The New Reality of Fashion is Digital | Gala Marija Vrbanic | TED

I often get this question:

"Why would anyone buy a piece of clothing that doesn't exist?"

And as you can see, it's not that it doesn't exist.

Digital fashion is real, and it exists in so many virtual universes,

ranging from basic social networks

to fully developed virtual worlds known as the metaverse,

letting people express themselves in a way not possible before.

I’ve been playing video games since I [can] remember,

dressing up my game character.

Actually, I enjoyed it more than dressing up myself.

Five years ago, I was running a physical fashion brand.

But because of my gaming experience,

I kept thinking:

“How and why could people wear digital garments?”

And there was a reason I believed they would.

In 2016, I did research on “hypebeast culture.”

You know, those people buying and selling garments

that are always sold out.

As part of this research,

I've joined various Facebook groups where they were gathering.

What I noticed was they were usually buying those pieces

just to post a photo of themselves wearing it on their social channels.

And later on, they would resell it.

So they didn't need or want the actual garment.

They wanted its image, and that image was being used online.

And it made sense to me,

because, like most of my generation,

they had their friends, peers, role models in the virtual space,

and this is where we care to express ourselves.

This is when I started experimenting

with what today we know as digital fashion.

Now I run the world's first direct-to-consumer digital fashion brand

and a fashion tech house.

We officially started last year,

and our growth has been unimaginable from a traditional fashion perspective.

Apart from doing our own designs,

we regularly collaborate with the biggest names from the industry.

With Carolina Herrera, we collaborated on a runway dress

and developed an app

where you can wear the dress on your phone using augmented reality.

And with Jean Paul Gaultier,

we collaborated on a piece that was part of their couture collection.

We even have our flagship store in the Decentraland,

a metaverse owned and created by its users.

And we are not the only ones.

For example, on Demat, an NFT marketplace,

fashion brands are selling authenticated digital fashion items

that are usually sold out as soon as they are released.

And as it was for me,

the games are becoming a gateway to digital fashion for many.

The biggest names in the luxury segment are eagerly trying to enter this space.

Balenciaga has collaborated with Fortnite,

and Gucci bag was sold inside Roblox for more than its worth in real life.

Fortnite itself has sold more than two billion worth of skins and game extras

for in-game character dressing.

But it's a misconception that creating digital fashion is quick and easy.

We often have to play by the same rules as in real-life physical fashion.

Think back to a time when there were no computers

and people were making posters by hand.

When the software like Adobe Photoshop finally arrived,

they thought making posters is going to be so much quicker and easier.

But obviously that wasn't true

because technology just replaced outdated principles with new possibilities.

So instead of doing most of the development in the physical space,

we do it in front of our screens.

The process is the same, just the tools are different.

And in the end,

everything falls back to a complexity of a piece or a concept.

For example,

there's a huge difference in creating a basic T-shirt

or a couture-like dress, regardless of the medium.

And the digital realm somehow forces you to go into that exploratory direction.

Because do you even need a physical T-shirt in a virtual space?

With digital fashion, you can experience fashion in its purest form,

devoid of functional barriers.

You don't need your sleeves there.

You don't even need your hands.

Digital fashion is not an alternative but an evolutionary step.

And we are currently at the beginning of this new era.

An era where digital garments could become an added layer to our reality,

where you will be able to instantly choose to whom you want to present yourself

wearing multiple different outfits at the same time

and using most advanced technology, like AR or VR for example.

And not only does it allow for self-expression

in totally different contexts,

but digital fashion can be zero-waste and inclusive, available to users,

regardless of their gender, size or race.

I come from Croatia,

a country that is nowhere on the fashion map,

yet my company is considered one of the pioneers of this field.

When we started, we were among the few doing it.

And since then,

a whole new evolving market has grown around it.

Digital fashion market is going to be huge.

But from my experience, no one knows how far it could go.

It's fairly simple.

Technology usually grows exponentially, and so will our virtual presence.

And someone has to dress these people.

Thank you.