Kerry Murphy challenging traditional fashion norms with The Fabricant
Kerry Murphy is the visionary co-founder of The Fabricant, a pioneering digital fashion house that creates hyper-realistic virtual garments and experiences. Combining his expertise in visual effects and fashion, Kerry has redefined the boundaries of digital creativity, challenging traditional fashion norms and introducing new possibilities in the metaverse. His work with The Fabricant has collaborated with major brands and designers, blending fashion, technology, and sustainability to create a new era of digital couture.
Kerry Murphy will be one of the featured speakers at Digital Design Days in Milan, where he will share insights on the future of digital fashion and virtual experiences. Don’t miss the chance to hear from one of the industry’s most influential figures! Hurry up and secure your tickets now for an event packed with groundbreaking ideas and inspiration. Get your ticket here.
The Fabricant is at the forefront of the digital fashion revolution, creating garments that exist purely in the virtual world. As someone pioneering this space, how do you envision the future of digital fashion? Do you believe it will eventually converge with or completely diverge from traditional fashion, and how will this transformation impact the way we perceive identity and self-expression?
The Fabricant mission has been to lead the fashion industry towards a new sector of digital only clothing. We strongly believe that there has never been a better time for the industry to reinvent itself and adopt digitalization. With the advent of AI based tools, many of the traditional fashion processes can be automated, leaving more time for creativity and innovation.
The advancements in gaming and immersive experiences, will continue to create new forms of self-expression that go beyond mimicking the physical world. Fashion Brands now have the opportunity to become more efficient, creative and extend their IP into the digital realm.
Digital fashion blurs the lines between art, technology, and commerce. How do you balance creativity with the technical demands of creating these hyper-realistic garments? Could you share a story of a moment where the artistic vision for a piece was transformed—or even challenged—by the technical possibilities or limitations you encountered?
We are always challenging the technical limitations as much as working within their boundaries. A good example is the development of augmented reality filters. We created headpiece collections as full body tracking was not delivering the quality we expected.
The idea of owning a purely digital piece of clothing is still new to many. In your opinion, how does digital fashion influence or challenge traditional consumer habits, especially in terms of sustainability and the fast fashion industry? What role do you think digital fashion will play in shaping cultural narratives around sustainability in the next decade?
Gen Alpha is the first generation who has grown up owning Avatars. The majority of them give more importance to how their digital personal is dressed than their IRL one. They are also more sustainability minded, demanding brands to be more transparent about their practices. For them, digital fashion is a great alternative to express identity without compromising the environment.
The Fabricant collaborates with various artists, brands, and tech companies to push the boundaries of what’s possible in digital fashion. How do you approach these collaborations, and what do you believe is the key to successfully merging different disciplines and perspectives in such an innovative and relatively unexplored field? Can you share a collaboration that had a profound impact on your vision for The Fabricant?
As pioneers in digital fashion, we were fortunate to collaborate with leading brands who shared the same ethos of innovation and transformation. In each collaboration we tried to elevate both brands and build new narratives that inspired the industry at large. In our last collaboration, with Maison Margiela, we took it a step further, and for the first time associated a physical item to the ownership of the digital one.
We believe that adding the physical item helped to create a better understanding and increase the perceived value of digital ownership. This initiative paved the way for other opportunities of using blockchain to authenticate physical and digital ownership (integrating into Digital Product Passport), which we believe will be critical for mass adoption.
Fashion has always been deeply personal, tied to memories, emotions, and even social status. How do you capture and translate these emotional connections into a digital medium, where the tactile experience is absent? Do you think a digital garment can hold the same emotional value as a physical one, and if so, how do you envision consumers developing these connections in the virtual space?
We strongly believe (and have enough evidence) that a digital item can hold the same emotional value as the physical one. Ultimately fashion is storytelling and, by using digital technology, new captivating and original stories can be crafted. Moreover, digital fashion can be associated to moments (for example digital merchandise for a concert), and become collectibles of cherished experiences.
