This week has started with a bang and there seems to be so much information and meetings that I have been able to tap into, all that being said I have felt overloaded with information and overwhelmed with trying to understand which direction to start on but it has been nice to reflect on how much work I have done this week when at times you feel like you can’t do enough!
We have been given an additional brief to coincide with the two modules that is directly linked to working in the Industry, where we have been asked to submit work for past competitions and fashion shows with the potential to include animation.
I have enrolled on a 6 week course on Digital Fashion held by The Digital Fashion Group 101 and this week has included in depth overviews of the emergence of digital fashion and how other technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) are helping the industry to make informed decisions; there has been interviews from Kerry Murphy and Amber Jae Slooten both co-founders of The Fabricant. To hear their insights and how they arrived into digital fashion has been fascinating and inspiring. They mentioned technologies that I would like to explore further
- Megascans (Unreal Engine)
- Metahumans
- Ganufacturing (AI Learning – images in ai to come up with generated designs)
(I’ve been creating my own avatar using Metahuman and have enrolled on a course on Linkedin Learning on creating environments using Megascan)
https://www.linkedin.com/learning/unreal-engine-and-quixel-megascans-architectural-visualization
https://www.thedigitalfashiongroup.academy/
10/1/22-Twitter Spaces have been busy with back to back content from The Fabricant’s Pepe Castelo & This Outfit doesn’t exist, Dani Loftus discussing digital fashion and also Kerry Murphy, discussing Web3 and NFT Fashion.
Dani Loftus is fast approaching her 1 year anniversary of This Outfit Does Not Exist where she explores the use of digital fashion using her images and filters. She says that when she started she expected more people to be interested in this areas but she found that there were few doing what she was and there were very few people wearing digital fashion. She said that after the boom of the NFT market in Feb 2021 there has been an increased awareness and larger brands are starting to understand that they need to be part of this new movement.
Pepe says that digital fashion is starting to be understood and he sees great opportunities in it.
He explains how The Fabricant are building the tools that will enable a co-design with consumers and explains how digital fashion holds utility and allows for self expression, he also expresses how digital fashion is able to democratise as it can be created anywhere in the world by anyone.
They see trends are being in Personalization
When talking about physical garments they recommend starting with the digital, using the digital to put out to market and then move to the physical. And as brands you can combine both digital and physical.
DL love the idea of being able to wear something that she wouldn’t be able to wear in real life, garments that are innovative – avant-garde and just wouldn’t work in real life.
Kerry Murphy predicts that digital fashion will overtake physical fashion but it could take centuries and the questions that need to be asked are around the utility of digital fashion and how you can provide digital fashion without the physical; he sites AR filters like snapchats fully body, NFT games (Sandbox and Star Atlas) to bring in own digital clothing, how social media is being used to flex ownership and how the experience itself of intertacting, creating and minting can be all used to create interest.
Notable takeaways to consider and further research
- 60% of crypto wallets are owned by women
- Nico Fara – Service Provider (removes barriers)
- Bloomsberg article on NFTs / Women in Crypto space
- They’ll be places where you’ll wear and won’t wear your digital fashion just like in real life, where are the events that you want to wear the garments? And how many avatars will you have?
- Detailed garments would loose detail when in other gaming programmes ie Roblox
- What are PFPs?
- WEB1-email/WEB2-Social media(owning your data)/Web3-Decentralized (own your own data)
The Fabricant – Online Workshop 11/1/22
Anna and Diane from the Fabricant held a workshop to show their process of creating a dress through use of concept, sketch and creation. They used CLO3D to create the pattern giving insights on their workflow and tips and tricks and showed how Adobe Substance can be used to create materials to be applied in CLO3D. This got me wanting to start creating garments that I have previously designed and made and I have decided to create a digital version of one from a past post graduate collection.
Creating digital version of previously designed and made garments from Abstraction Collection
I have been able to use the tutorial and my learning so far to create the digital twin for one of my garments from my collection, Abstraction.
I input the image as a reference for creating, and started by creating the waisted panel of the garment building the additional pieces around this. As the garment is complex the dress took me around a day and a half which included some figuring out of some of the techniques I needed to use and a fair amount of fitting and adjusting. I really enjoyed creating this digital twin from scratch and it made me revisit the processes from when I originally creating the garment. Once the fabrics and colours were added I feel that the finished garment really does represent the original and I am thrilled that I have been able to complete this digital asset.
I’ve spent some time in the library picking up a selection of books which I feel will inform my research on consumer theories, cultural theories, fashion studies, sustainability and research methods. I have also been considering trends that are emerging and have been using prediction journal View to search for images/colour/material and ideas to inform further research. I have also spent time searching for reports on sustainability from
- McKinsey & Co
- Ellen MacArthur Foundation
- Wrap – Textiles 2030
- Stockholm Resilience Centre
- WGSN
Webinar – The Digital Fashion Group – Digital Design & Sustainable Futures – The Goals
This webinar could not have come at a better time when I am starting to question how digital fashion can help with sustainability, the speakers included:-
- Alexia Planas Lee – Circular Fashion Summit
- Evelyn Mora – Digital Village/Helsinki Fashion Week
- Olga Chernyshera – DressX
- Roy Perhi – Placebo(digital fashion house)
- Merunisha Moonilal – Lecturer in Sustainability
Such an amazing discussion which really got me thinking about
- Circular systems
- Are we doing enough in digital fashion? is it just a new means of making money/selling?
- Need to see real results for the potential of digital fashion (not much data yet!)
- We need to see the bigger picture and ask bigger questions about what we can do
- look at the figures on DressX on consumption research
estellepearce.wordpress.com 