Over the past year, much has been made of digital clothing as luxury’s next mainstream consumer object. In early 2021, high-profile yet gimmicky launches like Gucci’s twelve-dollar sneakers coincided with the arrival of the NFT to bring the idea of singular, ownable digital objects to the forefront of the industry for the first time. Over the past year, “the metaverse” has become a utopic buzzword for an industry that’s increasingly facing injunctions on its physical production. As a result, digital fashion is quickly moving from niche to high-end offer, with brands like Miu Miu adopting “digital materials” as a driver of savoir-faire and distinction. There’s not a media outlet in the industry that hasn’t featured the Institute of Digital Fashion. Dior Men AW22 takes place in “the Metaverse.” Intangible, untouchable digital clothing has arrived to save an industry beleaguered by disposability and overproduction.
Digital fashion, in its current iteration, takes several forms. The most common are digitally material garments which are either photoshopped on a static body or overlaid through augmented reality technology. The latter tend to afford movement, and even if the technology is still visibly laggy and early stage, this presents a lot of exciting creative possibilities for digital designers and consumers alike. Movement and interaction between bodies and garments creates meaning: we tell stories with our clothing primarily by “doing things” with it.
The clothing we wear in the physical world is designed to help us interact in real-life spaces. It protects us from cold and heat; it helps us carry gear; it adorns and describes us to those we pass. Digital clothing is designed to help us interact in digital spaces. It helps us carry the symbolic weight of our increasingly fluid online identities. In the real world, textiles are a medium that we shape into symbolic tools called garments. In the digital world, we use layers of bits to turn aesthetic modes into shareable content.
That digital clothing should suddenly become popular now is no coincidence. Digital representations of the body are growing increasingly complex (think: moving from static Instagram images to TikTok dances). New virtual spaces encourage us to experience the world through embodied, 3rd person avatars rather than first-person screen interfaces. And the sheer volume and social weight of our online presence is creating a market for new forms of expression in the digital world. A digital dress made of a physically impossible, water-like material like water shines and glimmers in the sun is, in many ways, far more creatively impactful than another Adidas tracksuit shown on a Wall Street catwalk and shipped from across the world.
But it would be misleading to create a dichotomy between digital garments and physical ones. Traditional garments, made of textiles and designed to afford and constrain the physical body, are produced in a system that is fundamentally digital. As the principal consumer-facing output of the Fashion system, garments are multi-material assemblages designed and produced on software, produced in the physical world, and sold and mediated through digital platforms. The garments we purchase on e-commerce platforms and covet on TikTok are not physical goods in the strictest sense but digital representations which have been heavily edited to be legible on screens. Their physical characteristics - texture, color, weight - have been carefully exaggerated to become “readable” to the mind’s eye via screens.
Thus, drawing a distinction between “digital clothing” and physical garments is a bit disingenuous. Think of it as the difference between printing out your concert tickets and opening a QR code on your phone: a paper ticket is just a physical tool you might use to encode security and memory in a way that a QR can’t, but the entire system that’s bringing you into the concert, from payment to printing to entry, is digital. In the same sense, physical garments have affordances (like warmth, physical protection) that digital garments don’t - but it’s difficult to say where the digital ends and the physical begins.
Further, popular narrative still simplifies the clothing we wear as the imagined creations of luxury Houses, the authorities responsible for legitimizing and codifying new aesthetic modes which are received, circulated, and renewed by the masses. Fifteen years ago, major media outlets acted as intermediaries, interpreting and qualifying aesthetics for digestion by the rest of the world.
The rise of social media gave way to a new form of interactivity and presence for luxury brands: by sharing images and video of collections, campaigns, and “lifestyle content” these brands were able to reach wider audiences whose unique contact with the brand might be social media images. While luxury brands are still granted a degree of authority in online spaces - through both historic social significance and algorithmic preference for advertisers - they exist alongside and in constant interaction with all other content a user consumes.
Thus today the circulation of aesthetic modes takes place largely outside the authority of Houses themselves, creating an imperative of constant new-and-nowness if they are to guard the weight of authority and relevance in a space of constant movement. This is the crux of the industry today: the endless collaborations, the ever-more “immersive” show experiences, the switch to “drop” models are but strategies for maintaining visibility.
The primary output of many luxury Houses isn’t physical clothing, it’s content. And in that sense, the “digital clothing” pioneered by a handful of luxury brands is merely the next iteration of intangible cultural production.
When you open Instagram or TikTok or Vogue.com and scroll through images of Balenciaga models walking through Wall Street, you are not consuming Balenciaga the Clothing Brand but Balenciaga The Content Producer. You are not buying the Balenciaga x Adidas tracksuit, you’re adding its digital twin to your shopping cart. And once the physical garment has arrived, you’ll more than likely photograph it on your body and upload it to the digital space of your choosing: you and your followers will once again consume a tracksuit that’s really more digital than anchored in any material reality. The physical product itself is not the end-game, it’s a fluid, enacted content network.
And after all, a world where “everything is content,” why not lower your production costs and your carbon footprint by offering your clients goods designed and optimized for their digital selves? Offer them garments that afford meaning and movement impossible in physical spaces. I’m not suggesting that digital garments can replace the savoir-faire of physical goods, but when the object is creating experiential merchandise - souvenirs of participation in a larger brand universe - digital clothing offers exciting creative possibilities for new forms of brand engagement.
Over the past year, much has been made of digital clothing as luxury’s next mainstream consumer object. In early 2021, high-profile yet gimmicky launches like Gucci’s twelve-dollar sneakers coincided with the arrival of the NFT to bring the idea of singular, ownable digital objects to the forefront of the industry for the first time. Over the past year, “the metaverse” has become a utopic buzzword for an industry that’s increasingly facing injunctions on its physical production. As a result, digital fashion is quickly moving from niche to high-end offer, with brands like Miu Miu adopting “digital materials” as a driver of savoir-faire and distinction. There’s not a media outlet in the industry that hasn’t featured the Institute of Digital Fashion. Dior Men AW22 takes place in “the Metaverse.” Intangible, untouchable digital clothing has arrived to save an industry beleaguered by disposability and overproduction.
Digital fashion, in its current iteration, takes several forms. The most common are digitally material garments which are either photoshopped on a static body or overlaid through augmented reality technology. The latter tend to afford movement, and even if the technology is still visibly laggy and early stage, this presents a lot of exciting creative possibilities for digital designers and consumers alike. Movement and interaction between bodies and garments creates meaning: we tell stories with our clothing primarily by “doing things” with it.
The clothing we wear in the physical world is designed to help us interact in real-life spaces. It protects us from cold and heat; it helps us carry gear; it adorns and describes us to those we pass. Digital clothing is designed to help us interact in digital spaces. It helps us carry the symbolic weight of our increasingly fluid online identities. In the real world, textiles are a medium that we shape into symbolic tools called garments. In the digital world, we use layers of bits to turn aesthetic modes into shareable content.
That digital clothing should suddenly become popular now is no coincidence. Digital representations of the body are growing increasingly complex (think: moving from static Instagram images to TikTok dances). New virtual spaces encourage us to experience the world through embodied, 3rd person avatars rather than first-person screen interfaces. And the sheer volume and social weight of our online presence is creating a market for new forms of expression in the digital world. A digital dress made of a physically impossible, water-like material like water shines and glimmers in the sun is, in many ways, far more creatively impactful than another Adidas tracksuit shown on a Wall Street catwalk and shipped from across the world.
But it would be misleading to create a dichotomy between digital garments and physical ones. Traditional garments, made of textiles and designed to afford and constrain the physical body, are produced in a system that is fundamentally digital. As the principal consumer-facing output of the Fashion system, garments are multi-material assemblages designed and produced on software, produced in the physical world, and sold and mediated through digital platforms. The garments we purchase on e-commerce platforms and covet on TikTok are not physical goods in the strictest sense but digital representations which have been heavily edited to be legible on screens. Their physical characteristics - texture, color, weight - have been carefully exaggerated to become “readable” to the mind’s eye via screens.
Thus, drawing a distinction between “digital clothing” and physical garments is a bit disingenuous. Think of it as the difference between printing out your concert tickets and opening a QR code on your phone: a paper ticket is just a physical tool you might use to encode security and memory in a way that a QR can’t, but the entire system that’s bringing you into the concert, from payment to printing to entry, is digital. In the same sense, physical garments have affordances (like warmth, physical protection) that digital garments don’t - but it’s difficult to say where the digital ends and the physical begins.
Further, popular narrative still simplifies the clothing we wear as the imagined creations of luxury Houses, the authorities responsible for legitimizing and codifying new aesthetic modes which are received, circulated, and renewed by the masses. Fifteen years ago, major media outlets acted as intermediaries, interpreting and qualifying aesthetics for digestion by the rest of the world.
The rise of social media gave way to a new form of interactivity and presence for luxury brands: by sharing images and video of collections, campaigns, and “lifestyle content” these brands were able to reach wider audiences whose unique contact with the brand might be social media images. While luxury brands are still granted a degree of authority in online spaces - through both historic social significance and algorithmic preference for advertisers - they exist alongside and in constant interaction with all other content a user consumes.
Thus today the circulation of aesthetic modes takes place largely outside the authority of Houses themselves, creating an imperative of constant new-and-nowness if they are to guard the weight of authority and relevance in a space of constant movement. This is the crux of the industry today: the endless collaborations, the ever-more “immersive” show experiences, the switch to “drop” models are but strategies for maintaining visibility.
The primary output of many luxury Houses isn’t physical clothing, it’s content. And in that sense, the “digital clothing” pioneered by a handful of luxury brands is merely the next iteration of intangible cultural production.
When you open Instagram or TikTok or Vogue.com and scroll through images of Balenciaga models walking through Wall Street, you are not consuming Balenciaga the Clothing Brand but Balenciaga The Content Producer. You are not buying the Balenciaga x Adidas tracksuit, you’re adding its digital twin to your shopping cart. And once the physical garment has arrived, you’ll more than likely photograph it on your body and upload it to the digital space of your choosing: you and your followers will once again consume a tracksuit that’s really more digital than anchored in any material reality. The physical product itself is not the end-game, it’s a fluid, enacted content network.
And after all, a world where “everything is content,” why not lower your production costs and your carbon footprint by offering your clients goods designed and optimized for their digital selves? Offer them garments that afford meaning and movement impossible in physical spaces. I’m not suggesting that digital garments can replace the savoir-faire of physical goods, but when the object is creating experiential merchandise - souvenirs of participation in a larger brand universe - digital clothing offers exciting creative possibilities for new forms of brand engagement.