See Now, Try-Now (in Augmented Reality)
AR Try-on is Closing the Gap Between Fashion Designers and Consumers
See now, buy now
When American designer Rebecca Minkoff declared in 2017 her shows would be “see now, buy now” it represented a shift in the fashion week ethos. Until then, fashion weeks pandered mostly to editors and retailers, who would take in the looks from the catwalk and make editorial and purchasing decisions for the seasons to come. With the advent of the smartphone—which can snap an image of a runway look and share it with thousands within seconds—fashion weeks quickly became for public consumption.
Minkoff wasn’t the only designer to cater to changing consumer demands. The same year, Tommy Hilfiger, Tom Ford, and Burberry all announced they’d be moving to a see now, buy now model, with collections available immediately after appearing on the runway.
See now, “Screenwear” now?
Five years and a whole pandemic later, there’s a new kind of direct-to-consumer opportunity in augmented reality.
At London Fashion Week, British designer Edward Crutchley has just shown his Autumn/Winter 2022 collection and launched two “see now, screenwear now” digital fashion items, a play on the “see now, buy now” trend.
The experience is powered by the ZERO10 App, which claims to use the most advanced body-mapping, segmentation, and cloth simulation technology to give the world’s most accurate representation of real-world designer items in the metaverse.
Inside the App
Once inside the app, which is free to download and use, you can select the items from Clutchley’s collection for try-on. Naturally, I gravitated towards this pink and purple dress.
Closer Than Ever
While innovations such as the smartphone and its killer app, social media, may have brought everyday consumers closer than ever before to the inside circles of the fashion industry, augmented reality is taking it one step further. By merging consumers’ physical bodies with the clothes shown on the runway, the gap between designer and consumer has narrowed.