Augmented Fashion

Augmented Fashion (2021) is 3-level VR experience by artist John Walter.  

Commissioned by Augmented Fashion: Immersive Interactions for Sustainable Heritage in Fashion and Textiles (2021) supported by The Robert Gordon University and AHRC.  

The Augmented Fashion project’s aim is ‘to determine how immersive interactions can be used to communicate the experience and value of creative, artisan fashion and textile products, with a focus on culture, provenance, heritage, the human hand and sustainable clothing consumption’.  

Within luxury fashion brands, immersive technologies are being used to enhance the high-culture credentials of those brands through brand-artist collaborations and immersive consumer experiences. However, there was no evidence of fashion and textile brands using immersive technologies to convey provenance, craftsmanship or heritage, suggesting a missed opportunity in using Human-Computer Interactions to communicate culture, place and in re-humanizing the making of clothing products in the minds of contemporary consumers.

In summary, this research project proposes to use immersive technologies and Human-Computer Interactions to visualize tangible and intangible cultural heritage related to the production of traditional and artisan fashion and textile practices; weaving the past into the future; preserving history for future audiences and preserving practices for future artisans to develop into contemporary fashion and textile products that embody the growing slow fashion movement, encouraging a sustainable future for designers, makers, consumers and the world we live in. 

Augmented Fashion website