The buzz around the metaverse may be fading, but the idea of virtual fashion hasn’t, and it’s ready to take the next step by further deepening its offerings, both digital and physical.
A new nonprofit, the Council of Digital Fashion Designers, doesn’t just want to keep “phygital” alive, it wants to make it thrive, and to prove it, the savvy group is hosting an event series featuring Diesel and other big-name brands.
The DFDC will be launched on Tuesday with a mission to “embed digital fashion into the traditional fashion ecosystem,” according to the association.
This is easy to say but hard to do.
Despite many virtual world developers pushing for interoperability between platforms, there is still no universal standard for virtual fashion, let alone phygital fashion experiences. Every project is different, and every environment has different technical requirements.
This means that for brands to deliver a virtual look that works across contexts and platforms, they have to create multiple formats. At least, that’s how it used to be. Now, DFDC is introducing tools to streamline that work.
DFDC’s new Reality Spectrum Matrix is designed to ease the technical burden so brands can focus on their product and experience.
Digital fashion like this Placebo Digital Fashion House x Threeasfour will be all the rage at Fashion Week Connect in both the virtual and real world.
Image courtesy of
It’s part of a larger, more ambitious approach that goes beyond games and virtual worlds – social media, augmented reality and more, available on a range of devices, from phones to mixed reality headsets, through apps or web browsers.
“We see great power in connecting the digital environment where consumers spend their time with the physical world of brands and the fashion system,” David Cash, founder and CEO of DFDC, told WWD. “It’s about successfully connecting these points and actually providing connectivity, not just hinting at this connectivity.”
To prove its concept, the group, which already brought together some of the biggest names in virtual fashion and blockchain, organized a series of events featuring work from some of the real-world’s most famous fashion houses.
Connecting all fashion
For its inaugural Fashion Week Connect series, DFDC has prepared programming across a range of phygital experiences, both real and digital, spanning the globe, starting in September.
The Global Digital Fashion Film Festival, in collaboration with ShowStudio and directed by Nick Knight and his team, will showcase digital fashion globally, both online and in real life, through films featuring celebrities such as Charlie XCX and Naomi Campbell, and fashion from brands such as Balenciaga, Mugler, Loewe and Bottega Veneta.
The agenda will also feature Diesel’s Metamorph projects, including the virtual reality Vert watch and an interactive metaverse experience created by Artificial Rome.
Dolce & Gabbana’s Collezione Genesi will be featured in a physical location at a real-world VIP reception in Los Angeles, co-hosted by RedDAO and DFDC. Hailed as the world’s first luxury phygital product, the 2021 collection takes the form of an NFT with a physical counterpart and sold for approximately $6 million, including RedDAO’s purchase of a jacket and a “Doge Crown” that will be on display at the event.
From Dolce & Gabbana’s Collezione Genesi
Provided by Red DAO
DFDC will also be in Paris, helping to present the Fabrix Digital Fashion Takeover as part of Paris Fashion Week at the Palais de Tokyo. Supported by the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode, the initiative will include Hong Kong-based designers Wilsonkaki and Ponder.er.
The group’s expansion into Singapore comes after supporting Epic Games Studio’s Digital Fashion Week in London and other VIP-only events around the world, where it will deliver experiences including augmented reality, game worlds and holograms as the title sponsor and lead innovation partner of Next in Vogue.
Fashion Week Connect and DFDC will also play a role in pop-up events during New York, London and Paris fashion weeks.
And continuing on the theme of interoperability, platforms supported during the event series will include social media apps like Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat, games like Fortnite and Roblox, metaverses like Spatial and Decentraland, and devices from mobile phones and desktops to the Meta Quest headset.
The undertaking seems huge, and to make it a success, Cash has assembled some of the biggest names in virtual fashion to serve as his board and operations team.
The list includes fashion photographer, filmmaker and self-described “image-maker” Knight; Megan Kasper, managing director of FirstLight and founding member of Red DAO; 3D and digital fashion artist Antoni Tudisco, who has worked with LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, Maison Margiela, Moncler and Balenciaga, among others; Vogue Singapore Publisher Bettina von Schlippe; Marjorie Hernandez, co-founder of Web 3.0 fashion marketplace Demat and creative blockchain platform Lukso; Daria Shapovalova and Natalia Modenova of DressX; Dani Loftus, founder of code-based couture platform Draup and digital fashion influencer @thisoutfitdoesnotexist; Leanne Elliot-Young of the Institute of Digital Fashion; and Gmoney of 9DCC.
Other groups participating include Threedium, Karta, Beyond Studio, MAD Global and FFFaceme.
Notably, DCDF is also in talks with prominent creative and executive leaders from the fashion industry. For now, Cash has refrained from making any public comments about their identities, but an official announcement is expected in due course.
David Cash
Nancy Kim
A new vision for phygital technology
After the dust settles, DFDC hopes fashion brands will walk away with a sense of what’s possible with digital and physical interaction.
The events are the embodiment of the mission, but it’s the technology that makes the vision a reality, and it will live on long after this final activation in the series.
This brings the focus back to the group’s reality spectrum matrix.
As a framework, it’s a clever workaround for solving interoperability issues. With RSM, brands don’t need to create multiple versions of a given item in different formats; the technology does the work — “remapping the polygons,” as Cash describes it. In essence, the tool handles the coding demands so brands can focus on the product, the experience, the physical aspects.
Moreover, he added, DFDC is working on developing “an API that can be plugged into anything,” “so you can plug this directly into a mobile app, or into a website. Technically speaking, you can plug this into any context where React is valid, from game worlds to websites to web pages.”React is an open-source tool developed by Meta for building interfaces.
Additionally, there is a points-granting and tracking mechanism that allows consumers to earn rewards in gamified scenarios, increasing loyalty.
These tools can also support virtual fashion NFTs. Non-fungible tokens may not garner as much attention as they did when Dolce & Gabbana’s multi-million-dollar Collezione Genesi stunned the industry three years ago, but fashion hasn’t declared its death just yet.
Megan Kasper in digital Fendi.
Alberto Gonzalez
Despite the twists and turns of investment and value, or even legal and political influences, these and other “on-chain” blockchain efforts are still impacting brands, Kasper said.
“Look at a brand like Louis Vuitton,” she said, referring to the fashion house’s ongoing on-chain product launches, including a phygital NFT of its most recent leather varsity jacket, which launched in April.
Kasper, who serves as DFDC’s chief advisor and executive director, also worked on the luxury fashion house’s Via NFT program. “They understand the long-term value of storing their products on-chain,” she explained. “With the regulations that the EU has on smart tags, I think brands are looking at tying the smart tags or NFT chips that they’re embedding in their products to on-chain, so that they can access the metadata, and then that can seamlessly plug into a broader digital version of that asset, whether that’s a 3D item, a wearable, a filter, etc.”
There is a push for regulation, though it is somewhat piecemeal between governing bodies, but with the DFDC, brands can join the conversation and have a say in what the future of this ecosystem holds, Kasper added.
“My personal experience with Via’s work is that Via’s[consumer]members are allowed to vote on what they want brands to produce, which is unheard of,” she continued. “Other than this, I’ve really never seen a luxury brand allow consumers to vote like that.
“So I think what David is doing with the DFDC and RSM tools is going to give brands a much easier way to bring these tools and aspects together to strengthen their long-term relationships with consumers.”
