Digital fashion innovations for the real world and metaverse

Abstract

The aim of digitalising the fashion industry was to streamline the design, production and business of physical products for the real world and to achieve sustainability with the help of different digital tools. However, with the recent emergence of the metaverse, the parallel world in virtual reality, a new horizon of digital fashion has been opened. In general, the innovations in digital fashion can be clustered into the following four themes – (1) Digital design and e-prototyping, (2) Digital business and promotion, (3) Digital human and metaverse, and (4) Digital apparel and smart e-technology (Figure 1). This special issue presents eight research articles and two reviews covering the first two themes of digital fashion innovations – (1) Digital design and e-prototyping and (2) Digital business and promotion. Computer-aided design (CAD) is among the first few digital elements entered into the fashion industry and education. There are many CAD systems for two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) design development that are being used in the industry today (Sayem, Kennon, & Clarke, 2010). Traditionally, the face-to-face teaching approach has been most effective for teaching these CAD software packages in academic set-ups. However, the COVID-19 pandemic forced us to move to a virtual mode of teaching across the world for the most of 2020 and 2021. Likewise, the tutors of fashion CAD had to adopt the new normal quickly and deliver the practical teaching elements of CAD over the online platforms, such as Zoom, MS Teams and Google Meet, etc. Lee (2021) looked into the effectiveness of online fashion CAD teaching in South Korea during the pandemic. They compared the grades and results of two groups of fashion CAD students: one group was taught 2D CAD systems offline in 2019, and the other group was taught the same systems online in 2020. Their finding is promising, and it shows that higher scores and grades were achieved by the online-taught students than the offline-taught cohorts. Although we do not have readily available similar studies from other countries to compare the finding, Lee’s (2021) study will give some confidence to the employers and educators about the knowledge and skills gained by students taught remotely during the pandemic. Pattern cutting is the first technical step in the apparel manufacturing process that starts materialising a design into a real wearable product in a set of technical drawings. In a mass production scenario, the pattern pieces of multiple sizes of same style of a garment are arranged into a rectangular area, known as a marker, matching the dimension of the cutting table and fabric width. The pattern cutting process, including marker making, is one of the most labour-intensive and least efficient processes in terms of waste generation within the fashion design and development cycle and is responsible for an average of fifteen percent fabric wastage (Ramkalaon and Sayem 2020). ElShishtawy, Sinha, and Bennell (2021) reviewed the works done on computational methods for the cutting problem and zero-waste design thinking. They highlighted the application of the CAD technique by Ramkalaon and Sayem (2020) and Weng and Kuo (2011) for zero-waste marker generation and stressed the importance of collaboration between the fields of cutting and packing (C&P) operational research and zero-waste fashion design (ZWFD). Being the first to cover the C&P and ZWFD research, the review article by ElShishtawy et al. (2021) provokes new research thinking among the academics and researchers in fashion and computer disciplines. The term ‘cyborg’, a portmanteau of cybernetic and organism, was first coined by Clynes and Kline (1960) to refer to an organism with enhanced capabilities through the integration of any artificial component or technology. Later, Haraway (1985) established the depiction of technology-dependent humanity as an existing version of a cyborg in her ‘Cyborg Manifesto’. The article by Särmäkari and Vänskä (2021) hosted in this special issue identified tomorrow’s fashion designers as cyborgs and it proposed a concept of ‘cyborg designer 4.0’, which refers to a physical and digital craftsperson, through the analysis from two case studies – one on generative clothing design involving machine learning and another on artificial intelligent (AI)-aided fashion sketching. They nicely echoed the footsteps of the blockchain technology, especially non-fungible tokens (NFTs), approaching towards the deisgn and development of digital-only garments as tradable assets, and provided an excellent food for thought for educators and industry leaders to figure out the construct of tomorrow’s fashion designers. Three-dimensional (3D) printing technology is a direct approach to converting a digital entity into a physical entity efficiently. Although this ‘digi-physi’ approach has been around for a fair amount of time, it has been more successful in designing and prototyping fashion accessories than in producing drape-able garments (Dip et al., 2020). Rolling (2021) looked into the designers’ perceptions of this technology and identified the efficient and inefficient