‘Digital fashion’ is a catch-all term signifying an increasingly diverse range of technologically innovative practices within fashion design, garment technology, and fashion marketing. The field encompasses everything from the customisable clothing worn by user avatars within gaming subcultures to collectable digital versions of luxury couture. Digital fashion blurs the boundaries between the real and the virtual, via the use of increasingly sophisticated augmented reality [AR], virtual reality [VR], and extended reality [XR] technology. The term also refers to new forms of fashion consumption and usership within the latest iteration of the internet, commonly known as Web3. Much, but certainly not all, digital fashion is minted on the blockchain and traded as non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. Web3 is the latest iteration of the internet, built upon the cryptocurrency blockchain, which aspires to be decentralised from corporate or state control. Similarly, digital fashion enthusiasts advocate for a decentralised fashion industry, where creatives no longer depend on the ‘big four’ Western fashion capitals. In this vein, the Dutch digital fashion collective The Fabricant (discussed below), who self-identify as a ‘digital atelier’, promise to help ‘build a new fashion industry where everybody participates and profits’. Building from this, digital fashion has also become a speculative field of fashion futures, whose questions transcend those normally raised by commercial design.
Yet, for all its radical, decentralising spirit, digital fashion is also a lucrative corporate space, dominated by predatory multinational brands eagerly seeking new markets to monopolise. Currently, digital fashion is one of the fastest growth areas within the creative industries, projected to be worth $4.8bn globally by 2031. There are unprecedented opportunities for new startups to become rapidly successful. Almost on a monthly basis, a new software application, or multi-million-dollar technology, rationalises, accelerates, challenges, or redefines the established practices of the fashion industry. A specialist think tank called The Institute of Digital Fashion was established in 2020. Based in Belgium, The Digital Fashion Group have already launched their own online academy and are developing partnerships with universities to explore future models of digital fashion education. The most heralded success story in digital fashion is the digital footwear company RTFKT [pronounced ‘artefact’]. The company was purchased by Nike, within two years of startup, for an undisclosed sum rumoured to exceed $1bn. The success of RTFKT and The Fabricant has inspired many copycat projects and many predatory investors. The digital fashion sector currently resembles the silicon valley boom of the 1970s and 80s. Indeed, the success of the digital fashion sector is partially built upon the NFT boom of 2021, where .jpegs made digital artists like Beeple sold for millions of dollars. Increasingly, digital fashion is where the bright young things of fashion design join forces with luxury brands, venture capitalists, cryptocurrency experts, coders, and occasionally cyber-theorists, in a melange which includes techno-utopianism, financial speculation, and conspicuous consumption in equal measure.
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CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)