#012 The year for Digital Fashion is 2024
this is not an April Fools
“We are no longer Homo-sapiens, we are Homo-techno"
— Grimes
This essay’s prequel closed with the claim that while digital fashion might seem like it’s in decline, in reality we’re just being introduced.
Naturally, this second part will dive into some ways imaginary clothes will make their introduction and the tools we’ll use to break the ice.
The emperor's big red boots
To rephrase a famous YSL quote, “fashion fades, self expression is eternal.”
As highlighted in my essay Mazlow and the Metaverse, fashion’s persistence across centuries can be explained by the ways that it caters to three of humanity’s innate needs: our need to self express, our need to affiliate and our need to show status.
However the nuances of how these needs are met evolve with the times. And in 2024, there can be little doubt that the place to flex, find community, and scream your unique sensibilities from the rooftops is online.
So what’s so digital fashion-friendly about the internet in 2024?
ITS EFFECTS ON OUR PHYSIOLOGY
Last summer I spoke alongside Grimes at Christie’s Art & Tech Summit where she made the statement “we are becoming cyborgs, our brains are fundamentally changed.”Under the belief that growing up with electronics, such as the iPhone, has led us to become “fundamentally different from Homo sapiens” the singer believes that we are becoming “Homo-techno” — a new technologically influenced species, physiologically different from the human beings of the past.
With no need for Neuralink, signs of “Homo-techno” are already evident when it comes to:Our attention spans – The ever more rapid bombardment of information, the abundance of gamification, and the ability to swipe with abandon has had a significant impact on our ability to focus on what we consume.
In a recent survey by TikTok 50% of users said that videos longer than a minute long were “stressful”. And, a 2015 study by Microsoft set the Gen-Z attention span at just 8 seconds — 4 seconds less than millennials.Our memorys – With the abundance of readily available information the need to remember has declined.
A series of experiments by psychologist Daniel Wegner showed that when people have access to search engines, they remember fewer facts because they know they can rely on “search” as a readily available shortcut.What’s more, Wegner’s experiments also showed that people were more likely to think of computer terms like “Yahoo” or “Google” after being asked a set of difficult trivia questions. A clear sign that search, rather than recall is becoming our default.
ITS IMPACT ON OUR SOCIOLOGY
In his exploration of the internet’s impact on human behavior Canadian psychologist Marshall McLuhan made the statement “in the long run, a medium’s content matters less than the medium itself in influencing how we think and act.” And, indeed, just as it’s changed our minds the internet has also changed our behaviours.
Most interestingly for digital fashion in terms of:
Mass celebrification — In 2021 Chris Hayes wrote an essay for the New Yorker, titled ‘On the Internet, We’re Always Famous’.
Hayes makes the point that “never before in history have we been under the gaze of so many strangers”. And indeed with the advent of the blogosphere in 1994 platforms like Myspace (2003), Bebo (2005), Twitter (2006), Tumblr (2007), Instagram (2010) and most recently TikTok (2016) celebrity has moved from a chosen few to an indiscriminate many.
Within his essay Hayes references Leo Braudy’s 1987 study, ‘The Frenzy of Renown’ in which he makes the point “As each new medium of fame appears, the human image it conveys is intensified and the number of individuals celebrated expands.” and to look at today’s most prevalent social media source – TikTok – it’s clear this is true.
With an algorithm centred on giving anyone who plays by the rules their chance at 24-31 seconds of fame1, as Hayes so clearly states, “it’s not surprising that poll after poll over the past decade indicates that fame is increasingly a prime objective of people twenty-five and younger”Uncannyvallefication — Success on social media in 2024 trends towards one of two poles.
The first is rawness and realness, in which virality is spawned by the relatable and accessible rather than the polished and preened.
Take ‘Tube Girl’ — 23 year old Sabrina Bahsoon. A law school undergrad, she posted her first video dancing on London’s underground in August of 2023. Flash forward 8 months and Sabrina has amassed over 600 million views on TikTok, partnerships with fashion brands like Hugo Boss, magazines like Vogue, and celebrities like Nicole Scherzinger.
Unlike the untouchable celebs of the past, the key to Sabrina’s success is her relatability. TikTok favours the remix — trends which anyone can participate in and make their own — essentially deep-fried memeifying2 behaviours. Rather than a glam-squadded, fame-gated Angelina Jolie (a classic boomer celeb), anyone with an Oyster/ Metrocard can be like Sabrina.
If realness and rawness are one pole of content in 2024 the other is entirely the opposite. Since the rise of the Metaverse (2021) and boundless creator tools like MidJourney, the internet is seeing a clear trend towards what I term ‘uncannyvallefication’.
When I started wearing imaginary clothes, anything 3D was pretty much regarded as witchcraft. Take Nike-owned digital sneaker brand RTFKT as an example. A video of the founder with a virtual shoe when the brand first began garnered 245,000 views and immediately set it apart as a viral sensation.
Since the advent of natural language based image generation models (Midjourney, Dalle-2 etc.) the un-real has become commonplace. We’re both desensitised to the surreal and equally more accepting of its integration into our reality. When not so long ago digital culture was magic, now no one bats an eyelid as Korean Aunties swarm MoMa or transform into delectably gloopy felines.
So what does that mean for digital fashion?
As we slowly mutate into “Homo-techo,” 2024’s cultural consumer can be classed as someone who:
Wants to be watched, and to be watching…
Collects clout through their online behaviours
Is comfortable with the digital world and elements of the unreal
Which opens up a myriad of opportunities for digital fashion.
For those who want a holistic view of the fash-tech ecosystem, I’d recommend subscribing to Maghan Mcdowell's Vogue Business. But from my own POV, the three elements of digital fashion I’m most bullish on this year are:
Clothes that move at the speed of culture — As explored above, the internet has fundamentally altered our brain chemistry and behaviours, resulting in an ever accelerating speed of information processing which extends itself to how we culturally consume.
Where in past decades, a fashion collection might have been in for a season, or a blockbuster movie in for a month, cultural phenomena are now created, recycled, meme-ified and deep fried in a matter of hours (or days if they’re lucky!)
If you take one of fashion’s roles as reflecting the zeitgeist, in a world of trends that move at the speed of your wifi, the only real way to catch up to culture with clothes seems to be if they’re digital.
Last month my company DRAUP launched our new collection FEED under this exact thesis. With the tagline ‘clothes that move at the speed of culture,’ we drop a new piece every time a new internet trend/ phenomena catches our eyes. When a piece is live we will dress ANYONE who wishes to wear it, and fills out our application form, BUT as soon as we create our new piece, its predecessor is gone forever.
Clothes that connect — Where our digital and physical identities are increasingly intertwined, and the uncanny valley is a popular place to visit, clothes that allow our IRL and URL personalities to fuse will play an increasingly important part in fashion’s future.
At one of Paris Fashion Week's hottest parties, taking place both in an Irish Pub and simultaneously in Fortnite, Tribute Brand presented PUNK – a brand tailored to all your realities.
Holding the belief that digital fashion is simply fashion, the purpose of PUNK is to seamlessly merge both our real and virtual worlds. Purchasing a PUNK tracksuit gives the consumer a stonewashed fit, equipped with an NFC chip3 that unlocks what the brand perceives as PUNK’s virtual existence.
Whilst digital-physical drops are nothing new (The Sims did a collab with Moschino back in 2019, and Balenciaga followed suit soon after) what’s important about PUNK is that the virtual component is far more than just the physical’s digital twin.
Rather than merely making a digital tracksuit, the Tribute team worked on discerning how the essence of their physical piece would translate in the digital. Taking Victoria’s Secret PINK as their starting point, the tracksuit (a PINK signature piece) digitally manifests as a parodied interpretation of PINK’s logo (algorithmically unique to each consumer), and as an avatar — PUNKY (a digital punkified version of the PINK mascot) which can be used in both AR and in virtual worlds such as Monaverse.
Whilst this might seem meta, if you look at culture today it makes obvious sense.
As Marshall McLuhan states,“the medium is the message”. And where even a piece of Instagram content needs to be re-tailored to TikTok, it makes sense that our identities need to be tweaked to translate.
Make (it) your own – 2023 was the year that shit got weird. Or more precisely, everyone got the ability to make weird shit.
The wave started when Open-AI released Dalle 2 – an AI system that can create realistic images and art from a written description. Dalle 2 was followed swiftly by MidJourney, and now SORA (text to video) rendering years of animation and 3D training largely redundant in making quite literally anything you want online.
Personalisation in fashion has been a trend since before LV offered personalised embossing, but now we’ve come to a place where user-generated content (UGC) is moving outside of game and into the clothes we use to flex on social media and wear in our real lives.
However, even in a world of creative abundance, it’s still my firm belief that personalisation will have parameters.
While some people may revel in the opportunity to wear literally whatever they want (shout out DressX’s incredible new digital dressing tool that allows outfits to be created and worn in a matter of seconds) I believe that brand will stay attractive to the majority of fashion consumers
In 2022 Roblox cited 11.5 million creators on its platform, with $624 million going out in payments to users selling their works. However, the platform claimed that its top 10 creators earned an average of $23 million apiece, with “nearly every creator in our top 500 earning at least $140,000,”. This shows that even in a world where anyone can make anything, the best at making their works, and selling their stories, will always be the ones who attract a cluster of consumers. They are set out by their ability to layer community and clout on top of self-expression.
In this vein, personalisation parameters become of incredible interest, where consumers wish to retain all the best elements of brand identity, but still flex that they’re unique.
In a future world, I’m sure that features like MidJourney’s ‘slight variation’ settings will be present on all ecomm sites. Such settings will allow us to perfectly personalise clothes within a brand’s defined enclosures. But until that time, I see generative algorithms as one of the most interesting ways to provide personalisation with parameters.
NOT TO BE CONFUSED with generative AI, generative algorithms are coded systems which allow elements of randomness to be integrated into products. Relying on hard coded probabilities (2 out of every 10 dresses I produce will have spots, 4 out of 10 will be red, 6 out of 10 will be knee length etc.) generative systems allow for pieces that are completely unique to their owner, yet connected to all other pieces in a collection by both a shared visual, and algorithmic thread.
Under our motto ‘code is the couture', DRAUP started creating generative digital fashion early last year – attracting the attention of institutions such as Christie’s through our work with these techniques.
Tribute Brand utilised similar methods, with their project ODDS, which has seen 218 unique physical sweaters created out of waste yarn. And now, Minnie Muse blogger Colby Mugrabi, has similarly gone all in on generative fashion with her brand mmERCH.
Branded ‘neo-couture’, mmERCH sees generative fashion pieces created in collaboration with artists. Whilst retaining a clear sense of style, each mmERCH piece sees its colours, patterns and even its materials, algorithmically differentiated. Plus you get your own digital avatar with every piece!
Then what’s holding us back?
As made clear in my last piece, it’s not 2021 anymore. The Metaverse isn’t coming any time soon, and idealism has given way to cold hard cynicism for many creators and consumers.
Looking with the eyes of one who knows the steps that need to be taken (and the difficulty to walk), the things that need to evolve are:
Our habits - Whether taking pictures in your underwear, or hitting, sorry tapping, people with your phone to activate an NFC, digital fashion predicates changes in human behaviour that no one has come close to cracking.
Where we wear - As the success of digital fashion is contingent on our lives online we are entirely codependent on platforms like Instagram, Twitter and TikTok and on games like Roblox and Fortnite. Thus the growth of our industry (and each company within it) is linked inextricably to the use of these platforms, and can be made or broken by their ever changing particularities.
The legislation – Be it TikTok, Crypto or AI the last few months have seen significant legislative moves to regulate the innovation mentioned in this essay. These legislative moves serve to curtail consumer behaviours alongside the technologies needed to adopt, and send the large brands scurrying to compliance.
And yet…
If the internet can convince 200,000 people to snort cinnamon at risk of death, getting them to adopt behaviours that allow them to participate in the $1 trillion fashion industry more accessibly, sustainably and creatively is entirely within reach.
And as our mutation into “Homo-techno” persists, digital fashion could well become the lifebuoy for consumers desperate to surface in the saturated sea of swipes.
This Outfit Does Not Exist is a bi-monthly newsletter on the future of imaginary clothing. Love it? hate it? don’t understand it?
The optimal length of a TikTok post in 2024
In 2016, Urban Dictionary user memegod420 uploaded the definition of a deep-fried meme as “When a high quality meme is screen shot, reposted and re-filtered so many times over that it has a yellowish, low quality resolution and looks like it was deep fried”
An NFC chip enables short-range, wireless communication between two devices (in this case a tracksuit and a phone)