The Fabricant is a pioneer of digital fashion and is the first fully digitalized fashion house. In addition to collaborating with brands such as Adidas and Tommy Hilfiger, The Fabricant has recently collaborated with Toni Maticevski on a ‘digi-couture’ in Australian fashion week. Lastly, its collaboration with RTFKT studios on the digital garment collection - RenaiXance - sold out within 10 minutes after it was launched. The Fabricant is planning to launch a new digital platform later this year.
For our readers who don’t know much about digital fashion, can you describe what digital fashion is?
Digital fashion, in a nutshell, is a way of being digitally dressed. If you’re interacting via screen, you don’t really need to “wear” physical garments. Instead of using natural resources, going through the process of working with a factory, weaving and transporting fabric, then delivering garments to stores, this is a more innovative way to create fashion.
This is the 21st century. With the help of technology, we can really disrupt ideas; from what being dressed is to what garments are. The Fabricant is the first digital fashion house and we create clothes purely for the digital realm, which means they’re created in 3D software. We build the garments as 3D patterns for people to wear them digitally. This so-called “digital dressing” is a very new idea for lots of people. But if you think about how we interact with each other right now, regardless of social media or any other digital format (e.g. gaming), screen interaction has become very common, even dominant in our lives. So considering these kinds of interactions, we can certainly be digitally dressed. That’s how we do fashion sustainably - by using technology to eliminate waste and carbon footprint.
Where can we use digital fashion? You mentioned Snapchat and Instagram; are there other places we can play with digital fashion?
I would say right now gaming is probably the easiest place to use digital fashion. Gamer or not, a lot of people will (more or less) be familiar with the idea of going to a game, where you are able to select a character called ‘avatar’ to dress him/her/them up. Oftentime games have their own marketplace, where you can purchase more individualistic ‘skins’ (meaning how the avatar dressed). Like ‘Fortnite’; you can buy quite a lot of different skins. In this way, digital fashion has a natural home in gaming. That itself is a kind of digital fashion.
Compared to fashion in the gaming environment, our team seeks to create a much more high-end, fashion- driven, avant-garde expression. Rather than being playful or cartoony, our team takes digital fashion more to real life. If you look at our garments, we like to keep one foot in reality and play with the possibilities on top of that. For instance there’s no gravity in a virtual world, which means we don’t really have to conform to the limitations of physicality in our creation. So our garments can behave in ways that are physically impossible.
A real example is the collaboration that we did with Toni Maticevski, a physical fashion designer in Australia. We worked with him to bring one of his beautiful garments into the 3D world. The garment looks like a glossy ball gown with tentacles that fly in the air, and the garment itself is made of a liquid metal, an impossible feature in reality. This garment is currently available to “wear” right now at Australian Fashion Week. Visitors can go into a booth and see themselves wearing the garment.
What do we need to wear “physically” when we are trying out digital fashion garments?
If you go to a platform like DressX (a digital fashion retailer), they only sell digital garments. And when you go on their website, they have listed out very specific guidelines on what to wear physically in order to receive the best image of yourself digitally dressed. I believe you have to wear close-fitting garments.
How do digital fashion designers monetize?
That’s a great question. We’re currently working on a platform called “Leela”, where young designers in the digital space will be able to create their own aesthetics and sell. To us, a digital fashion house like Leela will really allow young creators to begin iterating their own garments and to collaborate with other creators. A big part of our belief around digital fashion is a really open, inclusive and transparent space where you can collaborate and co-create with your fellow creators. So it’s not this kind of classic top down model that you have in traditional fashion houses where they dictate how everything is going to be. We’re planning to go live on this platform by the end of this year. Right now, I think you’ll probably have to go to DressX as a retailer.
Just to add onto this, lots of creators now go on digital art marketplaces to monetize by selling crypto art or NFT. That’s another big way digital fashion designers are trying to monetize their work now.
NFT is quite a new thing to many people. Can you elaborate on what NFT is?
NFT stands for Non-Fungible Token, which is a digitally created item being uploaded to blockchain. Blockchain provides a digital ledger to verify transactions and validate things that have happened through a distributed network of computers. Blockchain is completely transparent; it’s traceable throughout history as long as technology exists. NFT, on the other hand, is essentially a visual iteration verified on the blockchain, which becomes a visual cryptocurrency. The item that you’ve sold as an NFT has value of its own and it becomes collectible to digital art collectors. NFT allows people to really collect and trade digital items in a way that makes its own market and its own currency. Digital fashion is, I believe, the next big iteration of digital collectibles. We’re just at the beginning.
When it comes to digital fashion, ‘metaverse’ is the key because in the metaverse, digital fashion becomes essential. Can you tell us what a ‘metaverse’ is?
A ‘metaverse’ is a fully realized persistent digital world. To put this in simple terms, if you’re thinking of a game like “Fortnite”, that is called a metaverse; it’s a world that you can enter and be immersed in. Being immersive is a very strong part of what the metaverse is and the metaverse is just a fully realized digital world where you can persistently exist and roam around and interact and transact and participate in experiences.
We believe metaverse is the next iteration of the internet. If we think of the internet right now, it’s quite an old technology (really, it’s very 2D). With metaverse, you will enter as your digital self (your avatar) wherever you want to be. For example, you can roam around in your digital store, select some garments and interact with people there and go out to a digital globe in the metaverse and listen to a digital DJ set, etc. You can kind of take it wherever your imagination would like to go.
The metaverse is coming. When we express and iterate our digital selves, we all have a digital twin which will obviously require to be digitally dressed. Therefore, there’s a huge opportunity for creators and brands of all kinds to really begin to define how people will look and what they will wear in this environment. Everything is possible in this space and fashion will be key because everybody will suddenly have this new way to express themselves.
How do people start making digital fashion?
All they need to do is to start. There are tons of great videos on YouTube about digital fashion. Other than that, digital fashion is very much about being open source and making sure everybody can participate. By the way, you can also join our own Twitch streams. The Fabricant is a fully digital atelier.
What’s the vision or possibility for digital fashion or The Fabricant?
So for us, it’s very difficult to predict because technology moves so rapidly. However, we aim to make our garments wearable at street level one day. Imagine wearing your regular clothing on streets with a pair of digital and Wi- Fi enabled glasses and the person walking towards you will be wearing their regular garments as well. However, you’ll be able to see their digital self with your glasses. In other words, you’ll be able to see their digital “twin” in the metaverse. And if you take your glasses off, obviously, you come back to the physical world. I believe that’s where the future of fashion will evolve in a digital world.