About Digital Fashion
What skills and competencies does a digital specialist need most in the fashion industry today?
Is digital fashion pure art or does it have a promising future in applied areas? Can digital fashion completely replace real fashion in some domains?
Why is digital fashion starting to grow so hype at this specific moment?
What areas of digital fashion offer the best prospects these days?
There is a lot of talk on the global market about spatial computing and 3D Internet. So, we may say there are two areas for technological development of digital fashion: hardware-orientated and product-orientated. We have seen the augmented and virtual reality headset segment updated in 2023. We now have microdisplays with high pixel density and new, compact, low power drain microchips. This makes technology widely accessible. Blending of realities, hybridity and seamless communication are what consumers want from brands, and all this makes fashion a truly free, inclusive and omni-channel industry that is ultimately open to self-expression. We are about to see a major shift to creating immersive projects with value and meaning.
There are three major lines of work in digital fashion: technical 3D design, development of advertising video and photo content, and creation of game-ready clothing for interactive experiences. Each of these requires a specific development pipeline, software and skills. For example, the Digital Fashion course at the Muse Creative Professions Online University focuses on sequentially increasing skill complexity. First, we design clothes in a 3D modelling software suite. This basic digital tool can be used in manufacturing to assess a product’s design and fit on different body types and to produce a more graphic plan for a collection. Next, we export the digital clothing to 3D editor software, where you can set up an advertising campaign or create a lookbook that goes beyond the physical world. Then we put the clothes into augmented reality and do an AR try-on, where a user can try on a product using their mobile phone camera. After that, we move on to virtual reality and build a virtual showroom providing an experience of ultimate immersion in the brand’s atmosphere.
Digitalization provides infinite marketing and business problem solving opportunities. There are many ways to use a certain product when interacting with a customer – not just showing pictures on the display. Digital space allows you to engage customers gently, with no obtrusive ads, in collaboration with the brand; it enables a hybrid experience and allows one product to be used on different platforms. The O2O (online-to-offline) format is booming at the moment, bringing together the physical and digital worlds. We create VR gaming projects for retailers in offline stores. Just last year, we organized a VR show at Moscow Fashion Week.
For me, digital fashion began almost ten years ago as a personal experience of mindfulness and sustainable consumption. We prepare up to three trial specimens in the experimental shop before putting any given model into mass production. Even basic 3D design reduces waste of time and resources and allows marketing potential and production feasibility to be assessed at the design stage. Digital fashion offers aspiring designers a lower barrier for entry into the industry.
There is a lot of talk on the global market about spatial computing and 3D Internet. So, we may say there are two areas for technological development of digital fashion: hardware-orientated and product-orientated. We have seen the augmented and virtual reality headset segment updated in 2023. We now have microdisplays with high pixel density and new, compact, low power drain microchips. This makes technology widely accessible. Blending of realities, hybridity and seamless communication are what consumers want from brands, and all this makes fashion a truly free, inclusive and omni-channel industry that is ultimately open to self-expression. We are about to see a major shift to creating immersive projects with value and meaning.