Here is the full transcript of Karinna Grant’s talk titled “What’s the Point of Digital Fashion?” at TED conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
The Future of Fashion
By 2033, you just might have a smaller wardrobe than you have now. Not just because you’ve already checked which items spark joy, but because you probably won’t own as much physical clothing. I’m not just saying this because typically we own more than we need, and we actually only wear 20 percent of our wardrobe, but because dematerialization will have taken over fashion.
Think about the books that you own, the music that we listen to. They are now in the cloud. And many of our favorite stores are online, and this is happening to our clothes too. Digital versions of physical products and digital-only products are making their way into our lives through gaming, social media, and shopping. This is an Alexander McQueen digital tee that you can download to an avatar to wear inside a game.
Digital fashion is made of pixels rather than threads, and it’s still a relatively new sector of the virtual goods industry. But in the last five years, it’s kind of exploded, and we’ve seen zeitgeist moments from digital-first brands like the Fabricant, Tribute brand, and Auroboros. And RTFKT, who got the world talking about “phygitals”: physical and digital versions that you buy together. And luxury brands are also in this space, like Vuitton, Balenciaga, and Gucci, and they’re doing something surprising at surprising price points.
So they’re bringing together the worlds of gaming and luxury. Some of these items are less than 20 dollars, and this Gucci Roblox handbag actually resold for 4,000 dollars, which is more than the physical one retails for, just an hour after it went for sale on Roblox. This is interesting because quite often our first luxury purchase is sunglasses or a lipstick. In the kind of near future, and especially for the next generation, that’s not going to be the case.
A New Fashion Era
It will be a virtual item that you can wear, just like that handbag inside a game. And if your pockets are deep enough, you can also pay luxury prices. CryptoPunks and Tiffany last year did a collaboration where they made phygital pendants, 250 personalized ones, which were the princely sum of 50,000 dollars.
I’m a fashion academic and innovator, and I’ve spent a lot of years researching how and when people adopt new trends, whether their dad’s sneakers or Snapchat filters. And it’s kind of ironic because I fell in love with digital fashion, because I like vintage fashion, and the thought of being able to wear key pieces from fashion history is something that keeps me awake late at night.
This jacket by Mugler has been painstakingly digitized by Superficial Studio. What’s super exciting is that we’re at the very beginning of this revolution within fashion. And when it goes mainstream, probably within the next five years, it’s really going to change not only what we wear, but also how we produce and consume goods, hopefully for the better.
Just because something isn’t physical doesn’t mean it’s not real. And just because something is dematerialized doesn’t mean it gives you a warm, funny feeling in your stomach when you buy it or own it or wear it. Especially when it looks like this. So for digital fashion, there’s something really for everybody, from sportswear to couture to the kind of straight out ethereal.
And when I see pieces like these that are so cool that I want to own them physically, I get frustrated because there isn’t a word to describe that. So I’ve started calling it “meta-desire.” And I’m still working on an emoji for it, which I think is very important. Digital fashion is characterized by infinite creativity. When you design in the physical dimension, you unfortunately have constraints like gravity, how a fabric drapes, perhaps the cost of raw materials.
The Impact of Digital Fashion
But when you design virtually, you have limitless possibilities of say, for example, what a dress could look like, how it could perform or function. This is a piece by Institute of Digital Fashion, which is part jewelry, part clothing. And in the near future, we have completely new categories of materials and products. And magazines are also using this as well. They’re adopting digital fashion to make the pages and the fashion become more immersive.
But so what? That’s what my mom often asks me. “What’s the point of digital fashion?” Well, you have two choices. You can either wear it on your real self, your physical self, or you can wear it on your digital self. And gamers have already been doing this for over 25 years. They already understand the value of virtual goods. They’ve been earning, modifying, and putting skins and cosmetics on their characters to wear inside games.
Digital dressing is a thing. This is me during the pandemic when I couldn’t get to any stores, but I could get a dopamine hit and, of course, share it on social media. You guys can try this yourselves if you go to platforms like The Dematerialised or DressX. And a relatively new company, Zero10, also does this. So digital dressing is when an extra layer, like an augmented reality, is added on to a photo or a video.
And this is something which I call “soft wearables.” So effectively you have a kind of, like a new form of fast fashion, because you could update the clothes that you’re wearing with new messages, slogans on a daily basis if you want. This was a project from Nike and RTFKT last year, and something that I’m excited about in the farther future is that we won’t need to view this extra digital content through our mobile phone.
The Necessity of Digital Fashion
It’ll actually emit from the smart materials in the fabrics themselves. But why do we need digital fashion? Well today, we already spend one third of our time online.