Is the Future of Fashion Downloadable?

Words May Garland

Cyber clothes are chang­ing our rela­tion­ship to fash­ion. Will the demand for phys­i­cal gar­ments decrease when we can pur­chase a dig­i­tal wardrobe in the metaverse? 

One thing is for sure, in light of the cli­mate cri­sis we are fac­ing, we’ve reached a time where the fash­ion indus­try needs to become sus­tain­able, and these tech­no­log­i­cal advances may be the answer. 

The way we view fash­ion has changed. Gone are the days of flip­ping through a cat­a­logue to view the lat­est col­lec­tions; instead, our devices reg­is­ter our inter­ests from our search his­to­ry and bom­bard us with online adver­tise­ments every time we open social media. 

Thanks to COVID-19, many brands are also choos­ing to digi­tise their shows dur­ing fash­ion week and more peo­ple are opt­ing for online stores as a sub­sti­tute for win­dow shop­ping. Brands have tak­en advan­tage of this by mak­ing full use of the video con­fer­ence plat­form, Zoom to show­case their stock to customers. 

In Swe­den, broth­ers Hannes and Simon Hoge­man were not put off by the lock­downs and launched a vir­tu­al ver­sion of their store, Trés Bien to keep sales high. The con­ve­nience of online stores has meant our shop­ping expe­ri­ence has advanced from the high-street to a vir­tu­al dimen­sion. It doesn’t look like this pro­gres­sion is slow­ing down either, with 900 mil­lion more dig­i­tal buy­ers this year than in 2020.

Tech expan­sion in the cloth­ing indus­try is going even fur­ther. Brands such as Trib­ute and The Dema­te­ri­alised are paving the way for fash­ion design­ers to cre­ate down­load­able garments. 

Their CGI 3D mod­el­ling, UX design and cod­ing tech­nol­o­gy is used to inno­v­a­tive­ly cre­ate col­lec­tions that chal­lenge our rela­tion­ship to clothes as consumers. 

Fash­ion col­lec­tions can be made from NFTs (a non-fun­gi­ble, unique token) which allows you to own lux­u­ry pieces in vir­tu­al space, dress your gam­ing avatars and even cus­tomize your Insta­gram grid to include pho­tos of you in a new dig­i­tal ‘fit. 

Lux­u­ry brands such as Guc­ci, Balen­ci­a­ga, Louis Vuit­ton and more are now col­lab­o­rat­ing with NFT cre­ators to join the cryp­to craze. Mor­gan Stan­ley pre­dicts that meta­verse gam­ing and NFTs could make up 10% of the lux­u­ry goods mar­ket by 2030. 

These cyber devel­op­ments we are wit­ness­ing in high-fash­ion push bound­aries in the retail indus­try, allow­ing grav­i­ty-defy­ing sil­hou­ettes to be designed to achieve what could not be achieved in phys­i­cal fash­ion. The inno­va­tion and cre­ativ­i­ty that vir­tu­al fash­ion accom­mo­dates allow design­ers to explore fash­ion free from gen­dered bound­aries and make it acces­si­ble to all.

“We strong­ly believe that dig­i­tal fash­ion is the future we should embrace. With no need for phys­i­cal deliv­er­ies and pro­duc­tion, it is avail­able with­out restric­tions for any gen­der, sex or size.” – Trib­ute

The rise in pop­u­lar­i­ty of cyber fash­ion or ‘con­tact­less fash­ion’ also has envi­ron­men­tal ben­e­fits by reduc­ing pol­lu­tion from man­u­fac­tur­ing phys­i­cal gar­ments and the harm­ful emis­sions from ship­ping stock to our wardrobes. 

Shop­ping for con­tact­less fash­ion may also curb ‘throw­away cul­ture’ by sat­is­fy­ing our need for the lat­est trends with­out pur­chas­ing a phys­i­cal object that may get thrown away at the end of the season. 

Vir­tu­al fash­ion is an excit­ing devel­op­ment in the retail indus­try and comes with its set of advan­tages; how­ev­er, we’re still not quite there with achiev­ing the per­fect sus­tain­able solu­tion in the fash­ion industry. 

The blockchain tech­nol­o­gy used in NFT fash­ion requires high ener­gy con­sump­tion, which has a detri­men­tal effect on the plan­et. As the dig­i­tal artist Memo Akten dis­cov­ered, the aver­age NFT has a car­bon foot­print equiv­a­lent to more than a month of elec­tric­i­ty usage for the aver­age per­son liv­ing in the Euro­pean Union.

The pro­gres­sion into vir­tu­al fash­ion allows brands to be more exper­i­men­tal with their designs and find new ways to slow fast fash­ion. How­ev­er, we still have fur­ther to go to devel­op ful­ly sus­tain­able tech­nol­o­gy that won’t neg­a­tive­ly impact the planet. 

For some, cyber fash­ion still feels like a bizarre and fleet­ing trend but with more brands exper­i­ment­ing with NFTs, it looks like cyber gar­ments are now the present and the future for fash­ion. Are we on a path to switch­ing out our Guc­ci for pixels?