Virtual threads: rethinking materiality in digital fashion

Digital fashion, also known as e-fashion, digital couture, and virtual fashion, is rapidly emerging as a significant phenomenon within the fashion industry and digital culture. While digital garments have long been popular in gaming, their adoption has expanded to everyday digital interactions, such as virtual meetings, social media, and personalised avatars. This shift reflects a form of digital dematerialisation, where physical goods are replaced by digital counterparts, challenging conventional understandings of materiality and reality. This study explores the role of matter in digital fashion and examines whether digital fashion reduces the agency of objects and reinforces hierarchical relationships among entities, or whether the absence of physical matter offers new ways of understanding materiality. By critically analysing two digital fashion stores, DRESSX and The Fabricant, through the theoretical frameworks of new materialism, object-oriented ontology and posthumanism, this paper investigates the implications of digital fashion on contemporary cultural practices.