South America's Next Generation of Digital Fashion Creatives Take to the Stage in Brazil

by Hetty Mahlich on 1 December 2021

Meet some of the leading talent who took part in Brazil Immersive Fashion Week in October.

Meet some of the leading talent who took part in Brazil Immersive Fashion Week in October.

Last month the second edition of Brazil Immersive Fashion Week (BRIFW) took place, putting fashion designers and 3D creators from South America on a global stage, treading a path between physical and the digital realms. As the ties between fashion, gaming and technology both evolve and solidify by the day, the platform invited viewers to experience designs via unique virtual presentations, with BRIFW also holding a series of talks with leading innovators on where fashion is heading, organised by Adam Andrascik in partnership with Rave Digital.

The Fabricant is a name which has become increasingly familiar in digital fashion lingo. The design house's co-founder Adriana Hoppenbrouwer spoke about the developing avatar economy with founder of BRIFW, Olivia Merquior. You can watch the talk here.

Gaming is another hot topic in industry circles, and Merquior was joined again in discussion with visual art director Eris Snail.

As we look towards the future, beauty, post-humanism and digital fashion's roots in fiction and science were also discussed in the must-watch interviews.

We spoke to five of the visionary fashion designers to find out more about their custom virtual presentations.

Lucas Leão (Brazil)

What do you think is missing from the conversation around digital fashion and world-building, and how does your work presented as part of Brazil Fashion Week fulfil this?

LL: Watching the market and new creators, I still miss a greater possibility of exchange and interaction with the viewer. There are very few artists who see working with an interaction between the physical and the digital world. With that in mind, our team wanted to explore this new scenario when launching the collection. We created a physical show, with the expansion of reality happening live.

Have you worked digitally before? What challenges did you face working on this project?

LL: With each collection that we present, we ask about what has already been done in terms of the relationship between fashion and technology to think about the next experience. What drives us the most is the possibility of making our buyers think and reflect. We already presented prints built in 3D software in 2018, then in 2019 we took an avatar wearing our pieces to the catwalk, and in 2020 we presented a movie with all the pieces of the collection digitised in 3D.

What was the filter you created for your show, and why was it important to incorporate the digital and the physical at once?

LL: We did a fashion show with physical pieces and scenography, in which spectators could have an effective experience with the environment and the clothes. We added another layer of reality using a Snapchat filter; in this new layer users can experience a new world proposed by Lucas Leão.co.

Lucas Leão, Look 1

Hawkthemary + Sonni (Brazil)

Why did you decide to incorporate video game aesthetics into your final outcome?

HS: We believe that soon games will stop being exclusively an entertainment experience and become spaces for meeting and culture...for our desires, who we are and who we would like to be. We created this fashion show to make the line between the future of fashion and games even more thin, since we understand that they will meet and reference each other more and more.

What do you think is missing from the conversation around digital fashion and world-building, and how does your work presented as part of Brazil Fashion Week fulfil this?

HS: First, the importance of this in our way of consuming. In the digital world we can already see that custom skins and items fund a billionaire market, and are the most profitable part of multiplayer online games. Nowadays people want to belong and express themselves within the digital world as well, but not in the same way as in the physical world, and this can be one of the main differences between the two ways to consume fashion; coexisting and interfering with each other, without necessarily erasing each other.

There are many topics to not only be discussed, but also explored, as the creation of new worlds and digital fashion has only gained a name in recent years. It is a field with a language still in the making, but one that certainly needs to be about freedom of creation, decentralisation, community and self-expression. We understand that the opportunity is being created to reinvent ourselves culturally, in a digital world that allows everyone to co-create. Our work reflects this as it deviates from what is expected of a fashion show in a fashion week; it was a free creation in which we showed that if we can think and develop not only digital fashion but new worlds and forms of dialogue in this medium, then in this future that we try to build, people will have creative freedom to create their own clothes, shape and form to express themselves.

Have you worked digitally before? What challenges did you face working on this project?

HS:Yes! The creative freedom. While it allows us to create what we are and what we think, it corners us. Especially in digital, for the ease of always being able to test. It's even harder to accept a final result if you're a few clicks away from an entirely different one.

Hawkthemary + Sonni

Studio Acci (Brazil).

What do you think is missing from the conversation around digital fashion, how does your work you presented as part of Brazil Fashion Week fulfil this?

SA: We wanted to show that digital fashion is not only something visual, but something that you can experience in many other ways. It will be part of our life more each day, so we developed this mixed experience where first you can explore this digital environment (first chapter of our ACCIVERSO, a sequence of worlds that complement our storytelling), and then appreciate all the collection in details through AR (augmented reality).

How have people responded to the collection?

SA: The response from the public was very positive! Since the experience is available on our website, we could see a very high level of engagement mainly from Brazil but also worldwide. Considering it is something new here, it's very important for us to see the national interest is rising.

Have you worked digitally before? What challenges did you face working on this project?

SA: The most challenging part was timing regarding the scope of the project, which was the experience. We already had the collection in production, the storytelling and all the creative part very well defined, but this was the first time we developed an authorial mixed experience, signed by us for us. Thinking about the costumer/user experience is always a priority for us.

Studio Acci

Angelo Castro (Uruguay)

Tell us about the city/space you created in your film, is this your fashion utopia? Why?

AC: Together with 3D Artist, Simon Loyber we created a utopian metaverse of my home country, Venezuela, showing certain visual and musical references created by music producers @francobechi and @maisonmusica. For me it is very important to believe that my country will soon come out of this humanitarian and political crisis and in a post-apocalyptic scenario will reflect how important this crisis was, eliminating that macho thinking and feeling that hurts us so much.

What do you think is missing from the conversation around digital fashion and world building, and how does your work that you presented as part of Brazil Fashion Week fulfill this?

AC: I feel there is a need to expose and raise awareness about many social issues, to make minorities visible or at least those that challenge creators. My contribution to this edition was precisely to talk about a topic that directly challenges me and I believe that with this I connected with several viewers. I argue that although we come from a monocultural and oppressive past, we must embrace the qualities that make us who we are. To feel proud to be that the piece that does not 'fit' and that it generates discomfort; to overthrow prejudices and to invert the frame of reference values.

Have you worked digitally before? What challenges did you face working on this project?

AC: This was my first time working in this format and I was delighted. Maybe the delivery times were our enemies for a moment, but we did it! The whole creative process was done remotely, Lobyer from La Plata, Argentina and me from Montevideo, Uruguay.

Angelo Castro

Docena (Chile)

You collaborated with Green Peace and Fashion Revolution as partners on your showcase. Why is collaboration important for the future of fashion?

D: We feel that it is important to build a more collaborative and expansive fashion industry that regenerates, that builds social fabric and allows the inclusion of people. This collaboration seeks to amplify useful information about how we need to inhabit clothing at this time of humanity.

What do you think is missing from the conversation around digital fashion and world-building, and how does your work you presented as part of Brazil Fashion Week fulfil this?

D: From our point of view, with our role as activists, we feel that there is a lack of a more critical look at the way of production and consumption of clothing. We feel that digital innovation can be a tool for communication and the transformation of fashion.

Have you worked digitally before? What challenges did you face working on this project?

D: Yes, we have worked digitally before. We made a fashion film during the pandemic inspired by the 2019 revolution in Chile, called Chirak- a play on words between Chile and Iraq.

We also presented this at BRIFW, and we collaborated with a group of digital artists who worked on the concept from different aesthetics, always with the revolution with inspiration, around a theme by an urban music duo called Metalengua. The main challenge was undoubtedly being able to show an alternative to the way people relate to clothing, to be able to show it in a more contemporary and inclusive way.

Explore the event in all its glory via the BRIFW website.

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