Try on digital clothes in a physical store

Feel like trying on some digital clothing? Then you should head to the London pop-up store Hot Second between the 19 and 21 of November, where you can dress up in garments from The Fabricant, Carlings and Christopher Raeburn, Vogue Business reports. Inside pods equipped with a camera, projector and ”magic mirror”, visitors get to dress up in digital get-ups and take home a digital image of themselves in the clothes.
This is an initiative from Holition and Aaro Murphy funded by university lecturer and futurist Karinna Nobbs, to study how shoppers react to themselves in digital clothes.

Digital design only for Tommy Hilfiger

Forget design sketches on paper and physical samples sent to showrooms. From now on, Tommy Hilfiger’ s design process goes completely digital. The idea is that  by 2021, the majority of  their clothes will remain digital until they are actually sold or appear on the runway, Vogue Business reports. The expectation is that the digital process will decrease waste, save money and speed up the going to market-process, Vogue Business reports.
This is highly interesting as this method has been fairly absent from the fashion world so far, with just a few of exceptions such as Swedish fashion brand Atacac.
But change is coming, and it’s coming in the wake of climate change and the growing insight within the industry that the means of production has to transform in a big way.
As for the Tommy Hilfiger brand, they also harbour plans to try digital clothing. The plan is to let customers try on clothes in shop windows, using Augmented Reality or buy digital versions of the clothes to dress online avatars.

 

 

Luxury brands team up to digitize physical clothing

Gucci is doing it. So is Prada and Louis Vuitton. Digitizing physical clothing that is, with the goal of testing how digital clothing perform.
A new gaming app premiered about a week ago. It’s called Drest and there users can dress photo realistic avatars in styling challenges. The startup have so far recruited 100 brands, apart from the aforementioned Gucci, Prada and Louis Vuitton, also Stella McCartney, Valentino and Burberry and many others. And more are to come before the official launch in 2020, Vouge Business reports.
App games and video games are now seen as as a way to reach consumers, since players are already used to dressing their avatars digitally. Louis Vuitton recently actually became the first luxury brand to enter a game. In ”League of Legends” they offered in-game ”skins” and a corresponding collection designed by Nicolas Ghesquière.
Unfortunately it seems like brands are primarily using this new approach to fashion to drive sales of physical products, rather than creating virtual clothing collections. In Drest, users can then buy the clothes they dressed the avatar in, at online luxury retail platform Farfetch.
I think it’s a real pity to use this opportunity for that, in times of climate crisis and the fashion industry’s need to drastically change. Why not grab the chance to try something new?
Let’s hope the experts are right when they claim that digital clothing will become more popular eventually.

Fashion and gaming: a new (lucrative) relationship

Think you’ve got it covered because you use social media to target your audience? Think again. Fact is, the gaming world might be an even better bet. Although gaming has been a huge sector in entertainment for years it has so far not been seen as sector for the fashion industry to invest in, according to an article in fashion tech magazine Interlaced. But consumer behaviours are bringing gaming to the mainstream and its global revenue was according to BBH Labs, a research and development team at creative agency BBH, bigger than the movie and music industries together. And on top of that, more popular than Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat. 
On September 11th, Interlaced is teaming up with experimental retail concept Lone Design Club (LCD) in London’s Covent Garden for a panel discussion about this potential merging of fashion and gaming. 
The panel consisting of fashion designers, creative technologists and marketing directors will, among other things, discuss how fashion brands can create products for avatars and gaming and how digital-only products can change how we think about fashion production and sustainability. 

 

Using blockchain to bring the limited edition concept to the digital world

Is authentication the next application area for blockchain in fashion?
Perhaps.
Imagine buying a piece of clothing and then bringing a digital representation of that garment into a video game. Now a digital item, it would be possible to copy it multiple times, right? But then imagine making that garment a one of a kind, a part of a limited edition collection, and to bring actual ownership to it.
That is what street wear brand XTERAT_ is doing, using blockchain technology. To achieve it they use NFT:s, non-fungible tokens, meaning a digital token that represents something unique. In other words, a way to prove that a digital item of some kind, is unique.
When it comes to XTERAT_’s clothing, it allow buyers to prove the authenticity of the products, for instance that the product has previously been owned by a celebrity.
XTERAT_ are not alone in this quest, as FashNerd reports. Louis Vuitton have already launched their Aura platform with its prime goal to authenticate luxury goods. Lukso is a blockchain ecosystem designed for the fashion industry and Provenance has used it to help brands build trust through transparency concerning the production history of the clothes.
It will be thrilling to see how this develops onwards.

Could digital clothing be the next big thing?

Clothing collections that exists only on the digital realm? It might sound strange, but in fact, it’s already a thing. Norwegian clothing retailer Carlings actually launched a digital collection back in November, and it sold out in a week, according to Vogue Business. Digital designers manipulated customer photos to make it appear like they actually wore the 19 genderless, sizeless items. And apparently they are already planning a second collection.
Although gamers have been spending real money on digital clothing for years, doing it irl might seem odd. But in fact, as people live a large portion of their lives online and and also have concerns about fashion’s impact on the environment, these ideas might actually start making sense in the future.
We are quite far from this being commonplace, though. Fashion brands in general are not yet equipped to deal with 3D modeling, and creating these collections so far remains a slow and expensive process.