Meta Tailors — The Makers of Your Future Digital Wardrobe

The Meta Tailor is a radical new profession, emerging from the fusion of traditional fashion design, gaming, and digital experiences. They are 3D fashion creators that contend with unique parameters when making digitally native clothing that people can wear, style, and own across various platforms for digital identity.

The New in Digital Fashion: From Borrowing to Owning

In just one year, the digital fashion industry has gone through a series of transformations. Since the adoption of 3D software for apparel production, digital sampling, a.k.a. the recreation of materials and outfits into 3D, has been used to quickly preview and iterate on designs before moving to the creation of physical items. The uptake of this process has been a great step towards reducing waste, and as a fashion company, we celebrate this. 3D design also provides high quality visuals for marketing content driving posts on social media and creating new relationships between fashion brands, 3D generalists and virtual influencers.

Over time, fashion has made its way into new formats like AR (augmented reality) with versions of accessories and even full outfits available to “try on” on social media for the thrills.

But here’s the catch, these are not items you own. You are essentially just trying on digital outfits in the form of filters for a quick snap and share from those platforms like Instagram and Snapchat while they still exist.

Now consumers are realizing the benefits of OWNING their digital outfits.

What does this mean for the digital fashion consumer? For one, you can potentially bring in your digital wardrobe of fashion to compatible platforms to create a consistent self on the web. You might have heard of platforms like Decentraland, and The Sandbox Game, and more launching daily allow you to bring in and wear items made by third party designers.

The fact that digital fashion can be owned also means that these outfits are limited — so not everyone can show up in your colors and style. That is a good incentive for designers to put effort into creating truly interesting and bespoke outfits that owners can “wear” to stand out from the crowd. Brands like Tommy Hilfiger are going all in on this as they recognize that upcoming generations are going to be spending a lot of their time connecting with each other in virtual spaces as the new way to socialize. They are going to want to look good, stand out and have agency over how they style themselves.

Our team at BNV pioneered the role of “Meta Tailor” because we recognized that we are no longer making wearables merely for social media consumption and gentle AR interactivity. We are making digital wearables for the social platforms of the future, for clothing that is owned, can be customized, and much more.

New Worlds for Wearables

When creating wearable clothing in the real world, designers and traditional tailors consider fit, social interaction, and the cultures they represent. They develop their own design interpretations and decide the materials, cuts, styling, finishes, etc. so the wearer can see themselves in the clothing and go on to make purchases with satisfaction.

In the digital world, there is a different set of priorities to consider.

The greatest change to the existing paradigm is that the best wearables are often the ones that give great sense of agency — where the better the user can use the wearables to create experiences that are meaningful to them personally, the better the wearable ultimately feels.

It’s easier to think about it as translations of 3D meshes that need to work on the digital bodies in live gaming worlds. Another key difference between the creation of physical and digital lies within the exportation process: from digital draping to a solid mesh. For example, a beautiful superhero cape crafted in 3D software Marvelous Designer might look good when rendered for a social post, but may feel very muted and cheap on a Decentraland avatar if the cape has no cloth simulation to make it flow while running.

Designing for interactive platforms for the metaverse means that you are coordinating with platform developers. You’re helping to make the user experience for the user feel not only fresh, but also intuitive and constructive to how THE USER would like to build and play in those worlds. This also means there needs to be a sense of freedom and ease to style wearables with other items that can exist in the same digital world.

They are now part of the user experience team with the need to consider multiple formats, web-compatibility, and the digital cultures of the communities from those platforms. They build with awareness of the “wearable landscape” that has platform limitations with layering and styling, and working with marketing and tech professionals to make clothing that enhances gameplay and general gamification.

This is a far cry from the days of making digital advertising just to showcase the designer or brand on Instagram.

We are at the cusp of something new, and BNV is innovating with a growing battalion of Meta Tailors. We are soon to launch ME:ID, and one innovation we are excited to speak about is the Canvas (pictured in the banner). These are highly customizable and blank canvases that we think anyone with a sense of style is going to love using as they create their digital selves.

Stay tuned for more!