Spending Actual Money on Digital Clothes - Say What?

Let’s talk about digital skins - clothing, accessories, and body art meant to be worn by your avatar on a website. While this has been a thing for years, technology has helped it warp into something new with people even using filters on social media to give themselves realistic-looking tattoos and piercings. Digital skins also act as a way for gamers to give their virtual personas a unique style. Fortnite for example, allows players to purchase custom outfits for their avatars. 

These days though, digital fashion is starting to look a bit more real and not just limited to clothing made for virtual avatars. It is becoming its own subculture of the fashion industry where digital design and modeling meets real-world clothing. Designers have begun creating pieces for people to don not only in online gaming worlds, but in pictures of themselves they present to the real world on social media. 

With the help of augmented reality, customers can “try on” various designs to determine if it fits their style. Once they have decided on an outfit or accessory and made a purchase, professional editors render the design onto an image of the customer. And just like that, they’re social media ready.

While the idea of digital fashion is initially strange, many consumers are warming up to it as an attractive alternative to traditional fashion simply because it is easier, cheaper, and often more ethical than buying new clothes. Common concerns with traditional fashion (Was the garment made ethically? Will it fit? Is the material a skin irritant?) are made moot by the nature of digital clothing. 

The increase in demand for virtual clothing paired with shoppers’ growing desire for sustainable practices has predictably given rise to digital-only fashion houses and marketplaces. As the name suggests, digital fashion houses are fashion design companies which produce digital-only garments as opposed to physical ones. 

These companies aspire to reach a forward-thinking audience who believe that clothes and accessories don’t need to exist in the physical realm. As such, they make their products available via digital marketplaces which function just as any other e-commerce site where you browse through goods, choose your desired products, and pay for them. In the end, the only difference is that the garment you get is not physical. You gain an outfit which can only be used in virtual spaces such as VR, video games, or social media.

Digital fashion is commonly sold in the form of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), however, not every digital fashion house sells NFTs. As we touched on earlier, many of these designers have products available that you can choose to have fitted to your photos.

Digging deeper into the digital fashion houses and marketplaces, you’ll see that major players include DressX, Tribute, XR Couture, The Dematerialized, and Digitalax. Each of these houses has their own take on virtual clothing and how they distribute them.

DressX takes an all-encompassing approach - users can fill their Metacloset, a digital wardrobe you can use to dress yourself in photos, videos, and in the metaverse. Shoppers can try on items before committing to purchase. They aim to be a clothing solution across virtual platforms and even intend to roll out clothing to be used on video calls in real time!

To provide their products with a more solidified sense of value, some fashion houses like Tribute and The Dematerialised operate on a scarcity model, with most items limited to a certain number of uploads. Once this number is reached, the product is sold out and no additional units can be purchased by other consumers.

Fast fashion is causing a major negative impact on our environment by creating an excess of textile waste via mass production. Digital fashion marketplaces alleviate the problem by allowing consumers to focus on making what they have last longer by buying fewer physical clothes.

Being the lovers of innovation and sustainability that we are, MEC is excited to jump into the world of digital fashion. While we don’t offer NFTs (yet), we do offer virtual garments, given to you as a digital file. 

The way we stand apart is that the digital files we offer are completely yours to mold as you see fit upon purchase. What we mean by this is the base product that you select for purchase (a scarf for example) can be edited in Browzwear so you have a final product that is unique to your taste. Once completed, it can be 3D printed for individual or store use. At the individual level, this reduces waste by ensuring you are purchasing the exact product you want. At the store level, it minimizes textile waste by providing shops with an alternative to the mass production method.

Investment giant Morgan Stanley estimates that by 2030, the digital fashion market could be worth more than $55 billion. Could virtual fashion be the next move for you? Follow our blog to keep up with the latest in textile innovations.

This post is part of our Welcome to the Digital Revolution: Textile Edition series about the textile industry’s rapid shift from analog to digital. Stay tuned for the next in the series and subscribe to make sure you don’t miss it!