When virtual and material worlds collide

This paper explores the impact of digitally mediated communication technologies on the fashion industry. It argues that the material and virtual worlds of fashion are perpetually intersecting social realities that coexist relationally, simultaneously, and in mutual interconnection. The paper explores these shifting fashion landscapes from three different perspectives in order to understand how fashion worlds are being transformed, enhanced, and reproduced in space and time. First, it argues that emerging digital technologies are remediating and reshaping existing cultural forms of signification such as fashion magazines and photography. Second, it explores the Internet’s potential disintermediating effects on fashion markets and consumption, to determine the extent to which digital technology is enabling the devolution of fashion authority from traditional power brokers, such as magazine editors and designers, towards a more diversified array of participants, including fashion bloggers and consumers. Finally, this article considers the ways in which digital technology is transforming fashion consumption. The Internet has opened up new spaces of fashion consumption with unprecedented levels of ubiquity, immersion, fluidity, and interactivity. Fashion spaces are increasingly mobile; they must follow us around, travel with us through time and space. The network effects made possible by the Internet are enabling the creation of always-on, always-connected consumer communities. Increasingly, we are adrift not online but offline. This is generating new ways of being in space, with the absence of physical presence becoming second nature. Taken together, the collision between virtual and material fashion spaces requires a fundamental overhaul of our understanding of the role of fashion production, consumption, and knowledge, and of the laws of markets.