No need to shell out thousands for a great mixed-reality headset just yet. But make no mistake: Fashion needs to get up to speed, quickly, with alternatives to IRL fashion shows as the coronavirus pandemic scuttles international fashion weeks, laying bare the pitfalls of physical prototyping and large gatherings.
Unable to proceed as normal, Shanghai Fashion Week recently unfurled its first digital edition, hinged mainly on livestreams of modeling, discussions and QVC-like selling segments, while Helsinki Fashion Week, which has a sustainability bent, just revealed its next edition in late July will move to cyberspace, including virtual reality experiences.
He noted during the last fashion season, designers including London-based Steven Tai experimented with “interactive look books,” allowing buyers to view garments via 360-degree videos. He forecasts wider adoption of avatars and digital clothing purchases as our online identities become more important. He pointed to popular memes showing how people portray themselves very differently: trendy for Instagram, casual in Facebook and serious for LinkedIn. Why not a digital Zegna suit for the latter, and something sporty and casual for the former platforms?
A diverse cast of striking digital models are at the ready to walk virtual runways, thanks to Cameron-James Wilson, a photographer who founded The Diigitals, an avatar agency that’s home to Shudu, billed as the world’s first digital supermodel.Wilson characterized the coronavirus epidemic as “a wake-up call that the industry needs to change. Everyone’s been talking about the 3-D revolution and fashion has been slow to embrace it,” he said in an interview.
The Diigitals is expanding and diversifying its roster of avatars, and developing demos for social media channels — one to show what future runways might look like, projecting the technology into the future. “We’re like the ‘Black Mirror’ of fashion in a certain way,” Wilson said, referring to the Netflix series that projects how technology might change our lives in the not-to-distant future.
He pointed to closer collaboration between those industries and fashion in recent years, with Nike and Louis Vuitton collaborating with the games Fortnite and League of Legends, respectively, and also selling skins and digital shoes as an additional revenue stream.
This is so long overdue. The in-person fashion shows are cost-prohibitive and unnecessary. It took a pandemic, but finally fashion is progressing into the digital age for real.
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