. The use of Crypto and NFT’s add a new way of monetising digital fashion assets, this is because NFTs’a re essentially a digital piece of art that can fluctuate in price and has a watermark built in to it to stop it from being simply copied or duplicated. A good comparison would be a trading card for example, like a Pokémon or Match Attax card, each one has a unique image/ code that makes it unique to its owner and only they can truly own that certain card. Some cards are more expensive than others because of their rarity, and also their appearance, a more unique looking NFT will be more expensive and finally the quality of the NFT is important, that the art is of the highest quality in terms of pixelation etc.

Cryptocurrency comes into this because using a certain currency (Ethereum) you can buy these NFT’s as their currency is one of the most refined and also has a public blockchain history available, this basically means it’s very easy to see history of transactions and ownership of their NFT’s. This has in very recent news been changed, for more mainstream participation, a company based in Crypto trading called Moonpay has made strides forward to aid non crypto funded NFT purchases. Ceo of Moonpay, Ivan Soto-Wright had this to say on the breakthrough “Right now, the NFT market is limited to the hundreds of millions of people who own cryptocurrency. MoonPay’s NFT Checkout has just opened the door to billions more who own credit cards by making ownership both simple and fast.” (CNBCTV18, 2022). This shows the step towards NFT’s becoming a more accessible and well known commodity amongst not just tech-savvy kids but people who enjoy art in more traditional forms and maybe we’ll see NFT’s in sports or TV somehow. I think this is the exciting aspect of NFT’s and crypto, the ideas are new, and new can be scary but it can also yield so many more possibilities and angles to industries and creativity that we haven’t seen before, which is very exciting.

This has been a subject that has had me read and re-read a lot of articles/ podcasts and reports to understand the idea of NFT’s and Cryptocurrency. It’s a new world for a lot of people and ever the optimist, I’m always looking to try and make it easier for people to understand and grasp for themselves because I think it has an amazing potential and could be something that truly see the fashion industry boom again in a totally different way to ever before.