Courtesy The Fabricant
The Fabricant is a digital fashion house leading the fashion industry towards a new sector of digital-only clothing. The company specialises in photo-real 3D fashion design and animation. Their work operates at the intersection of fashion and technology, creating digital couture and fashion experiences that are always digital, never physical.
The Fabricant aims to show the world that clothing does not need to be physical to exist. The company representatives believe the digital-only fashion sector will open up new creative avenues beyond the limits of the physical world, while promoting sustainability and drastically reducing the negative environmental impacts of the current fashion paradigm.
WHY IS DIGITAL FASHION AN INDUSTRY GAME CHANGER?
Fashion is one of the last creative industries to embrace technology. It is equally one of the most polluting. The Fabricant sees the opportunity to use technology to make the industry more sustainable while expanding its creative options in unlimited new ways. The digital fashion environment opens up new avenues for all stakeholders in the industry, both creatively and in terms of its potential as an emerging market.
The Fabricant wastes nothing but data and exploits nothing but imagination. Digital garments vastly reduce fashion’s impact on the planet’s resources and the natural world. When clothing is always digital, never physical, pollution and waste reduction are non-topics. In this new sector, there’s no need for samples, high retail stock levels or size ranges. It’s sustainable by its very nature.
HOW WILL DIGITAL FASHION INFLUENCE CONSUMERS?
Through the digital clothing, The Fabricant is returning to the heart of what fashion was always meant to be – a playful arena to explore and express our identities and individuality. The fashion future the brand builds is collaborative, creative, diverse and inclusive. In digital fashion people are not passive consumers, but creative agents crafting their self-expression and curating their virtual identity through digital clothing.
Young people in particular have an instinctive understanding of the digital space and its power to enable self expression. For them the digital world has equal validity to physical life as an environment in which to explore and express their various selves. The Fabricant's work seeks to emotionally connect with these digital natives to co-create an inspiring, innovative and sustainable fashion landscape that’s attuned and relevant to their values and interests.
Kerry Murphy, Founder Kerry is the founder of The Fabricant, a digital fashion house leading the fashion industry towards a new sector of digital-only clothing. His education is in film and visual effects and he worked in the advertising industry for companies like Facebook, Nike, Asics, Under Armour, Playstation, Philips and many more for over a decade, before establishing The Fabricant full-time in 2018 following two-years of technical and business development. Finland-born Kerry combines his technical 3D/VFX, creative direction and business skills to form the foundation of The Fabricant. “I believe, to change the toxic environmental and cultural aspects of fashion we need to change the experience. Digital-only fashion provides many new opportunities to do so.”
Amber Jae Slooten, Co-founder, Creative Director Amber is co-founder and creative director of The Fabricant. She graduated from Amsterdam Fashion Institute (AMFI) in 2016, and was the first ever person to graduate from a fashion school with a fully digital-only collection that contained no physical garments whatsoever. Technology has always been a guiding line in her work as she combines a strong foundation of fashion design skills with several years of experience working with 3D software tools for her creations. Nominated as young designer for the Dutch Design Awards and shortlisted as one of the most disruptive women in tech, Amber strongly believes in creating a more
sustainable fashion industry through digital transformation. She never touches a single piece of physical material in her work, as 3D design tools provide her with a wider range of possibilities to endlessly express her creativity.
“I strongly believe fashion does not need to be physical to exist. In this day and age our digital identity is almost more important than our physical one. What will our identity look like in the future, when we are no longer limited to physical restraints like gravity?”
“The digital world gives a space for a new wave of creativity, using materials that go beyond fabric. Materials that can never exist in the physical world, like water, smoke or light. Maybe you would like to be on fire all day, because you feel so lit. Be my guest. Explore.”
“Clothing has two functions, protection and expression, but what if you take those two apart? I see a future where we will all wear our digital identity around us, where we will be able to curate that space. Endlessly expressing yourself, but then without the impact on the planet.”