Today’s episode was recorded about two months out from the release of our Digital Product Creation Report for this year, which is due out in mid-December. We also recorded the same week we pinned down the creative direction for that report and commissioned two great new 3D designers, each working with very different pipelines and processes to create for the cover. Now, every year I’m interested in seeing what the designers we choose do with the fairly open briefs that we give them. And the reason for that is that creating in 3D can be a pretty limitless creative canvas for self-expression if you want to approach it as one. Or, depending on what your job is and who’s paying the bills, it can be a set of tools to help you operate within some very well-defined boundaries to more efficiently create real products or to allow your colleagues and partners to make choices based on the representations of those products that you make. And despite their different end purposes, there’s actually a huge amount of crossover between those two angles where tools, processes, and workflows are concerned.
Designing a cover for a magazine is going to pull in many of the same systems and solutions that someone would use to make a real garment or real makeup and take that up to and even past the prototype stage, which brings us to a bit of a common crossroads. One where someone has driven a stake into the ground on one side that says ‘digital fashion’ and someone else has put up a placard reading ‘digital product creation’ and everyone’s milling around looking confused and asking themselves, are those even different things and which one are we supposed to be working towards?
To put my cards on the table early I do think those two are separate and well-defined things and I’ve found that separation of them very useful over the years, and the rationale behind why I split those is going to come up in this episode. But as plenty of people around me will tell you, I’m not always right. I know, shock to me too. So I figured who better to bounce this all off, this distinction, and who better to ask some other questions in this same space than the Founder of Digital Fashion Week, Clare Tattersall.
Clare and I have met a couple of times in the past, but I’ve never really had the chance to ask her any meaningful questions about the way she sees her events, which this year ran in New York, London, Paris, and Milan. I’ve never had the chance to ask her how far they’re self-contained versus how much of what’s contained in them can be extrapolated to fashion in general and to what I’d personally define as digital product creation. So to talk about that and a whole bunch more, here’s Claire.
The transcript below has been lightly edited.
Clare Tattersall, welcome to The Interline Podcast.
Hi, Ben, thank you so much for having me here.
Not at all. Pleasure is all on this side of the table. First up, we’re recording this just over a month after you ran your Digital Fashion Week events in the UK and the US for 2025. How did those go?
So fantastic, thank you. Every season it changes a little bit. Having started in 2020, I’ve seen a lot of the same people, season after season, which of course is really wonderful. But this season, there were a lot of newcomers, more curious people. Which really indicates to me that it is becoming more understood, more known beyond the small circle, the niche circle of people that we’ve really had. As somebody in the audience said to me – we had speakers from Tapestry and CLO 3D – gosh, you’re really mainstream now. So, I feel that there definitely was a movement forward to this whole industry just becoming more normalised now.
That’s good to hear. And, when we talk about this industry, what are we talking about? So “digital fashion” as a phrase, can feel a little bit messy depending on where you stand. Now we have a definition for it here at The Interline, which is, as a creative canvas intentionally separate from digital product creation or DPC, which for us concentrates on the streamlining of creating physical products through digital tools. The two share a lot of the same tools and workflows, but they use them for different purposes. That’s our definition.
What does digital fashion mean to you? Who does it encompass and where are the boundaries?
Great question. I see Digital Fashion Week as the digitalisation of fashion. Every touch point of technology in the fashion industry from concept to consumer. Everything starts with digital design tools, DPC. When you put these tools in the hands of creatives, they become something else. They take them, they run with it and they build something else. So this is what has happened in the fashion industry.
I see my start point in this really as 2020. It definitely goes further back than that – I’ve been in digital fashion since 2009. But if we look at the recent events, I really see that digital fashion is a language that is running through everything. It’s running through the product creation and it’s taking us into new worlds of possibilities. So it is an entire canvas and parts of that canvas really are still blank. But there are a lot of parts of these canvases that are not blank. How do we use digital fashion in virtual try-ons and what is the meaning of that as well? What is the value to the consumer? What’s the value to the industry?
So, you ask what does it encompass and what are the boundaries? I don’t really see that there actually are any boundaries. Five years ago, I would have had a very, very different answer for you. But now I feel the possibilities are endless. It’s: what can we do in the gaming industry? What can we do in retail at the touch point with the consumer? But I see digital fashion assets as really just a language that starts with the designers and runs through all these possibilities.
Thank you. I think maybe one of the sticking points people encounter when they hear ‘digital fashion’ is the association with Web3. I’m going to put a pin in my own personal perspective on that side of things because I think it’s well documented. But whether you think a market for verifiably scarce digital styles is a good idea that’s still quietly forging ahead despite waning interest or you think it’s a fundamentally faulty one, it’s fair to say that fashion at large had its fingers burned a little bit commercially and culturally when it went after that idea.
What do you think the industry could have, should have learned from that wave? And do you think tokenised ownership of digital assets is still the goal? Is that still the ambition?
Well, gosh, there’s a lot to unpack here. So let’s start with the question, is it a good idea? Yes. I think how we use these ideas can be very different brand to brand.
It was really 2020 to 2021 that were sort of… the years of the heyday of the NFT. That word or acronym makes me shiver a little bit. It’s such an ugly term that just doesn’t really fit with concepts of what is possible in fashion, which is about creativity and identity. I think NFTs do have a place. I think what they really imply, as part of the blockchain, is what’s really, really interesting. I wish we would stop talking actually about what we’re doing with blockchain in the fashion industry, because I think it should just be a tech stack that is slid under the hood. What do we want? What is the problem? How are we going to solve it? And blockchain is an amazing solution for a lot of things.
So, for me, blockchain in the luxury industry is just an absolute no brainer. How do you prove authenticity? I think, for example, if we look at LVMH’s Aura Consortium and how it tracks luxury to prove provenance. I think that’s a really, really good example of using the blockchain for authenticity. Very tangible, replicable. You know, how we can use the blockchain to look at supply chain transparency. I think there’s possibly for the retail industry and for the consumers.
Supply chain transparency has a lot of positives and also a lot of negatives – we’ll see how many hands a product actually goes through, which can be a little bit terrifying. There will be a lot of implications for the price as well. But I think knowing where something was made, where the fabrics were sourced from, it’s sort of like knowing where your food comes from. And this is all being incorporated in digital product passports. I think it’s really exciting how this is coming in in Europe over the next few years. I think it will be a game changer for the fashion industry. I think it will be a game changer for blockchain as well. For having all this information on a product, we can see where it’s come from, but also beyond the point of sale.
What does it imply for circularity and resale? It has the opportunity for us to see that an item actually has been sold and resold, but it also can provide all this really, really valuable information about fixing things, mending things, and for upcycling as well. So I think there’s just absolutely enormous value in these terms.
But the other thing that’s tangential to this as well is digital fashion used in gaming. How can it ensure royalties again and again and again for the original designer? So yes, I hope that it doesn’t go away. I hope that we learn these really valuable benefits that there are to blockchain and we incorporate this just quietly underneath and make it part of the solution.
So don’t lead with tokenised digital ownership as the ambition, but make that one of several potential outcomes from a different perspective on the tech stack underneath.
Yeah, I believe very much in putting the consumer first. What does the consumer want? How do we provide information to them? How do we track the product? How do we provide continued value to the consumer? So I think it’s looking at it from a different end, not from the creation of the NFT, but how can an NFT solve a problem? In the fashion industry. We just slide it underneath. When we build a website, for example, we don’t talk about, it’s being built in C++ or are we using Java in it? So some people will be talking about that, but for the majority of the people, that’s just not relevant. We just want a beautiful, functional website and that’s my best way of looking at it. Let’s just slide it underneath; it’s just a silent language that we use to solve problems.
I think I can buy into that to some extent. I think it does require as a precondition, the idea that the visual digital representation of a product is also its product definition for those two things to go forward hand in hand, for us to say digital product creation is our toolkit for bringing products to life in their full kind of visual aesthetic and functional language. And what that carries forward with it is the experience for the consumer from a content point of view, but also from provenance and authenticity and everything else. It requires there to be a single reference frame for all of that and for that single reference frame to be the digital representation.
Yes, absolutely. And that’s going back to the earlier point about it being a language that can run through the entire journey of a product as well. So it starts with the creation of this digital asset that can then be a digital twin. But yes, I think starting with the digitalisation, it opens up this world of possibilities.
Okay, great. Now, I think for a lot of fashion organisations, 3D and DPC strategies have been pointed at probably two key objectives. One is making it smoother, easier, more profitable to create physical products through digital means, like we’ve already talked about. And then the other, I think, is creating content and experiences at scale, things that extract a different kind of value from common tools, assets, frameworks, and workflows and so on. I believe at Digital Fashion Week this time around you framed precisely that latter thing as the age of engagement. Tell me what that looks like in practice. Why is engagement such a critical benchmark for fashion to aim for and what role does digitization play in it?
Great. So there are many roads that we can go down here with this. I think, again putting the consumer at the front of everything, the consumer has very different demands. Consumers are really value-based now. And if we put that in parallel with our traditional way of shopping, that has just become outdated where you walk into a shop and you just sort of flick through these racks and racks of stuff. I don’t think that’s what people want anymore. People want to feel that there is a value system behind the clothing. Again, so with DPPs, we can provide all this information. You can see the journey through the supply chain. You can understand where a product has been made. So all of these are values.
Also, if you are engaging a consumer in gaming or the metaverse, you have the opportunity to really share your values. Let’s go back a few years to the Gucci Garden, which I think is just a really simple and very brilliant idea of this as well. So bringing people into the garden, providing assets, providing experiences as you move around through that, coming out with the culmination of your experiences that you would have a unique asset, but the opportunity to share your history and your values with a consumer as well.
So these are a couple of examples, but let’s move on to Virtual Try On, and how we can engage a consumer with trying products on virtually in store as well as e-commerce. So much of commerce is happening online. How can we reduce returns? How can brands and retailers actually get you to a higher number of products actually moved into the cart and from the cart into the checkout. When people know what a product is looking like on them, then it’s about 64% more likely to end up in the shopping cart and it’s about 70% less likely to be returned. This has just massive implications for inventory, producing more effective inventory. When we have more data that we can collect about body measurements and knowing what products people actually really want, we can really reduce the waste from the fashion industry so, so very much. How can we go down a different channel as well? How can we look at marketing? To consumers. How can we look at meeting people where they are? So I’m a huge fan of fashion designers moving into the gaming industry.
The statistics we have about the number of people who are in gaming and the number of assets that are being bought and sold and the money being generated from that. It’s absolutely a no-brainer for designers to go into gaming markets.
Yeah, and I’d like to actually pick your brains on that one a bit. For a little bit of context, I’ve been in gaming in some capacity, personal or professional, a lot of my life alongside fashion. So it’s very much a subject of mine as well. I think you’ve previously talked about gaming being kind of a proving ground because of the scale that you’ve just mentioned and the younger, kind of highly engaged audience. And I think you talked about gaming being a bit of a testbed for some of the tools and pipelines that are being built to get from designing real products in 3D to having those products show up as either standalone cosmetic items in particular video games or as part of branded universes.
When you look at the big collaborations we’ve seen so far between major video game IPs and platforms and fashion, what do you think fashion has learned so far about what works and what doesn’t in that space?
Well, I think a big thing that brands have learned is that there are millions of people waiting to be engaged in gaming. You know, we’ve got 90 million players daily in Roblox. You’ve got, I think, 16 million in Sandbox. You’ve got these players who want to create, they want to play, they want to engage. I really believe that gaming is sort of the future social media. This is where a lot of Gen Z and Gen Alpha are. However, the numbers are astounding. I think it’s one in three people in the world are playing games. That’s a massive, massive number. So it’s not all just these young generations.
Let’s look also at the time spent. So if you as a brand, from a social media point of view, if you’re putting something on Instagram, you have about three seconds to engage with your consumer and capture their attention. On TikTok, you have a similar length of time. It’s possibly a little bit longer. YouTube about 10 seconds to about three minutes. But if you are in gaming, on average you have about 10 minutes to engage with your customer. This is a massive amount of time to get them to try something, to feel something, to understand them, to learn about your brand. Also, products are infinitely cheaper. So you can buy and sell much more rapidly. But let’s just look at some statistics here. So, 70% of Gen Z said they would buy a garment that exists only digitally. In 2024, the virtual fashion gaming segment generated 20.17 billion US dollars. The immersive fashion market is growing at 22.7% annually. So it’s just astounding numbers that we have. Roblox paid $352 million to creators in 2024, proving the scale of the creator economy. This is where people are.
What a brand’s learned is that it’s definitely valuable to be there. But beyond that, something they’ve learned is that it’s actually a very, very savvy consumer. You can’t just sell people something. It has to have meaning. It has to have value. And it has to be authentic. It has to be authentically you. Being there just because the consumer is there is not good enough, you have to bring your brand and your values and find the right consumer. Adapt your designs, perhaps, to these virtual worlds. If you are buying and selling your fashions in a war game, you probably don’t want something that’s frilly with wings. So look at, where are your kind of consumers? Where are they hiding and how do you reach them there? So authenticity is probably the biggest takeaway that I think a lot of these brands have.
And do you think there is a user generated economy there to be had? Or do you think this is a sector that is dominated by partnerships forged between existing big brands and existing big intellectual properties?
No, I think there’s definitely a user generated creator economy. Absolutely. I know that there are companies, there are agencies like Blueberry who is creating assets and making millions a year from this. There are independent designers or just creators as well who are creating assets, looking at what is being bought and sold and providing this. Yeah, there’s very, very definitely a market there.
Okay, great. Now, I think you’ve always been an advocate of moving digital and physical fashion closer together. It’s not a coincidence that Digital Fashion Week runs alongside physical counterparts. I’ll go on record as saying, ‘phygital’ is not my favourite word, but practically speaking, what does this mean to you? How far does the vision extend beyond cultural spaces like fashion weeks? And into the hybridisation of products, brands and experiences. What does it mean to you to bring those things closer together?
I totally agree with you about the word ‘phygital’. It sort of makes me cringe a little bit. But I think until really, really recently, it’s just been a very simple way to explain the hybridisation of fashion. So personally, I have a dream of on-demand fashion. And I think so many of these experiences that we see in the physical fashion industry can be moved forward a lot by the digitalisation of product. So just to give a scenario – we create the fashion with our digital design tools. We have them with virtual try on with AI and with blockchain when we have our identities on blockchain and we own our data. And what are the tools that are coming in the next six months to a year to enable us to have us at the center of the conversation? How do we bring product to our body, our body data essentially? And how do we… move this then as a step closer towards on-demand manufacturing?
I think anything that we can do for the planet to reduce the tremendous waste in the fashion industry is an absolute must do. And I think just by designing with digital tools, we’ve already cut out tremendous amounts of waste. Tommy Hilfiger, back in 2022, said that by the end of the year, they wanted to be totally digital in their design process. And they achieved that goal. And that was really, really ambitious. So I would like to know what their savings actually have been. But the amount of samples not being shipped back and forth across oceans, I think we can all applaud that in the fashion industry.
How can we use these tools to look at a world where manufacturing is much faster, much more local, much more immediate that perhaps we could go into a store, we can have excellent virtual try-on in a virtual mirror and then it can be manufactured at speed and provided to us. So that is my dream scenario. But all of this digitalisation of the industry is moving everything step-by-step to a much, much better place.
Now, from the photos, it looks as though Digital Fashion Week London was a pretty hands-on showcase for a lot of different technologies from a range of partners. What do you find the most purely exciting, from your point of view, when you judge those in isolation from a pure tech perspective at the minute? And which do you think is going to have the most measurable impact on the way fashion operates in the near future?
Gosh, I really feel very excited about all the exhibitors that we had involved and every idea that they’re bringing to the table. There were some things that were a world first in London. We worked with Pixel Canvas and Epic Games who were really very, very involved in making the first ever live multiplayer mocap runway happen. So what we did was, rather than having the traditional runway, we brought a dancer in to show how we can engage with fashion in non-traditional ways. And then the dancer was engaging with the audience and the entire audience then we could bring up in groups to dance. Creating a multi-culture aspect to this. And everybody had a different avatar and a different element of fashion in here as well.
So achieving these goals and what are the implications of that? I see that as opening up a lot of possibilities: A, for fashion runway shows, B, for different cultural events. What does it mean for the music industry? What does it mean for the dance or theatrical industry and how clothes are worn in all of these? So while we were experimenting with technology, trying to do something that had not been done before, the conversation really goes into what is the role of clothes in our lives? And the answer I believe very much is self-expression. And how do we take this into different areas of our lives as well?
Yeah, I would agree with that definition. I think self-expression is the most fun. That actually brings us to a slightly weird space, which is it’s impossible to talk about, I think, any definition of digital creativity or expression or technical work right now, without also talking about AI.
What’s your perspective on whether and where AI is going to become integrated into product design, development, or storytelling?
I totally agree with you. We cannot ignore this conversation. I see AI as really the fuel injection into everything that we are doing already. We’ve seen massive rapid changes within the development of all these different technologies. I firmly believe that AI is not a creative force. AI is a tool and it’s a source of energy to fuel everything. So AI is already involved in how we make everything faster, how we design. We’re looking at tools that turn sketches into 3D products.
Does this mean that we are opening up and making it more accessible to a lot of people? Absolutely. But I firmly believe that skills are really, really important. Talent, I firmly believe, rises to the top. We will see massive amounts of just dross put out there. We live with that already. You know, most of what we see in stores is just absolutely awful inventory. A lot of image generation, etcetera, is absolutely awful. That’s been existing for years. So has talent.
Talent will rise to the top. AI is there to help talented people become even better, more efficient, faster. So yeah, it is just very simply going already and will be to a greater degree through everything. But the role of the creative is the visionary, the person with the idea, the curator of taste, and AI can’t do that.
I like that answer.
Finally, if we were to fast forward a decade from now, so that takes us to 2035, what are the key things about the fashion industry that you would like to see change? What doesn’t work today?
So something I feel very excited about is virtual try-on, about owning our identities and having those on the blockchain. So it’s not these big data companies that own our data, but we do. And moving all of these parts into having on-demand manufacturing. I feel that is still very far away. But I think we’re taking a lot of steps. I think virtual try-on and the implications of us being at the centre about our creative expression, about our empowerment of how to buy and how to buy efficiently as well, about clothes coming to us and us being the centre of the conversation. I see that as a very, very exciting and positive direction that we’re going in.
Okay, perfect. Claire, thank you so much for joining me.
Thank you for having me. It’s always great to talk to you, Ben.
Likewise.
That’s the end of my chat with Claire. I hope you enjoyed it. By the time you listen to this, the DPC Report 2026 – yes, we’ve messed with the numbering system this time around to reflect the fact that most people will read it next year – should be just around the corner or maybe in your hands. Either way, I hope you get a bunch of value out of the kind of conversations I enjoy having. Whether they’re happening here on the show, and there’s plenty more of those coming, or whether they’re in print, or digital print, whatever you want to call the DPC report. For now, thanks for listening, and I’ll talk to you again soon.
