Unpacking Fashion Film for Digital Design

Film media have become an essential part of the symbolic production of fashion, not least because of the emergence of Internet. Fashion film uses storytelling in a way that the audience comes to experience the garments in combination with the film. The film experience then influences viewers' eventual experience of wearing the garment. Fiction enables fashion and fashion becomes fiction. At the same time, there is an emerging interest within computer science, such as human-computer interaction (HCI), in designing fashion-related, digital services and wearable technologies, which are also termed "digital fashion." Such technology has the potential to offer new products that are worn as garments. A digital garment shares the focus on visual appearance with traditional clothing fashion, but differs from the latter because it can change its visual expression. In developing and studying such technology, we need to understand both what constitutes fashion in a broad sense, and how to communicate these new design concepts to intended users. Both challenges motivate the production of a film on fashionable wearables. We therefore need to unpack in detail how to make such a film, as well as how to address the differences between the "functions" of fabric and of digital technology.