Digital Fashion Trends and Digital Fashion Brands to Watch Out For
The Fabricant
The coronavirus pandemic and climate concerns are pushing the fashion industry into taking steps towards sustainability. Gradually, fashion brands are adopting digital platforms in an effort to reduce waste and streamline production. As a result, consumers have started to demand fresh and unique styles that are affordable and environmentally friendly.
If they are to stay in business during these challenging times, fashion companies have to modernise and reduce their ecological footprint. Some fashion brands, influencers, and inventors are already making progress in tapping into potential technology to transform the fashion industry. Technology provides numerous solutions to protect the environment, such as the use of the Internet of Things or IoT.
Benefits of Digital Fashion
Digital fashion leverages technology to produce hyper-realistic, non-physically wearable apparel. Clearly it's ideal for the growing one-time wearing trend, with target consumers being the Gen Z and young millennial generations who spend a vast quantity of their time in the virtual world. Not only are they strongly fashion-conscious, but they don't wish to own widely available clothes. It seems digital fashion has met its match.
These one-off outfits exist only online, rendering the clothing lifecycle null and void. Instead of going with fast fashion brands, consumers can purchase unique digital garments and show them off on Instagram and other social media sites. Digital fashion provides the most creative solution to the fashion industry's carbon footprint so far.
Digital fashion offers several benefits, but its potential to replace fast fashion is the most important. The production of traditional clothes leads to tonnes of wastage, more so for fast fashion brands such as Zara. The fashion industry produces more waste than aviation and shipping combined. By eliminating textile wastage, digital fashion reduces the fashion industry's environmental impact by up to 95%.
Digital Fashion Designers to Watch Out For
Digital fashion isn't a new concept. Releasing their first digital fashion collection back in 2018, Scandinavian fashion house Carlings were among the first adopters of digital fashion and one of the companies to watch out for in digital fashion. Carlings' digital collection is comprised of 19 sizeless and genderless pieces of apparel.
Buyers would send their photos to be digitally tailored through image manipulation. The demand was astronomical, and the pieces sold out within a week. Many brands have since started making digital-only apparel as an alternative to fast fashion. These include digital fashion company The Fabricant and virtual and physical clothing brand Happy99.
Digital fashion brands to watch out for
❖ Dress X. Since most people lack the tools to wear digital clothes, Dress X helps people wear 3D and virtual garments and makes them readily available via email. Dress X is the first international retailer to carry digital fashion collections from popular brands and 3D designers.
❖ Tribute Brand. Croatian label Tribute is the newest kid on the digital fashion block. Founded by Filip Vajda and Gala Marija Vrbanic, this brand makes virtual dresses exclusively. Their prices range from $29 to $699. Tribute's digital fashion designs are inspired by Tekken and Grand Theft Auto video games
❖ Moschino. Big-name fashion brand Moschino is one of the latest entrants to the digital fashion scene. Moschino released its first digital collection in 2019, which included apparel and other items inspired by The Sims’ video game. This allowed players to dress up their avatars in Moschino designs.
Borne of the desire to replace textile with something more eco-friendly (in this case, pixels), digital fashion is gaining massive traction in the fashion industry. A number of emerging digital fashion companies, including Dress X, The Fabricant, and Carlings, are leveraging technologies such as AI, AR, and IoT to produce one-off outfits. Digital fashion eliminates textile wastes, reducing the industry's carbon footprint immensely.