Will Digital Fashion Be The Fashion Fix?

When The Fabricant “Iridescence” dress was auctioned in May 2019, selling for $9,500, made global headlines, it marks the first digital couture garment on blockchain being sold.

©The Fabricant

It’s clear the digital fashion train has already left the station as luxury fashion brands like Burberry are designing gaming skins, Balenciaga launched a collection in the form of a bespoke video game, and digital influencers like Miquela are amassing millions of followers… But will it help to address or aggravate some of the fashion industry’s environmental issues?

But first,
What is digital fashion?

Digital fashion encompasses everything from live-streamed runway shows and digital collections you can buy in digital formats to digitalized production processes. Over the past year, our lives have become increasingly digitalized in ways that were once hard to imagine. It comes as little surprise then that digital fashion has also accelerated.

From a consumer point of view, we are all living digital lives, expressing ourselves in multi-media and virtual realities. When self-expression and the exploration of identity through the medium of fashion exists beyond the physical realm, it allows us to transcend the boundaries and limitations of reality; in the digital environment, we can express our multiple selves and explore new possibilities of who we might be.

#2
Digitalised Design Process

Given fashion’s role in the environmental crisis — projections show that the industry could be responsible for a quarter of the earth’s carbon budget by 2050 if nothing changes — the digital method of production and consumption presents an interesting and more sustainable opportunity, which allows brands to adjust their design process and production model, so as to reduce the company’s carbon emissions as well as to minimize over-production and stock-keeping.

The production and distribution of the fibers and garments used in fashion all contribute to different forms of environmental pollution, including water, air, and soil pollution. However now with digital fashion tools, design and development team could get a sense of the product itself, virtually and immediately, seeing garments in different colors, shapes and patterns without necessarily making them before deciding.

As a designer you can then email samples to your buyers or customers all over the world, showing them how the fabric will move. If you don’t like the color or fabric, you can change it. You can simulate all kinds of solutions using avatars, and even avatars based on your target audience’s preferences.

A study by Imperial College London found that these kinds of digital interventions can dramatically reduce the brand’s carbon footprint up to 30%. As a matter of fact, a growing number of fashion brands are shifting their design and development model to go digital. For instance, Peak Performance has teamed up with The Fabricant to replace their physical samples for digital ones improving the marketing process while eliminating unnecessary waste and allowing for internal quicker decision-making on colors and fit. The environmental impact reduction is estimated to be -96% decrease in carbon emissions from one physical sample to one digital equivalent.

#3
Diversity in fashion presentation

In addition, a new virtual way of fashion presentation provides the fashion industry with more opportunity and creativity to reduce the carbon emissions caused by offline fashion shows and trade shows. According to a report by Ordre, fashion buyers and designers alone contribute 241,000 tons of CO2 emissions a year by attending fashion weeks in New York, London, Paris, and Milan — more than the total emissions of a small country such as Saint Kitts and Nevis.

The emerging Congolese fashion brand Hanifa presented a groundbreaking fashion show in 2020 on social media via digital technologies - with no models, or any physical garments. Anifa Mvuemba, the founder of Hanifa, broadcasted a virtual fashion show through Instagram Live, in which each dress appeared in 3D format against a black background. The garments slowly walked towards the audience as if breathed into life. Viewers can easily see every detailed and structure of the designs at the comfort of their homes.

Animal Crossing definitely imagined the future of fashion in a digital world, with a lot of high-end fashion brand designs on their platform, where brands and designers can showcase their new collections in the form of downloadable clothes. In addition, recent years also witnessed a growing number of brands exploring the virtual world with fashion, including Gucci x Roblox, Louis Vuitton x League of Legends, and Balenciaga's collaboration with Fortnite, just to name a few.

#4
A possible on-demand production model

Digital fashion offers a potential solution to the fashion industry's notorious problem of overproduction via an on-demand production model. To give a better idea of the scale of over-production, as of August 2020, H&M alone was sitting on a pile of £3.2billion of unsold inventory, which is not only a waste of the finished products, but also all the resources that consumed to manufacture the garments, ship them and store them in warehouses, that’s a huge impact on the environment that could have been avoided. And now digital fashion provides the opportunity and potential to tackle the pre-consumer fashion waste.

“When sustainability and digital fashion go hand-in-hand, and everyone wins. For the brands, you’re producing garments only when a customer needs it.” Jules Dagonet, the head of the University for the Creative Arts explained, which announced the launch of its first digital-only fashion course in 2021.

Farfetch’s recently collaboration with DRESSX provides a great example of reducing the carbon footprint through on-demand production. “We created an only digital capsule collection and we did all the marketing digitally. Influencers were dressed digitally, nothing was produced. And just after the campaign, Farfetch collected the orders and the physical garments were produced on-demand. For the 40 garments created for this capsule collection, we saved 2,5 tons in carbon footprint.”

Digital clothing is not just aimed at designers who need to make many samples before deciding on a final creation. It's also a great replacement for those garments which are bought for a single social media photo and discarded - up to 9% of clothes purchased in the UK are for content creation. Influencers and other consumers can buy a digital garment instead, which is seamlessly edited to the photo they provide as if they had been wearing it at that time and place.

#5
Growing consumer interest

From consumers’ point of view, Gen Zs and young Millennials have grown up in the digital era, blurring reality and fantasy, and developing key characteristics of a digital fashion customer. The Fabricant refers to these customers as “Digi-Sapiens” and they number around 3.5 billion individuals globally, with more than 55% of the total purchasing power.

A research released by The Business of Fashion shows that about 70% of U.S. consumers believe their digital identity is important and 65% say digital ownership is important, while 50% are interested in purchasing digital assets, including digital skins or games, digital fashion, digital bodies and/or other items in NFT, in the next 12 months.

Another exciting trend for the consumers is the virtual dressing room, which is becoming more and more common for e-commerce platforms, making it less likely that a dress ordered online will be returned or not worn. Or, for example, digital design for prototyping clothes, where a dress can be made digitally in several versions and colors first to show to the customer. In recent years, a number of brands, including Tommy Hilfiger, Ralph Lauren and Burberry, have launched virtual stores and virtual fittings have been introduced by brands as part of the shopping experience.

Though the environmental benefits are clear, we know that digital fashion is not an 100% perfect solution for the fashion industry, as running the data itself can leave a carbon footprint. But it’s fair enough for us to say that digital fashion could be a great replacement for many of its processes, and has already made a tangible difference in emissions, and presents a creative, innovative and sustainable solution for the industry.

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