The Interline commissioned Diane Wallinger to create for our “Digital Fashion” category in our DPC Report 2024. Diane is a versatile (digital) fashion designer and Positive Fashion advocate with more than a decade of academic and professional experience spanning traditional, digital and sustainability in the fashion industry.
A graduate of Vogue College of Fashion and London College of Fashion, Diane has worked with renowned brands, including The Fabricant, on visionary digital fashion projects. Her expertise lies in combining creativity, innovation and technology to drive positive change in the industry.
Our team sat down with Diane – and some notable figures from CLO Virtual Fashion and Epic Games who have shared their own perspectives and, in Epic’s case, supported Diane with their own skills – to look behind the curtain on her design, to understand her workflow, and to discuss how the puzzle pieces of digital fashion and digital product creation fit together.
The Interline: What was the inspiration behind your design for this year’s report? What did you set out to convey, and how did you develop those ideas into the final look?
Diane Wallinger: Traditionally, fashion has always been influenced by external factors and I believe that digital fashion imagery has a similar ability to mirror or respond to the zeitgeist. We are going through troubled and uncertain times, and I wanted to reflect on a need to balance this out with comfortable clothing, protective layers and softening colours and materials. Sometimes braving a complex geo-political climate starts with putting on a comfy sweater and I think that even digital-only imagery can convey such feelings.
The Interline: While you worked in the “digital fashion” category, so there was less of an emphasis on producibility and more on form and expression, your design is still anchored in realistic materials. We all wanted to demonstrate that digitally designing garments to be physically worn, and designing garments that will only be worn digitally, have common foundations and share a lot of skills and tools – even if the intent and the endpoint are different. How do you think about that crossover between digital fashion and digital product creation?
Diane Wallinger: I see digital-only fashion as a natural follow-up of digital product creation (DPC). After all, once a product is digitised or digitally sampled, the sky – as in, the file size – is the limit. I wanted to use the opportunity of the report to show that a product prototyped digitally for production’s sake can come to life with digital imagery like a physical sample would in a magazine editorial. And that stepping beyond pure digital product creation can have so much impact, so fast.
The Interline: What do you believe the use cases for purely digital fashion are today?
It’s fair to say that we’re not all wearing digital garments and accessories in online meetings the way some people predicted we would be. But some of us certainly are.
And it’s equally valid to point out that NFTs didn’t result in anything like the shake-up in the core principles of fashion ownership that was being touted a couple of years ago. But at the same time, fashion brands are continuing to collaborate on and sell digital items through videogame ecosystems – most recently demonstrated with the addition of the “kicks” footwear category to Fortnite, and Nike’s initial drops in that space.
So digital fashion might not be what the initial hype said it was going to be, but it’s clearly still something as a consumer market – as well as being its own frontier of creative expression. Where do you think it stands? And where does it go from here?
Diane Wallinger: I think that digital fashion currently sits in a fun, yet not totally comfortable place – something I also wanted to convey with my imagery. We passed the hype phase fuelled by COVID-19, the run to implementation has slowed down and brands seem to focus on carefully integrating digital fashion for production. This in itself is a good thing, but it doesn’t leave much space for digital-only fashion, or at least less than a few years or months ago. However, I do think that digital fashion, notably in combination with AI, has an amazing potential for creating tailored marketing content that can showcase the impact of a product in unmatched ways. And I’ll keep pushing for this vision while waiting for a future of wearing a handful of physical garments made out of innovative fabrics for the sake of protection, and multiple statement digital pieces for adornment.
The Interline: How did you get started working in 3D? And what was the earliest trigger you can remember that prompted you to recognise the potential in creating digital fashion?
Diane Wallinger: I started learning CLO3D by myself during my Master in Fashion Futures at The London College of Fashion – the course gave me the space, time and context to begin my digital fashion journey. But the first trigger came much earlier, during my Bachelor’s. I remember having to create a deck on the future of fashion and including a full slide on digital fashion – it seemed obvious that this would be part of the future of fashion. Funnily enough, what was on that slide at the time were pieces from The Fabricant’s DEEP collection and I remember thinking the visuals felt so refreshing and new. Little did I know that a few years later, not only would digital fashion be my medium of choice, but I’d get to work for this incredible company I found so innovative and mysterious!
The Interline: What does your working environment look like today? What hardware and operating system do you work on? And what sits on top of and around your desk?
Diane Wallinger: I’ve recently returned to my home country – Switzerland – after six years of living abroad and one spent as a digital nomad travelling from Costa Rica to the Canary Islands. So, I’m settling into this new life phase and my desk is very representative of that – not to say messy.
I still work on my ASUS ROG Zephyrus laptop (which I love) because with the travelling a desktop PC wasn’t an option. I have the G15 model, with an AMD Ryzen 9 5000 Series processor and an Nvidia RTX 3080 graphic card. It’s already 3 years old but I’m glad I went for those high specs at the time, because it means I can still work with my laptop today. And I also bought the unit they had on display rather than customising and having one shipped, so it was a more sustainable and affordable purchase decision!
I’ve also scheduled a little winter clean-up for my desk, to shed the old and make space for the new. I’ve built up my digital designer “kit” over the years as I spent an increasing amount of time in front of my multiple screens – I think we’ve all realised the necessity of a comfortable workspace and I believe that’s probably where work-life balance starts.
The Interline: In your experience, how far has the fashion industry really adjusted to working in 3D? It seems like shoppers are perhaps ready to buy digital assets, but they’re also likely much closer to being ready to buy physical fashion based on seeing a digital representation of it. But in a good amount of cases, 3D initiatives and objects are still confined to design, development, and in-house review – and sometimes extended into B2B showrooms and retail selling. What do you think needs to happen for the wider community to reach the next level of trust and confidence in 3D, and take it further downstream?
Diane Wallinger: I’m a big advocate for the try-and-iterate process. I understand that brands might fear consumers’ reaction to digital imagery used for physical purchases, but I think that the public is much more ready than we think and that it’s worth a try. After all, isn’t it less risky to showcase digital products or publish a digital campaign to collect shoppers’ feedback, rather than producing thousands of pieces without asking if the public even likes them? Consumers make way bigger purchases, such as cars and houses, based on digital imagery, and I don’t think that there is much difference between a retouched e-commerce image of a fashion product and a 90% accurate digital sample. If brands tried it and honestly asked their community for their feedback, I think that it would give them the confidence they lack to go big on using digital fashion externally.
The Interline: How much of your 3D skillset is self-taught, and how did you approach learning it?
Diane Wallinger: When I started learning 3D for fashion there were no digital fashion degrees, so in the beginning I learnt everything by myself, mostly with Youtube tutorials. I also reached out to people working in the fields, especially when I attempted using Cinema4D, because there were times when I didn’t even know what to search for or which key terms to use. Then when I finished my Master’s I joined The Fabricant, first as an intern and my learning speed sky-rocketed – I learnt so much, so fast and so well from basically the most pioneering artists and designers in the industry.
The Interline: As well as being a designer, you also teach. Do you think education and industry each have a clear understanding of what the other party wants from 3D? Is there a clear enough pathway from acquiring digital design skills in university to then landing a career in digital product creation? We often hear that brands are struggling to find talent in their design, development, and marketing teams, but we also hear that 3D fashion designers aren’t able to find jobs. What’s happening in the middle?
Diane Wallinger: I believe that there is a bit of “mismatching” happening right now. On one side, students aren’t aware of what the brands are doing in 3D and which knowledge their future role might require – mostly because a lot of it is happening internally, as we touched on before. Additionally, it’s hard to even search for an open role for a digital fashion position; as it’s still a relatively new field, the vacant positions are advertised in a very inconsistent way, and it takes a lot of algorithm refining on LinkedIn to see relevant jobs. This might seem like a minor issue, but this actually leads to a lot of missed opportunities on both the hirer and applicant sides.
The Interline: The other lingering question for education is whether 3D skills should be taught as part of the core curriculum for fashion design students and fashion management students, or whether it should be an elective extra. What’s your take on this?
Diane Wallinger: I think 3D skills should be taught as part of the traditional curriculum of fashion design and fashion management students – 100%. I don’t see digital fashion as a distinct industry that would need its completely separate degree. Digital fashion is a software-powered technology initially invented to make physical fashion production more efficient, and in that sense, I believe that digital product creation and creative digital fashion practices for marketing should be integrated into traditional fashion curriculums. I teach on some courses where it’s already the case, and it’s incredibly rewarding to see the students click when they understand the potential of the technology and what it could do for the industry.
The Interline: One of the key reasons that Diane works in CLO is that she finds it fun and creatively liberating. Another is that she doesn’t feel as though she is creating in a closed system; she values the ability to bring in materials from other sources, the option to use an array of plugins, and the confidence that her work is likely to be integrated into future applications. This is important for digital product creation, since digital representations of real garments have utility across the extended product lifecycle, but it’s especially vital for digital-only fashion, where the final use case is still a moving target.
So we asked Alex Kim, Software Product Manager of CLO, how he sees digital fashion developing from here, and what it means to keep those doors open for creators.
Alex Kim: At CLO, we recognize that the future of digital fashion holds a wide range of possibilities, with new use cases constantly emerging. To stay ahead of this dynamic landscape, it is important to maintain CLO and Marvelous Designer as open systems. By doing so, we enable users to seamlessly integrate their creations with various tools, materials, and platforms, ensuring a flexible workflow that encourages creativity and innovation.
Our goal is to create a thriving ecosystem where users can seamlessly connect with various assets and technologies, going beyond just providing software. This approach ensures that creators enjoy streamlined workflows while having the flexibility to explore innovative opportunities without being limited by a closed system.
Creating this ecosystem means more than just facilitating the flow of data. It is about establishing a collaborative network that supports digital fashion at every stage. By enabling the smooth integration of assets and ideas across platforms, we help designers, brands, and creators bring their creations into diverse applications. This interconnected environment enables innovation and collaboration, empowering users to push boundaries and shape the future of digital design. At CLO, we are deeply committed to this vision, ensuring that our products are both adaptable and supportive of the growth within the digital fashion industry. This commitment ultimately benefits our users by enhancing their creative potential and providing innovative features.
The Interline: We’re spotlighting your designs in two different ways: one using your own software pipeline and workflow, and the other taking advantage of the link between CLO and Unreal Engine to showcase how the same designs and the same materials can be used to tell the same story from different angles. Let’s start with your own renders: tell us what tools and processes you used to create, pose, stage, and generate those final pixels.
Diane Wallinger: Like with all my projects, I started with a creative moodboard on Miro and some rapid silhouette sketches on my iPad. From then I moved into CLO to draft, develop and refine the look until completion. I currently use Daz3D to develop and pose my avatars, so once this was done I returned to CLO to pose and arrange the look in its “new shape”. In parallel, I created my garments’ textures in Adobe Substance Painter. Once the outfit was ready on one side, and the textures on the other, I exported everything to stage my scene in Blender. And some tweaking and rendering time later, we got our final images! When I think about it, it’s a bit like cooking: prepping the ingredients, incorporating them together, letting it simmer – and then time to enjoy!
The Interline: What was the process from your side when it came to preparing your designs to be used in Unreal Engine? And what do you think this kind of interoperability between existing 3D solutions and real-time rendering engines and tools means for how fashion should be thinking about the utility of digital assets?
Diane Wallinger: Independently from the type and number of outcomes, the process is more or less the same until it’s export time. Different 3D software has various mesh and texture requirements, so I had to generate different sets of textures for Unreal Engine than for my workflow in Blender. This might sound complex but it’s actually not that hard if the requirements are set from the start. More importantly, this opens up the doors to a myriad of opportunities for the brands that have digitised their current and future collections. Ready to sell on pre-order? Not a problem. Want to launch your new range in a game? Totally. Thinking of a FOOH marketing campaign? Let’s do it!
The Interline: Alongside completing her own workflow, Diane then collaborated with Malachi Duncan, a Technical Artist at Epic Games, who brought her design from CLO into Unreal Engine (UE) where he worked in real-time to further develop the look and the environment shown in the UE renders on these pages. We asked him to describe his inspiration, his process, and his workflow – and what it means for him for digital fashion to be able to move swiftly and fluidly from one tool and one environment to another.
Malachi Duncan:This environment was actually used for the CLO LiveSync video released earlier this year. At the start of that project I was inspired by the grandeur of the Château de Versailles. The design process started with gathering visual references from various palaces in similar styles to Versailles, which served as my guiding framework for modeling and texturing.
To work with this project I made a few adjustments, like removing pillars from the original piece to create a more open space. The ornate hallway became the perfect setting for a digital fashion shoot.
Once I had Diane’s model, along with her textures and style references, the look development began in Unreal Engine. Starting with the base colors for her garments, I focused on refining material properties such as subsurface scattering and fuzzy shading. Unreal’s substrate system provided the tools to fine-tune every detail, from sheen and specularity to opacity, ensuring the materials matched the creative vision.
Lighting came next, and it’s always a crucial part of my workflow. I begin by turning the scene’s saturation to grayscale, allowing me to focus purely on light intensity and positioning. Once the composition feels right, I reintroduce color and adjust light hues to complement the scene’s tones. This process involves multiple experimental passes to build a mood and create a balanced, visually engaging image.
With the lighting and look development complete, I move on to rendering. Shifting from SRGB to ACEScg allows for more nuanced color grading, which I finalize in DaVinci Resolve. This step includes fine-tuning exposure, contrast, color balance, and saturation.
Digital fashion is a seamless blend of artistry and technology, relying on a suite of specialized software tools for tasks like asset creation, animation, rendering, and grading. Following a well-defined pipeline ensures that each step works in harmony, resulting in a polished, cohesive final product.
The Interline: Diane, your personal projects often get into the importance of human and environmental wellbeing in both physical and digital fashion. Everyone is obviously familiar with the idea that wearing something you like, or that flatters you, can translate into feeling good, but you believe the deeper potential for clothing to be part of holistic wellbeing hasn’t had the same recognition. So whether it’s the interaction between material innovation and skincare, or the casualisation of work attire, tell us where you see wellbeing and digital product creation intersecting in the near future.
Diane Wallinger: I believe in what I call Positive Fashion; creating fashion outcomes that look good, do good and feel good. Digital fashion is an integral part of that, as it contributes to a significantly more efficient and sustainable production process, which falls into the “do good” aspect.
Fashion notoriously has a (negative) impact on its workers and the environment, but I think that we underestimate the influence clothing has on the wearer – production-, shape-, colour- or material-wise. I truly believe that a holistically positive fashion system where garments are designed, produced, marketed and consumed with human and environmental well-being in mind – including the mindful integration of technology – could benefit every fashion stakeholder. It might sound utopian, but we have to set our hopes high if we want to make our industry move faster towards a better future!
