Yahoo News These clothes aren’t real, they’re all digital: is this the future of fashion?
In May, businessman Richard Ma bought a dress for his wife, Mary.
The dress, which was called the Iridescence, cost him $9,500 and was silver and silky in its composition.
So much so that when it caught the light, it twinkled, as though the material was smiling at you.
By all definitions, it was a real show-stopper. A true jaw-dropper. An absolute head-turner.
The only catch is that the dress Richard bought for Mary isn’t real.
It was designed by The Fabricant, the world’s first digital-only fashion house, where you can spend a small fortune on new clothes, but will never be able to wear them in real life.
The Fabricant was founded in January 2018 by Finnish animator Kerry Murphy, who was inspired by fashion student, Amber Slooten’s all-digital graduate portfolio, which was modelled by holograms.
Fast-forward six months and Slooten had joined Murphy in his pursuit of digital, sartorial excellence.
“I was attracted to her passion and openness to try new things. I knew I could visualise her fashion designs in a much more scaled and technically-enhanced manner,” Murphy explains.
The zeitgeist, in case you’ve been living under a rock, is on sustainability. How we can be more sustainable now, in the future, and just how we have been so unsustainable up until this point?
For fashion is faster than ever – Zara takes designs from the drawing board to store in just five weeks – but the innovation of how clothes are produced has not managed to keep up with how rapidly they’re marketed and consumed.
Perhaps this is where digital clothing – which, naturally, creates zero waste – could be the solution to the world’s toxic relationship with disposable fashion.
Certainly the notion of sustainability is what inspired Scandinavian brand Carlings to launch their first digital-only range in October last year.
“The fashion industry is in trouble, we all have to understand that and seek solutions,” Carlings’ CEO Ronny Mikalsen candidly states. “The issue is that a lot of retailers are targeting sustainability but they’re not properly engaging, they’re just talking at you.”
His two daughters are digital natives of Gen Z themselves: perhaps it’s the way he’s analysed their consumption of social media that enabled him to envision the digital-only focus that Carlings developed.
“Once the world got introduced to social media, clothing production increased massively. It’s all about ‘the fake reality’ – we have to understand that people are buying things to wear once and be pictured in,” he explains. “They never wear these clothes again.”
The brand must have done something right: their first, and only, digital collection sold out within a week, proving there is a demand, or at least a curiosity, about digital fashion.
Stefanos Constantinou is one of those who purchased a digital outfit from Carlings, but for him it was less an issue of sustainability and more the “innovative” advertising campaign which “was addressed to everyone, no matter of gender or age” which attracted him.
He spent just short of £100 on a statement cobalt blue ensemble, which a team of 3-D designers then digitally altered to a photograph he submitted to them.
Once the digital items of clothing have been fitted to one picture, there’s a fee to have them fitted to another. So you, quite literally, get one picture in one outfit.
Constantinou explains: “I would think twice to buy a luxury item but I feel in this case the whole concept ticked all boxes.”
Mikalsen’s view on the torrent of single-wear fashion is holistic: he has observed that Gen Z feel the strong urge to “express themselves”, which is why Carlings’ digital collection comprised so many avant-garde pieces which they wouldn’t necessarily purchase in real life.
But could digital clothes ever truly compete with the fabric which we require to dress us?
Mikalsen is resolute: “This will never replace physical clothing. We will always need those items, but they’re not the items you want to express yourself, they don’t show the other side of your personality, which the younger generation are all keen to do.”
The same question is posed to Murphy, to which he steadfastly replies: “100 per cent they will. No doubt about it.”
It would appear that the jury’s out and the future of fashion really is unchartered territory.
