Part of Decential Media’s celebration and recognition of Women’s History month

---

It’s one thing to try and understand the concept of digital collectibles. It’s another to try and understand the concept of digital fashion, particularly if those fashion items do not exist in the physical world.

Most people have a basic frame of reference to understand a physical baseball card—and thus—the rough idea behind a digital baseball card.

But for digital fashion, it’s more of an uphill battle of understanding.

Enter DRAUP, the digital fashion company created by Dani Loftus, which aims to not only put digital fashion in the spotlight but also prove that digital fashion can be high couture—an ambitious agenda for a company that does sell physical fashion products.

The company—which two years ago raised 1.5 million dollars and totes investor/collectors like Gmoney and Cozmo de’ Medici—has a base number of around 500 collectors who have largely bought into the idea that the couture digital fashion DRAUP creates is akin to highly valued digital art.

“The problem DRAUP is trying to solve is the concept that digital clothes can be couture,” Loftus said to me in a recent interview. “There’s this general misconception that digital assets are not high craft. Especially with tools like MidJourney, there’s this idea that anyone and their kid can make digital assets. But to be a digital artist or digital fashion creator, there’s a load of art and skill that needs to go into this.”

Loftus said for some of its pieces, DRAUP spent months crafting generative algorithms. The company has also created pieces and collections with leading artists like Nicolas Sassoon and Linda Dounia.

Part of DRAUP’s mission is to marry artistic nonfungible tokens (NFTs) with digital wearables to provide better utility for the NFTs themselves and allow full value to be received from digital fashion. A future goal of the company is to be able to allow a holder to use their digital wearable in whichever metaverse or digital world they most align with.

“With all of the pieces from our previous collections you get OBJ and GLB files, meaning you—as the owner—can import them into all worlds that accept those files” Loftus said.

DRAUP also offers a “digital tailoring service” that will custom fit a digital garment to the specific dimensions you request.

“We were one of the first fashion houses to implement generative algorithms in the creation of our clothing,” Loftus said. “This applied to our prints, patterns and placement, but also went one step further and applied to the structure of the garments. The shape of your pants—for example—was generatively determined, which was quite challenging for us to set up because nobody had done it before.”

If a holder then owns a piece from one of the collections, the piece is uniquely theirs. The metadata within the NFT then contains the GLB file, which allows the holder to put the piece into a virtual world like Decentraland.

“It’s uniquely yours, so you can visually identify it as yours as well as through the metadata,” Loftus said. “It’s one-hundred percent unique.”

In terms of its uniqueness, DRAUP sold the first ever digital fashion NFT at Christie’s for $4,000.

“Having our work in a major auction house made me feel like we were really changing the paradigm around what is considered ‘high craft,’” Loftus said. “ What’s proving this is ‘high craft’ more than Christie’s?”

Most of DRAUP’s collector base comes from the Art Blocks community, a collection of generative asset enthusiasts who perhaps view fashion as the next asset class to collect.

It’s quite an endorsement for a product that has no physical component. 

“Our collectors are not actually your ‘fashion girlies,’ but rather supporters of digital art,” Loftus said. “Part of what hypes me up about digital fashion is that I like to make work that couldn’t exist physically or is almost impossible to exist physically.”

While technically not “physical,” DRAUP launched a “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” drop in which the company created a digital trash can and enlisted its community to “chuck in” pieces of digital trash from their desktops. A digital trash gown was then created from all of the digital trash, which was then airdropped to the wallets of all participants.

And while “digital” on the surface, there’s a human element to the “Reuse” campaign—people having to complete a task in the physical world at their desktops—which takes digital and physical world immersion to a whole new level. The clear line between physical and digital is now becoming blurred. If someone participates in a digital activity within the physical world, is that not inherently IRL?

“We’re still figuring out what it means to be a digital fashion brand,” Loftus said. “We’re really just trying to have fun and engage people in different ways.”

The company’s current collection is called “Feed,” which are pieces inspired by Internet culture.

“For a limited time, anyone who wants to wear one of our pieces in their photo, we’ll let them wear it,” Loftus said. “Once a new piece is created, we’ll airdrop the former one-of-one piece to one of our collectors.”

By “wearing,” Loftus means having the fashion item “fitted” to the body in the photo you send DRAUP. With a quick look at DRAUP’s Instagram, if you didn’t know beforehand, it would be hard to tell any of the pieces being worn are not real.

“We have someone on our team who is literally a digital tailor who dresses people,” Loftus said. “The rule is, you have to have the same parts of your body exposed in your photo as you would if you were wearing the piece.”

While the photos of people wearing the piece are not minted, the pieces themselves are minted as NFTs. 

“Gmoney is one of our biggest collectors, owning probably $15,000 worth of our pieces, but he’s never going to wear any of the dresses he bought for .4 ETH or the coat he purchased for 1 ETH,” Loftus said. “He’s never going to wear it because that’s not who he is, and that’s similar to a lot of our collectors given the crypto demographic. But what if every time a content creator wears your piece, you get $10, and somewhere on your profile it’s stored that a specific content creator wore your piece?”

According to Loftus, over 160 people have applied to wear the Feed pieces, and her goal is to figure out how to connect those two markets—the owners of the pieces with those who want to “wear” them.

“We now live in this crazy age where trends and fashion trends on the Internet are churning incredibly fast,” Loftus said. “If there’s a fashion trend or a meme that needs to be responded to, we create clothes that are high couture but responsive. This new thing of ‘applying to wear’ where anybody can wear the piece is very exciting for this new generation of people who want something now, want something culturally responsive, and don’t want to wait for the three to four month fashion cycle. I think digital fashion is a very interesting solution to that.”