A Digitised Addiction
For domains in which manual craft, skill and imagination form the essence for all that comes after, the idea of digitisation comes close to an insult. But what if such digitisation could ensure the survival this exact domain?
What happened?
Year in and year out, it is the month of October that rings in a period of wonderfully diverse religious and cultural festivities. One such festivity is Halloween, once a religious holiday, now culturally adopted across the world — and those who participate embark on the challenging endeavour of finding the most striking costume every twelve months. But as astonishing as the (American-only) $10.6bn annual spend on Halloween may be, much more astonishing (or frightening) is the impulsive nature of those purchases — with costumes ranking at the top of the list of concerns. Whilst the short life of those low-quality garments produced under questionable working conditions is an area of discussion on its own (most are not worn more than once and, if not in a dark corner of one’s wardrobe, end up in the bin), the fact they heavily contribute to more than one in every five garment purchases (including Halloween costumes) being returned — 70% of those due to being ill-fitting — is equally intriguing. The logistical miracles that enable an almost seamless purchase-return experience for customers (and the hope for an increase in sales for firms) are certainly a sight to behold, but what many of us hope to be a re-entry into the sales cycle for returned garments (many of those being free of charge) is, in fact, a journey to the landfill due to the insufficient condition of the returned items — significantly contributing to the close to 30% of all manufactured clothing goods across the world ending up in landfills every year. Add that to the enormous environmental impact of the clothing industry and all of its stakeholders (suppliers, transport etc.) and the urgency for a solution becomes evident. Luckily, the curiosity in the nature of humanity has not let us down, and a collection of brilliant, sometimes even utopian (or dystopian) ideas has emerged — and, for once, has nothing to do with the struggling field of circularity that was hailed to revolutionise the clothing industry for years already.
Give me the lowdown
It starts with the simple, yet fascinating idea to make use of Snapchat’s market-leading AR infrastructure — beknown to users through their popular filters — as part of the firm’s efforts to break into e-commerce. For Halloween, for instance, American costume maker Disguise allowed Snapchat users to try on costumes via in-app AR, with an option to directly order any garments of choice afterwards. Style Me’s virtual fitting rooms, on the other hand, bring this idea to brick-and-mortar stores by allowing shoppers to create an avatar with exact body measurements and looks to visualise a garment’s fit, letting shop owners expect a significantly lower returns rate. This is echoed with endeavours from competitors like Shopify, Amazon, IKEA and Walmart, chasing the implied cost savings along their supply chains with such a drop in returns being estimated as high as 2/3 — simply by offering shoppers a “digitally-try-before-you-buy” option. But the potential of those solutions spans far beyond Halloween costumes and in-store fitting rooms. Whilst the idea of digital creativity has already made its entry into haute couture — the latest Shanghai Fashion Week being held in an entirely digital manner -, some see the world becoming a (rather dystopian) digital-physical hybrid realm, in which an AR-glasses-sporting population superimposes a digital reality (think of a Louis Vuitton suit) onto a physical one (a Nike hoodie, perhaps?) in a soon as four years.
This opens the door for an entirely new species of business models (and I’m not talking about dubiously hyped NFTs), which call themselves part of the “digital fashion” industry, defining the spectrum of all clothing that is not produced in a physical manner. One might question whether digital garments are yet another fad, but Moschino’s 2019 capsule collection for The Sims or Louis Vuitton’s partnership with League of Legends tells us that the idea has already been long-established. One business capitalising on this trend — and in fact, widening the scope of this concept beyond in-game applications — is DressX, a digital fashion retailer imposing digital garments over existing photos of real or digital scenes through AR. DressX’s idea threatens the status quo of many areas in fashion, but most prominently the much-debated industry of fast fashion — which it may very well absorb. The drivers behind such absorption are manifold — one being the potential of transforming the regularly obeyed “no-go” of outfit repetition, both for celebrities/influencers and ordinary mortals, into an instantaneous, space- and cost-saving digital alternative, without having to miss out on the latest trends. But it doesn’t stop with mere absorption, because such concepts also offer opportunities to significantly broaden the horizon of creativity — what may not be possible with physical clothes could very well become reality in the digital world.
What to expect
An “overnight abandoning” of the physical fast fashion industry for a purely digital alternative would most certainly be welcomed with open arms, but, as with many other lifestyle changes, is unlikely to happen within an appropriate timeframe. A transition-friendly, digital-physical blend with little intervention in people’s routines (yes, people don’t like being told what to do or change) as a next step in the transition of a domain that has become a drug-like addiction to many, offers a significantly more feasible solution. Before the claimed 97% drop in carbon emissions for the production of a digital garment (all you really need is a computer) is widespread, we ought to appreciate and focus on the improvements within the physical production-transport-return cycle that a digital-physical fashion blend has to offer.
What the likes of Snapchat and StyleMe present in the meantime are an opportunity for companies to form much closer relationships with their customers and figureheads, to the extent that one may play with the thought of “not-so-unsustainable fast fashion on-demand” becoming possible. A controversial thing to say? Surely — but what Snapchat and co. enable is for companies to receive direct feedback from customers that tried on their clothes — what is being tried on, what are the customers’ body shapes and what is being returned the most — allowing them to adjust designs, sizing and production for clothes that fit better and are worn longer, resulting in fewer returns and less garment waste. Concerns over working conditions and data privacy won’t vanish into thin air with this new feedback system, but it’s an in-between step in the right direction. Surprisingly, the first pioneers have already made use of this “renewed, deepened” relationship between brands and their customers (or their data, in fact). In August of 2021, for instance, Farfetch presented the world’s first carbon-neutral fashion campaign. One might expect to hear about carbon offsets (yes, we’re not particularly fond of those), but instead, Farfetch partnered with DressX to clothe influencers in digital garments, with the physical counterparts for customers being produced on-demand and no “single-wear” samples sent to said influencers.
Whilst all of the aforementioned innovations might not make a big dent in overcoming the many challenges we currently face and are prone to open the floor for more discussion — including recent doubts about making digital existence a reality (the “metaverse”) -, what stands is the fact that the myriad of ideas that would allow the entry of digitisation into clothing offers both short- and long-term prospects for the fashion industry to limit, and gain control of, the impact on its stakeholders; something which a plethora of industries are yet hoping to achieve.
