My Digital Fashion Journey... By Luke Owen
An Intro to New Codes
The fashion industry is broken, everywhere we turn, whether it be at fast fashion or luxury market levels, brands are losing what they once were, are falling behind the curve of where technology and the rest of the creative world are going, From digital fashion to new ways of consuming, we need to, as a collective find new ways to express individuality and make our own mark on fashion. This calls for New Codes and with this, New Beginnings… New Codes is the creation and visualisation of a virtual based communication and marketing methodology for streetwear brands within the high end and luxury market levels. Focusing on creating digital assets best suited for each individual brands, whether that be a collection of digital imagery or short form media content for social platforms. New Codes aims to create a methodology that can be applied to multiples brands with different values and stories. Personally, I’ve always had an affiliation with technology, through my love for video games and also my previous education in Video Games Media creation course at college. The digital world has always been interesting and fascinating to me, and I think the collision of fashion and gaming has massive potential to change both industries in a massive way in the very near future. This is because we as a society and the younger generations especially are more technologically and digitally orientated, having shorter and more needy attention spans that require, more stimulating and fulfilling content than previous generations.
The New Codes library This project will have multiple aspects and avenues of research and content to set the scene of my final product, there will be the following: Digital fashion guide – This book is to organise and contextualise my knowledge of the digital world and the digital fashion industry, looking at the new realities we’re living in, virtual and augmented. As well as this, I’ll talk about NFT’s and how these will have an impact on the fashion industry alongside other industries. This book will help with reading further parts of my process down the line. History of Streetwear – This is a bit of self-indulgence… Streetwear is a busy market and I think there’s a lot to be understood and a lot of history that is highly influential to me and my work, so this book will focus on times, brands, designers and works that have had a subtle impact on my work. This will also touch upon brands like Palace and Yohji to see what their competitors and or surroundings look like.
Brand interrogation – The purpose of this is to gain an understanding of how I’m going to present New Codes moving forward, from the books themselves to my social media presence as well, looking at secondary imagery and research to do this and conduct the 20x20 method to deduct keywords and themes to my work. Consumer Profile – This consumer profile would look at my target generation in Gen Alpha as a whole to identify sweeping marketing techniques and really looking at the future landscape of fashion to better understand the generation as a whole. Then I will look into each Palace and Yohji to breakdown their current audience and how they can either gain more or help bring their current audiences in to the digital fashion world. Photoshoot brief – This brief will be an aid for the photoshoot I will be conducting near the end of my project and will contain primary and secondary imagery to support my models and team during the shoot. This will also contain our mission statement and what we aim to achieve during the shoot and the project as a whole. Test and primary book – Throughout my project there will be many successful attempts (hopefully) at gatherings primary imagery and workings, building my project up through research and development. Final Campaign book - Featuring the work for both Palace and Yohji Yamamoto, showing final images and developments through my primary work.
Brand Me & 360˚ Campaign
Something that inspired this project was my love for streetwear, the idea that everything we wear on a day to day basis means and has subliminal messages that mean different things to different groups of people. Streetwear is full of subtle and unwritten rules or ideals that many people follow, for example, wearing Nike sneakers with Adidas socks? Absolutely not. Jordan 1 Mids better than Jordan 1 Highs? Don’t be ridiculous. During the past 5/6 years, I’ve navigating and curating my own way through this streetwear world, building a wardrobe based off brands like Palace, Nike and Off-White. Choosing and making outfits that contain brands with similar ideologies or had collaborated with each other once upon a time, but this came with an overly complicated and frankly unnecessary diagram/ chart showing brands that I could and couldn’t wear together. I knew from research and my passion for streetwear that is was the area I wanted to look at and solve, coupled with my love for digital things/ video games, well it just makes itself doesn’t it really, digital streetwear to save use from this uniformity within the industry that people are becoming increasingly wary of. During the previous module I changed my thinking an perception of streetwear and saw more and more value in the luxury and conceptual market levels in terms of the stories they can tell and how this influences all the levels below via a trickle down effect. So I chose to look at Yohji Yamamoto as a result of this thinking and educated myself on conceptual storytelling and how this can be translated into palatable content for a new consumer that is more used to and preferred to digital content. For this project I’ll be conducting further research and then producing primary content based off this that aligns with this new consumer, predicting how they consume not just fashion, but marketing campaigns and brand communications in general.
Something that is prevalent within fashion is the uniformity and fear of standing out within the younger generations, as many people follow trends and styles because they don’t want to be different or they don’t want to be seen as the odd one out, of course in more fashion devoted audiences we see creative and unique styles more but in terms of the generation population, there is a need for validation on social media by influencers or peers more than ever before. Mental health is a massive talking point within Generation Z an example of a statistic taken about Gen Z mental health would be “Women Gen Zers are more stressed, with 53% reporting anxiety and sadness almost all the time, compared to 42% of men.” (Georgiev, 2022). This is a stat that also comes down to exposure to other people’s lives on social media who have had different opportunities etc to ourselves so we judge our style, success, happiness on theirs which is a sad reality of the youth today. This comes with research from my previous project looking at the how Generation Alpha might turn a corner, and might be a change in this trend which would suit my more creative and outward facing content that I want to create. Gen Alpha are predicted to be more outgoing than Gen Z so I think creating something more creative and content that makes my consumers think more and build an emotional or relatable attachment with. This comes with an example of what I believe to be the uniform of streetwear today, on the page to the left of this text, this has been taken from my brand interrogation which we will cover in the next section of this book.
This is a moodboard taken from my ‘Brand Interrogation’ think viusally describes uniformity within fashion and more specifically streetwear.
Has New Codes changed?
During my 360 campaign, one of my key points was that I wanted to create a new uniform or a new meaning to the word itself, can we create something new with a more minimalism approach that brings something new to the metaverse that isn’t something too bright or overtly loud, but I think after narrowing down how I want to approach digital fashion, this has changed, ever so slightly… As I’ve referenced from my previous work, I’ve looked at conceptual fashion and how this has changed my perspective on streetwear as a whole and has evolved how I dress myself and how I create my work, but I think I wanted to broaden my approach to the whole of streetwear. How New Codes has evolved from one project to the next is the application of it on the whole streetwear market, not just conceptual and luxury streetwear. The idea of the conceptual minimalism tones are something that I think my branding will be through my Instagram and website, but in terms of content created on brands, I think I’m going to look at and create content for multiple brands at different levels that have different marketing areas and techniques as I think this can broaden my horizons moving forward so to speak. This image shows 5 different aspects of streetwear, from left to right, outfits from Palace, A cold Wall, Yohji Yamamoto, By Parra and Dickies. These show different styles and aesthetics but I’ve edited them giving them a different element that they didn’t have before that can be related to each other.
Brand Interrogation
Something I’ve conducted to help figure and configure my branding has been my brand interrogation, this can be found as it’s own entity on my Issuu page. The intention of this book was to create an aesthetic or discover what New Codes would appear as on social pages like Instagram and Tiktok. For this, I chose words that I thought related to my project and ideas that I liked the sound of as well as what I think my new consumer would react best to in terms of mentally challenging and engaging digital natives of the future. Furthermore, I think this was an important process to go through as well as understanding my brand identifiers and beliefs, I got a visual understanding of what I wanted to create moving forward and I will incorporate the ideas of concept, shape, digital and minimalism within my marketing methodology. Another positive of this process is the other inspirations I’ve taken from this, something I mention in the book itself in the shape page, is how I’ve taken ideas from architecture and not just fashion but other creative industries which has been a trend within fashion for years as well, with the likes of Virgil Abloh also taking inspiration from architecture and engineering throughout his own development.
“I wanted to build skyscrapers because I figured if you could build the tallest building, you could design a spoon, you know?” Virgil Abloh talking to GQ in 2016 (Baron, 2016) For my development, I think this process was extremely helpful and something I will continue to use moving forward for reference as I believe that this can be developed further in terms of adding or changing words if necessary and then thus re-evaluating any information or take-aways. On the right are some elements taken from my Brand Interrogation book.
A History of Streetwear
As you can probably tell from my work so far, streetwear is where my heart is at, and it runs throughout all of my work and it inspired New Codes at the very beginning of my work. But what is streetwear? It’s a massive market in which many different brands/ designers and creatives sit and I think it’s the most interesting aspect of fashion as it encompasses so much and also has such a rich and enriched history. This book’s intention was to delve in to this history and understand where streetwear came from and where it is going. Throughout this research I discovered many interesting topics and information, something that I found really interesting was the history of streetwear in Japan and how that culture was moulded and formed through American influence and Japanese innovation. This methodology is similar to what I’m trying to achieve within this project, capturing something from culture/ fashion and bringing it forward through other innovations from a different culture/ industry. The way Japanese fashion juxtaposed western culture and fashion was really interesting to read about and even looking at Kawakubo and Yamamoto debuting at Paris in 81’ was an extremely interesting read. Past this, I looked at the other biggest streetwear brands today and the why’s behind this in terms of what makes them successful and is this something that can be utilised for what I want to achieve. For example, I looked at Supreme and their incredible grasp on streetwear and why this is, with the answer being an undeniable brand identity that is recognisable for so many people not just in fashion but in other cultures as well. A quote that I believe sums up Supreme well is the following by James Jebbia talking to Vogue:
“A Supreme drop, for those who haven’t experienced it, is an event. “We can have a leather jacket for $1,500, and if it’s a good value, young people will understand that,” Jebbia says. “But we also want to have the feeling that this won’t be here in a month. When I grew up, I think everybody felt that way. It’s like, If I love this, it may not be here, so I should buy it.” (Sullivan, 2017) The reference images are a collection of Jun Takahashi’s work and a collection of 80’s inspired streetwear brands and images taken from chapters within the book itself.
On a different vein, I looked at New Balance and I thought they offered a completely different insight and tactic to their business plan. This plan being to encourage and grow on trends based off their brand already, keeping faithful to current consumers and also supplying consumers through trends like the dad trainer or collaborating with Aime Leon Dore to create excitement and show a different side to NB which we haven’t seen on a big level before or at least in recent history. This became something that brought two different markets together and this is something that we’ve seen a lot of brands doing in the past couple of years specifically. I think this is something that New Codes can be seen doing, looking at the collision of two mass markets, that of the fashion market and the video game industry. As you can gain brand loyalty and ultimately dictate the perception of the industry you’re introducing them to as you’re the first port of call for that opinion.
Near the end of this book, I looked specifically at conceptual streetwear and what this looks like in comparison to the other brands and designers I’ve looked at so far. The two main figures were Craig Green and Yohji Yamamoto as I think they have super interesting insights, opinions and work in general. Something I’ve been gaining interest in the further I go in to this project is the storytelling aspect of every brand and how this is totally different from one to another, at least for brands worth looking at. This storytelling is something that is really crucial moving forward as communication on social platforms and in modern technology needs to adhere to younger generations and their shorter attention span than the generations before them.
Exploring Digital Fashion Digital fashion is an amazing topic and something that is always growing and evolving everyday through many brands and companies and new creatives but because of this, there’s always new aspects to understand and new terminology to learn so something I wanted to delve into is creating a digital guide that can go with my work to help translate digital fashion for any readers. I’d conducted research in to many aspects of digital fashion including augmented reality, virtual reality and NFT’s as I think these are some of the most important parts to understand. This is because brands are mainly using this media types to break into digital fashion and the metaverse as a whole. Advancing this forward, I created a keyword bank and defined these to help the understanding and reading of the rest of my work, so further down the line in other sections of this book or in other books entirely, I don’t have to repeat definitions or explanations for my reader. After this, I wrote about the previous three aspects of digital fashion I’ve mentioned and what they mean in a general sense, and then what I think they can be used for in fashion now or in the future. To support my personal understanding, I looked at brands or companies using this methods now and I think it’s interesting to see their consumer and how they’re further marketing through these ways as this is a crucial aspect of my whole project. I found a lot of inspiration through this book as well as important reading as well. Some of this inspiration was green screen technology as I think this is really interesting and something that doesn’t get spoken about enough. After researching into how this works, I found a potential niche that I can enter or look at recreating. Moving forward, I’m going to explore how I can create the illusion of 3D digital modelled assets but using physical clothing in reality that is worn by someone wearing a green suit. I want to do this because it creates something more real, and something that I can animate more easily, not limited by my digital modelling skills or by what my computer can make. Instead, I can film all of this footage primary and then edit via after effects to make it seem digital, but in a more organic and real way.
Consumer Profile
Something I’ve touched upon already is my consumer and who I think this is in terms of generations, but to further this research into generational tendencies and values, I created a general consumer profile with visuals and written research for reference whilst creating my work moving forward as this can give me an idea of what type of content to create as well as how to create this for maximum effect. Through my research I focused on the digital information and characteristics of Gen Alpha as this is the market and space in which I’m going into. This research looked at how we consume online content at the moment, via video games and social media. This research mainly looked at how monetarily, brands make money through subscriptions and Instagram as I think these are super relevant platforms at the moment. Furthermore, I looked at Meta and how they’re changing Instagram to make it more business orientated and to create an environment in which businesses and influences solely operate, I think this is to compete with other monetised platforms like Patreon and Paypal who both offer easy payment schemes and services. After talking about my general consumer, I go in-depth about my two consumers for my chosen brands I’ve decided to apply New Codes to. These brands being Yohji Yamamoto and Palace Skateboards and here in this section I go in to depth about why I’ve chosen both and how I think their consumers are different. But this also comes with its similarities as well as parallels that can be drawn in terms of digital techniques and approaches that I think can suit both. For a full in-depth look, my book will be available on Issuu alongside any other content I’ve made so far.
Test Shoots & Production After conducting research into streetwear, digital fashion and my consumer profiles, it was time to start conducting primary shoots based off this. Creating digital fashion out of real life assets and seeing what would happen. Not going to lie, horrendous images of me in a morph suit are going to be shown, so be nice…
These first shots are from my first primary shoot and are the raw captures from this, shows just the setup from my work and how this looks. On the right are some of the final pictures of how the technology works, this was great for also capturing film and moving image.
For purposes of my journey, I’m going to show a collection of images from my test shoots over the following pages but they are described and presented in much more depth in my book dedicated to my primary imagery.
Capturing a mixture of film and imagery has been a challenge and definitely a learning curve in terms of how to get the most out of how I can capture both at the same time or plan separate shoots for either/ or. With my more developed work, I began to create more finalised pieces and poster esque images to give more contextual to the work itself. This has also lead to finalising what I wanted to capture with a final shoot planned in terms of video to photo ratio content. Moving forward, I think the green screen technology is best used on video so moving forward I want to keep making moving content because I think this shows more depth and storytelling than simply still images.
Final Shoot Brief After conducting research, looking at consumers and then testing and collecting primary imagery, I felt it was time to plan and stage a final shoot in which I elevated everything I’ve done further and create some tangible to create a marketing and communications campaign around for both Palace and Yohji Yamamoto. I’d never written or conducted a photoshoot brief before so it was refreshing to do something completely new and interesting to me and I learned a lot about what needs to be included, what doesn’t need to be included and how to present these things. I started off by describing what New Codes is and our mission statement so to speak so the team working with me and the models know what’s going on and can contribute ideas or help brainstorm any problem-solving we may need to do. After this, I created moodboards for the location/ backdrop, the styling within the shoot and poses/ shots we can recreate from my inspirations within streetwear already. For this shoot, I have 3 models ready who are happy and understand the demands of wearing a green morph suit and running around for a bit which is what my shoot will be. Capturing more organic and natural human movement, but turning this into digital creations is the goal and something that I thought would aid this is having multiple models so they can interact with each other and create a more natural and candid vibe to the imagery as well as making for more interesting video content. This is one of the inspiration images for the filming and effect I’m going for...
Over the previous pages are some example of the moodboards I’ve made to support the models and people within the shoot. Speaking of the other people in the shoot, I plan on having 2 supporting people with m to assist with any styling changes and capture more video content for the final video as well as capturing behind the scenes content to show the process we’re going through to create this film. Something I needed to advance from was capturing content via models and taking up a creative director roles oppose to just capturing imagery on myself as this shows and is a more natural progression and something, that moving into the industry I’m going to have to do. During this final major project I’m learning and picking up new skills in many areas that I think will really help me through the creative processes within the industry both working for brands and as a freelance.
Final Shoot and my Final Product
Throughout my journey, I’ve been tackling different aspects at a time and creating content based on these developments and this has lead to a final shoot that has produced content that suits all of the previous work put together. This shoot was to capture imagery and video to create NFT’s, videos both long and short and imagery to be posted on social media like Tiktok and Instagram. During my shoot, we captured content in a car park, one because it was raining and two because it gives a modern but real background that lets us control the lighting within the shoot as for the green screen etch this is really important and it also helps with keeping away from members of the public and or filming people/ places without permission. Before we continue I just want to shoutout the security guard at the car park for letting us shoot there, appreciate you x The following is imagery from my final shoot, both raw and edited and I will show some video content but for that, my Instagram is the best place to view this.
Here you can see some of the behind the scenes and how we shot the images as well as the final edited images captured for the campaigns for Palace especially, the styling and concept direction was mainly towards Palace as I’ve found Yohji needed more a digital edit on some images I already produced earlier on in the test shooting phase. I’m extremely happy with how the final images came out as they didn’t need to be edited too much and juts needed the green screen effect on as well as some filters on photoshop to make the images seem a tad more digitalised. On the next page is an example of some of the video content I captured and will produce a short film with, showing the potential of New Codes and where it can possibly go. It all started with a morph suit and a dream, and look how far its come…
This project will be part of my launch into industry and will be the main body of work in my CV’s and applications for jobs within fashion. As well as creating something tangible to present, after consideration I’ve decided to create an alias to work under within the industry, this is Wonderman Studios as it does represent something futuristic and I want to pave a way in the digital fashion space and I think this describes it pretty well.
The origin of the name for me was the song by Tinie Tempah featuring Ellie Goulding called ‘Wonderman’ and the narrative is about someone going into space and exploring the unknown and the working up to this moment, which I think is pretty apt for what I want to do moving forward in the industry. Something I wanted to focus on was my personal branding and how I present myself through the project and when I move into industry. This is where the experience from other projects throughout my degree have helped, especially working on the branding for the Planet 204 within the Contemporary Fashion Business project with the University itself. This is something that is ongoing and has been a personal goal to create a strong branding story, and I believe I can use this as well within my individual endeavours on this final major project. In this section. I’m going to look at branding that I think I’m going to move forward with, and research into which aesthetic/ themes will suit my market level, market area and consumer. I’ll be referring to research I’ve conducted into streetwear and the metaverse in my research books that can be found within this collection of books for the New Codes project. This will focus on the Instagram and final video and how these will be made from and towards an aesthetic and branding I think best promotes myself and New Codes.
This final image is taken from my freelance account, posting my final FMP work which shows a multitude of digital skills and this is something that was important to show, as this is my industry facing account that I will show brands and companies I want to work for in the future. The important aspects to show were video skills, both in filming and editing skills as well as digital content creation and still image creation. The branding for this page was important as it is my first selling point in the industry, so the idea behind the first 9 tiles was, as I’ve stated to show as many skills as I could and tell people what I was about and what ‘New Codes’ is essentially both through an explanation and through visual content. The branding for this page is monochrome as I believe I wanted to keep it as minimalistic as possible so the content it features, stands out as much as possible and makes it pop so to speak. All of my posts on this account are going to travel in in groups of three as I believe it makes for more in-depth and interesting viewing for visitors to the page itself as well as my content on the discovery pages and hashtag pages. This page is also for any work that I get in the industry after I leave uni and will be a first port of call for my portfolio so to speak ahead of my already made personal website www.Lukeowenfashion.com (I’ve already bought this domain for a year so it’s not changing until that year is up).
For my final product, I’m going to have 2 final videos, Instagram content and the New Codes book collection that sums up my research and development of New Codes and how its grown over the past 4 months. This has been a challenging and mentally tough process as trying to find my gap in the market and create something tangible that represents and conceptualises a potential space for me in the fashion industry has come with it’s challenges and obstacles but I’ve also gained a lot of different and useful skills. As well as this, I’ve also gained an understanding of how I might operate within the industry itself, through creating my social media presence and alias in ‘Wonderman Studios’ and how this can help with obtaining freelance work as well as full time work. Moving forward, I will undertake more digital developments in my own time to further my skillset and showcase this on my Instagram for potential clients to see in the future.
Thank you for reading and coming on this journey with me...
References
Baron, Z. (2016, August 1). The Life of Virgil Abloh. Retrieved from GQ: https:// www.gq.com/story/virgil-abloh-profile Georgiev, D. (2022, January 19). Gen Z Statistics – What We Know About the New Generation. Retrieved from Review42: https://review42.com/resources/ gen-z-statistics/#:~:text=Eye%2DOpening%20Gen%20Z%20Statistics,Generation%20Z%20find%20ads%20disruptive. Sullivan, R. (2017, August 10). Charting the Rise of Supreme, From Cult Skate Shop to Fashion Superpower. Retrieved from Vogue: https://www.vogue.com/ article/history-of-supreme-skate-clothing-brand