Digital Clothing is the Future of Fashion 2024

Fashion actually is the language. It's a language without words. It's a language of emotions, of creativity. That's what I love about it, and it also reacts very fast to what is happening in the world. But now I think it's like only fashion that is connected to technology. My name is Dara Shapovalova and I am one of the co-founders of Dress X. If the notion was physical fashion, it's when we start from the garment. The notion of digital fashion was started with tech, was started from technology.

Technology is everything here. I remember fashion industry without any social media, and now digital fashion. That is like interwinning with social media. Fashion industry is one of the most polluting industries in the world, just because, like the clothing production, involves so many people and so many resources. We're not talking only about fashion, right. It's a parallel business.

Social Media – The New Type of Consumption

It's like huge amount of clothes that are produced, and the amount of clothes that cost, like less than, let's say, five, and seven dollars, were the most harm. That's happening. Lots of people started to buy clothes just for the content creation, and there is a famous research by Barclays Bank that says that in the UK, like 9% of customers who are shopping with credit cards, they actually return the clothes back just because they bought them for the content creation. That's where, like social media, I think, started to trigger consumerism even more, because that's kind of the new type of how many clothes should not be produced and just exist. for one word of the clothing on social media. We completely want to eliminate the physical aspect of all of that, and we started to brainstorm. So what we can do if we completely eliminate the physical part–and it was like, obviously, it's the clothes for the content, for the videos and for the photos.

Dress X – The First Multibrand Retailer

And at the same time, the epidemic hit when we understood that the retail will never be the same again when the production of digital item is happening, it's 97% less emissions of CO2 than the physical item is being produced. So basically, in terms of sustainability, where digital fashion can really help is that if you need an item just for like a fashion story or for wearing it once on social media, you can buy it digitally. We just need to provide a different solution where there is a choice. Dress X is the first and the biggest multibrand retailer of digital only clothes. We started with like five designers. Now we have over 80. It was like 35 items. Now it's 1400 items at Dress X.

My co-founder is Natalia Modinova. It's the person with whom I worked as many of my projects in the past, and the third member of the founding team is Julie Krasnijenko, and she used to be in technology for 15 years. So me and Natalia we have fashion background and Julie she has a tech background, so it's a kind of great different combination. So at Dress X the production is structured in a different level. So first of all, in-house we are producing digital garments, and it's all done in various programs like cloth, 3D and marbles designer, and it takes around two to four days to create one item. The designers submit their files and we start the digital dressing. We test the files, how they work on different images, how they don't. We're at the moment of time when sometimes it's not possible that you understand that it's a digital item, if a person didn't mention that any item can be in the end fit on anybody type.

Digital Fashion – The Future of Fashion

I see the world where digital clothes are worn and reworn and traded and worn by someone else. It's all about how we can replicate the experience of physical clothes and digital, and we never thought that we will be buying someone's clothes from a wardrobe. I am absolutely confident that in three to five years, every fashion brand, every fashion designer, will have this revenue stream from digital fashion. So math is extremely important in how the digital garment fits in the final image, and it's also super important for the machine learning. Without technology and software engineers and machine learning engineers, digital fashion would never exist. Digital fashion provides so many opportunities to the designers because it's just an opportunity to create something that doesn't have gravity or the textures that would never exist in real life. those artists who are very good in science, let's say, and who love physics, or who know a lot about space, for example, they can create garments that would never exist in reality and that can kind of break the rules of existence. My projection is that from 3 to 5 years from now, every person who loves fashion and buys it on a regular basis will also have his or her digital wardrobe.

Is Steam the Viable Curriculum?

It will only continue to grow faster, but there are so many things that can be done in the world because of the tech and because of all this new knowledge that we receive in the schools in Ukraine. It's only now that we have an opportunity to choose the curriculum. When I was learning, it was all about the program that I was ought to do so. I did not have that much choice. I couldn't select a certain curriculum, and here it's more about understanding what exactly you want to learn and to spend the time on the disciplines you want to. It's not necessarily the case in Ukraine when I was starting. I think it's changing right now. We do have team education for sure, and especially science tech are very important in math.

It's like the subject that everyone studies in the school, and yes, team education is absolutely important. The story of how we managed to put Ukraine on a world's fashion map. That's the moment of my career where I'm the most proud of. We managed to change something in the entire country culturally, the fashion week that I co-established with some other people and designers. That project quickly became quite an important one for the Ukrainian fashion scene, because it completely changed it. I was writing for Stylecom, which then became Workcom. So I was always a journalist, also like pitching the stories about Eastern European fashion to different magazines, and also started fashion website, and it was the first independent fashion media in Ukraine. It was also in a wholesale business representing designers to the biggest stores worldwide.

I realized that everyone is asking me for the suggestion of how they should develop their business, what they should do next. So I opened a school which was the first private fashion school in Ukraine, and when I started Kia Fashion Institute, it was because I realized that there are not so much knowledge that people can receive professional knowledge about fashion in Russian or in Ukrainian. So basically we all read lots of books right, but theory is great, but when you do something in practice it can be completely different. I think art is essential for every person, because I believe, like the most interesting ideas are born on the intersection of different areas and technologies, or like areas of knowledge.

So that's why I believe, like if someone is studying science, it's important to take at least like one course in art, I believe, to go and do what you've learned simultaneously or when you're learning. It is super important. So I believe steam is the viable curriculum for everyone, because actually I think that's the great foundation of whatever you want to do next in life. I think it's really important for everyone to understand that the success can come to any person if you really work hard and when you know what you want to achieve, because for me it's a mission, it's a mission of how I can change the world of fashion and how I can show to everyone that they can go and build their companies if they really want to and if they work hard.