The Utility and Possibilities of Digital Fashion | Digital Fashion Week NYC | PI Apparel

Hi, everybody. Thank you so much for coming. I'm Clare Tattersall. I am the director of Digital Fashion Week New York. I'm a member of the advisory board of the Metaverse Fashion Council. And I am the founder of The Drip, which is an NFT boutique. And we have worked very much to bring functionality to digital fashion. So I'm going to be focusing a little bit on that. I really like panel discussions, so I would really like you to ask questions as we go along, not wait until the end. And I also really invite everybody, if you have a comment or something to say, it doesn't have to be a question, but if you want to pipe up. I was in some panel discussions yesterday and I was just burning with questions and ideas, so I really invite you to do the same. We'll have an imaginary panel discussion. So fashion is for wearing. Fashion is about creativity. It's art as architecture for the body. It's about storytelling. What image do we want to What do we want to tell people about ourselves? Are we corporate? Are we playful? Are we sporty? We want to express our emotions. We want to share with the world our inner self through our clothes. So in the physical world, we do that with textures, with silhouette, with— with an image. We sort of have set ideas about this, and— We have a few limitations. We have accessibility to materials. We have appropriateness. We definitely want to be appropriate in the physical world. And we are also limited by gravity. So, big concern. However, in the digital world, things are totally different. We have the opportunity to create fashion that's big, that's fabulous, that can be— completely unreal, and we are not constrained by gravity. But how are we going to wear this incredible fashion? So I— if you have two takeaways today, what I want them to be is that we have an extremely high relevance of digital fashion to our future online selves. And the other takeaway that I want you to have is how digital fashion is wearable now and wearable in the future. And this is the area I'm really, really going to invite you to ask questions and to have comments on as well. So what are we going to do? We are going to— unpack this idea. We're going to demystify parts of the conversation. I'm going to dial it back to start with, and we're going to look at how did we get here, the history of digital fashion. We're going to look where we currently are right now in the Web3 economy and what that means for us. We're going to talk about screen time. We're going to talk about immersion, the metaverse, and games. And we're going to look how we can actually get dressed in the digital world. So let's start off with the history of fashion, the rise and rise of digital fashion. So digital fashion started as a simple tool. As we know, we have people downstairs from CLO3D, from Browzwear, from Optitex, from Style3D, and forgive me if I haven't mentioned everybody. It's so exciting to see how many innovators there are in this space at the moment. But when you put a tool in the hands of creatives, then something else emerges. And digital fashion has grown into a whole new industry of its own that's creative, that's magical, that's interesting. And it's not just about fashion, it's the entire world. And we can use this to wear the digital fashion. We can use it to sell fashion. And we can use it in so many other ways to immerse ourselves in this. So fashion is in a very exciting place at the moment. Where we are right now is the Web3 economy. So we're not exactly at the inception point. We've taken a few steps into the Web3 economy already. But what is the Web3 economy? Web3 economy is a new iteration of the World Wide Web that's based on blockchain technology, which incorporates concepts such as decentralization and token-based economics. So again, let's unpack some of these ideas. Decentralization. What does that mean? What does that mean for creatives? So decentralization, essentially it means that people are working as a community. There is a lot of collaboration going on. A huge amount of the talent pool is an independent creatives, and large brands are collaborating with independents. This is a really exciting time. But how do creatives have any control? They have agency over their work. With the Web3 economy and token-based economies, then they are minting their fashion as NFTs. They can create smart contracts so that people directly get paid at the same time. Do we have any designers in the house? We have a few. So it's a really, really exciting place for designers. We're upending traditional hierarchies, and designers and other creatives have a lot more power, independence, and control. So what do fashion NFTs look like? The whole NFT story, some people are very well acquainted and some people find it a little confusing. So I'm just going to go into a little detail. I hope I'm not insulting anybody's intelligence with that. So NFTs, they're basically a contract. It's a token. You mint something on the blockchain and it's an NFT. An NFT can be anything, and anything can be an NFT. So what brands are doing with NFTs are you could make an NFT a ticket to an event, or you could make an NFT something that is wearable. You can make an NFT a piece of fashion art. You can make an NFT perhaps a photo of a physical piece of fashion that you put a digital moving image on, or it can be a digital twin. So a fashion NFT can be absolutely anything. Is all digital fashion an NFT? Absolutely not, and it does not need to be either. I prefer to look at NFTs as something on the blockchain, and That's where I think it's really exciting for the entire fashion industry, both the digital and the physical fashion industry. I think it's going to bring transparency to the process. I think so many of us want a fashion industry that's more ethical, more sustainable. I think a lot of consumers want the same thing. And when things are on the blockchain, we can see what's been involved. Where were fabrics sourced from? Where was everything produced? We'll be able to see that, and I think consumers will have a lot more control. But digital fashion as an NFT, you're seeing who created it, who bought it, who sold it, and everything is visible, the entire process. So digital fashion can also be sold as just regular digital fashion as well. When you buy an NFT, it is just a token and you have unlockable content. And it's the unlockable content that is really key to this conversation. So we're getting there to look at how we're actually going to wear the fashion. But why, why do we actually even really care about the Web3 economy and digital fashion at the moment? The answer is very simply screen time. You know, on Sunday morning at 9 o'clock, I don't know about you, but I get a little pop-up that tells me how much time I spent online this week. So the average person in America spends 40% of their waking time online. That's pretty huge. As we move into more immersive online experiences, we're gonna need something to wear. We're going to want to express ourselves. We're going to want to express our creativity, our personalities, and our style. So another point about time that we're gonna spend in the virtual world as well is, um, in education, there have been studies that show that children, when they are learning in immersive experiential experiences, they have 15% higher retention rate. I think that's really exciting for education. I think a lot of us have questions about the metaverse. And I think there's a lot of really good ways we can use the metaverse. And we're going to want to wear clothes in all of these experiences. So immersion, the metaverse, games. Does anyone have any questions at this point? No. So the metaverse, the— is officially that you have a wallet that will allow you to enter the metaverse. That is the factor that unites everything. So you need a crypto wallet in order to enter the metaverse, the official explanation. However, we can have a lot of metaverse-like experiences where you don't need a wallet. We can have a lot of experiences. We don't need VR goggles. We can do streaming pixels on our laptops. Has anyone been in a metaverse experience online? Did anyone go to Decentraland? Or anything like that? You did? OK. What did you think of the— did you go to the fashion show in Decentraland?

No, no, no. But I've done just similar experiences where you kind of get the environment, the social feel, the social aspect of it.

OK. OK. So we have avatars. Ready Player Me. So many people on LinkedIn, et cetera, they are using a Ready Player Me avatar. To show themselves, but there's very limited amount of clothing. We need more variety. There's a huge opportunity that's coming soon for fashion designers for dressing your Ready Player Me avatar or any other avatar at all. The games industry is so far ahead of us. They have been doing the metaverse for years. For over a decade. I don't know if anybody heard Epic Games and Unity, their panel discussion yesterday. It was fantastic. And they're providing the tools. So we know the direction that things are coming from. They're providing free tools for so many engineers to create metaverse and immersive experiences. So that's really exciting. It's very available, very accessible, which is a very Web3 concept as well. Collaboration. So in all of these experiences, how are we going to get dressed digitally? So conventionally, the history of digital fashion is the two companies that really sort of started the high-profile digital fashion are The Fabricant and DressX. DressX, you have been submitting a photograph and they will dress your, the digital garment on your photograph. So our platform, the Grip.Boutique, that we've just launched, we have partnered with other technologies to bring new ideas into how we can dress ourselves in the digital world. And we do not have all the answers by any means. This is just the start. But we are creating by collaborating and partnering new ways of dressing. So one of our partners is Ventana, who is downstairs, and they are super generous and they have given our designers access to their platform and they have created experiences. So we're not doing virtual try-on with augmented reality for fashion, it's just not there yet. You can see some other apps. Snap is moving things along very fast with Lens Studio, but it's just not good enough for fashion. For jewelry, for makeup, it's absolutely incredible. There's Pulpo AR as well. They're doing fantastic things with jewelry try-on. You've got companies like Jewels, who Tracy from Aurelia and Icarus, she was talking yesterday morning and she has designed some of her designs on Jewels as well. And the earrings move and you can wear them on Zoom and Google Meet. So you can wear jewelry in your digital lives already. And they're absolutely Fantastic. So we're not using— we're using augmented reality, courtesy of Ventana, for creating social media experiences. In October last year, we had a digital fashion trail around New York. And the designers exported their designs from Ventana. And we started— we had a space at the World Trade Center. And you could create huge, digital sculptures. You can take pictures of yourself with the digital sculpture. So it was really using fashion as art in that way, and then you could take pictures. We are also partnering with Texel Moda, who are downstairs in booth 7, and what we're doing with them is it's a virtual try-on. They have an amazing app you can use in different ways. So like other people, you upload a photograph and they put the, the garment on the photograph. With this, you upload one photo and you can dress any amount of images on there, and the body mapping is incredible. I really recommend that you go and check out what they're doing because the— I think the body mapping is second to none. So you can either dress a garment on an avatar or you can dress it on your photo. Because when we buy a garment, we don't just wear it once and we don't just wear it in one place. We want to be able to upload any number of photos so that we can see ourselves at home watching television or at at the top of a mountain or on the beach or in the woods, you want to be able to take a photo, upload it, and dress the garment on you. And the third thing that we're doing is, it's very cutting edge, it's still in beta. If you buy an NFT right now, you still can't use it for about another month, but we are working with a company called Hologress, and they have created something like an Avatar Zero, and you, the designers, dress the garment on that, and from there, it can be exported into any game. It's the nearest thing we have at the moment to universal interoperability, which means that you can take one garment onto any platform. Because a big problem with the metaverse and with games at the moment is everything It's different. But in the same way that we want to upload a picture and dress it anywhere, we don't want to just buy a piece of clothing for one game. We want to buy something that we can move into any game. And it's going to be a little different. It's got to be adapted for the avatar. But we're going to be able to wear it anywhere. And this, I think, is really going to revolutionize the fashion industry and really change how we work with digital fashion, how we look at the future of our online lives. So I think for any designers, it's absolutely imperative that we start working in the digital space already. And there's so many amazing technologies that are here today and yesterday to explore, to delve into, and to see how it's going to work for you. What we do at Digital Fashion Week New York is look at different technologies and how you can put them next to each other and bring value to fashion and create new immersive experiences, either in the physical space or in the digital space. So I think the future is very, very bright for digital fashion. It's going to be a tremendous part of our future. Online lives, and I hope to see you in the metaverse. Does anybody have any questions? The mic is just coming for you. What was the name of that partnership? You said Hallow Dress. What was it? Hallow Dress. Hallow Grass. Hologress. Yeah. And the tool is called MetaTailor. Yeah. So the company is Hologress, but the platform is MetaTailor. Thank you. And has that been announced yet, or is that kind of a new— Yes. So they've been running for a long time. So it's actually two brothers, and they have been in the gaming industry for— 20 years, so they're really coming from the industry and they've been working up until this point with game developers and providing materials for game developers. We're partnering with them to bring more fashion, to bring haute couture fashion to, to the gaming industry because I think we can see You all know that Meta, Facebook Meta, they released the new designs, which they're not wildly inspiring, but, but they're a start. They're a start step by step. But I think there's, there's a lot more that we can do. You've seen through some of the pictures, the designers that we're working with and their designs are very intricate, very detailed. Very technically correct and very interesting.

Hi, I'm Elena from PVH. And speaking of the art that— it was amazing. All of those examples were incredible.

Thank you.

And my question is kind of towards that. Like, how did those designers find you? How did you seek out those designers? Where are they putting that? How are they getting eyes on those things?

So all the designs that you saw here today, they're for sale on The Drip.

Down to my next question.

As NFTs, so we just, I started with just 6 designers. Designers that I know are technically brilliant. They have training in the physical fashion world, but they're also able to adopt new technologies. Because working in this space, if you're at PVH, you very much know that there's so many new technologies coming at you. And they're not intuitive. You have to be able to learn to work with something to get one idea out of it. But yes, they're all very brilliant. So we have casting calls twice a year for Digital Fashion Week. We have physical shows. We have animations as well, trying to look at the different ways that people are working in in digital fashion and to have a physical runway show as well with digital elements. So some designers are working in the physical space and it's just such a huge topic. I don't think we should limit ourselves to any one thing at all.

Can I ask a follow-up question?

Please.

So knowing that those are all available NFTs and knowing the future that you told us about Holographics. Once somebody owns an NFT of one outfit, are they one-to-one? Is there one NFT and you own that exclusively? Is it a limited run? Can 10 people own the dress that we saw? And— I'm like loading it on here. I'm fascinated. And then so once you own the NFT, once— because the thing that somebody brought up yesterday was interesting is interoperability can exist. Now, and with the Avatar Zero idea, it can go into different video game platforms. But even the platform technology changes so often. Do those outfits age out in 9 months? Do they age out in 3 years? What— you know, those kinds of concepts.

Well, so that's a great question. So it should not, because you've bought the item. And when you buy it, you unlock several different ways of using it, and you unlock all of them. Um, the— for the Avatar Zero, the Avatar Zero will remain pretty much the same, but MetaTailor will be able to adapt it to new platforms. They'll be adding new ones in there and updating it to their technology as well. That's the whole point of the, the Avatar zero, so that you will also be able to sell on your NFT if you've had enough of it at some point. But to expand on that point, I don't see everything as NFTs. And MetaTailor, we have this conversation very often. Our next step is actually to provide a marketplace where our designers have 80% non-NFTs and then 20% NFTs, which are more haute couture. But the big sales are in— the first thing. Yeah, in the non-NFTs. There are people, there are some designers who are making not really particularly interesting designs, and they're making millions by selling them for $5, $10. It's— there are possibilities. So we're looking at, with our designers, scaling things down, having like a ready-to-wear non-NFT option, and then your haute couture NFT option as well. But thank you, great questions.

Oh, sorry. Oh, sorry.

Oh, yeah. Oh, sorry. Yes.

Hi, my name is Miguel. I'm a former fashion designer in technology now, really into digital twinning. This is more of a comment that you touched upon, but I think what was really exciting to me about this new virtual economy, and especially from a designer's perspective, statistics out there like less than 10% to 12% of graduating fashion students actually get a job in fashion. So this is a really great opportunity for designers to now take their own career into their hand, build careers that don't require a lot of capital like you do in the physical fashion world, you know. So I think it's a really great opportunity to support designers going into this realm to just help them do what they want to do, which is be passionate about designing and designing something that they can control and control their own business direction, right?

I, I think that's a great point. And actually, a lot of the designers that I work with, they actually, after they've exhibited with us, they get jobs in large companies But then some of them actually switch around and try and move out of the companies because they're pretty successful independently. And right now, they have a lot of agency over the sales. You're building in the price, and you're managing your time. Talent obviously rises to the top. So you do need to be talented. But that's sort of a given in any industry, really. But there are amazing opportunities right now, and I don't think it's just a bandwagon. And I think it's a great time for designers to sort of have one foot in each world as well. You can work in the corporate world and build that experience, which is really valuable, but you can also be independent in your part-time too.

Oh, there we go. My question is, besides the gaming world, where else can these NFTs and non-NFTs be used and utilized?

OK, so great question. So we are looking at how the designs can be from the Avatar Zero can be on Ready Player Me, which I think is sort of the most accessible avatar, really, if you go into a metaverse experience. It's kind of currently the gold standard. I don't know, so anybody might disagree with me on that, and I really welcome disagreement. But I think they're sort of the gold standard for avatars that you can create that will look more like you. My real complaint with that is they're all like one size. We don't have diversity of sizes yet in the Avatar world, but we will look forward to that where it's, it's a journey. So any metaverse experience that you go into and we are, we are really at the beginning of this and you will be seeing more and more through time. There is a rush to be in the metaverse. People are buying plots of land in the metaverse, holding events. There are music events in the metaverse, art events in the metaverse. And when you go to those, you want to make sure that you're dressed well for them. So yes, yeah. But it is, it is at the beginning, it is an investment that you make if you buy something and you will have more use out of it in the future. And to add on to that, so another thing that we offer when you buy the NFT is you get the FBX files. So you get the raw files for the garment, which will enable you to have more use out of it in the future that you might not have at the moment. So it's kind of like getting the pattern for something. You get the FBX files. These are great questions. Do we have any more? Well, thank you all so much. Yes. Yes.

Do you have any suggestions on where to find the most up-and-coming news so we can keep up to date on the happenings of things that are, you know?

Yeah, actually Vogue Business. Okay. Megan McDowell, who writes for Vogue Business, she is, I think she's the best writer. She's the most up to date. I subscribe to that to find out what people, are doing. Yeah, and it's well-written journalism. Thank you. As well. So reach out to me anytime. I put my contact information here. You can connect with me on LinkedIn, find us on Instagram. You can email me. I love answering questions, probably more than I should do. But I really like bringing the community together and sharing with everybody. And we're just really at the beginning of everything. There's a long way to go, and you're all part of it. So thank you so much for being here.