Digital Fashion Lab

The Digital Fashion Lab was an event fusing together experts from different areas of the fashion and digital worlds to see what ideas and dialogues could be generated to inspire new thinking, concepts and ventures. The current and future involvement of digital technologies in everyday products and lifestyles is on the incline.The fashion domain is continuously changing due to this shift, and to help keep it in the forefront of digital innovation, this workshop infused further potential insights. Taking into consideration materials innovation, manufacturing processes, marketing, distribution, retail (online & offline), consumer use and product afterlife, these all require some level of digital input and present future opportunities and advancements via digital methods. The questions proposed to explore during the workshop included:

• "How can the fashion and digital world find mutual economic benefit in their working practices in order to remain relevant in a connected world?
• How can digital technologies and games be implemented in fashion branding and marketing?
• What opportunities do virtual showrooms, 3D-printed dresses and online shops offer for the fashion industry?
• Which applications can you mobilise to build solid and lasting customer relations?
• How does fashion appear in the various game genres that are currently available in the market?
• Pushing back frontiers and ‘thinking out of the box’ are encouraged."

Not only did the event have round table discussion, brain storming and visualising ideas with Lego, but a range of speakers also disseminated their work involving digital fashion. Two speakers to highlight included postgraduate students presenting their project Fashion Curation 2013 demonstrating the use of digital technology to exhibit historical fashion. Secondly, Jenny Griffith's 'Snap Fashion' App that enables users to find, snap, compare and shop for fashion items.

The Digital Fashion LAB was hosted and arranged by iDROPS and Digital Studio/ London College of Fashion in collaboration with KTN Creative Industries and Shareplay (DK). The lab was enthusiastically delivered by Paul Tyler of Handling Ideas with a great amount of engagement and energy throughout the event.