Digital fashion house The Fabricant raises 14 million dollars in funding

Amsterdam-based digital fashion house The Fabricant has raised 14 million dollars in a Series A funding round.

The round was led by investor Greenfield One, with participation from Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary’s Sound Ventures, Red DAO and others, according to an article by VentureBeat shared by The Fabricant.

The funding will be used to support and expand the Dutch company’s co-creation and non-fungible token (NFT) platform, The Fabricant Studio.

“This is a big moment for the digital fashion revolution,” the company said in a LinkedIn post on Thursday.

Founded in 2018, The Fabricant uses film visual effects such as motion capture, 3D animation software and body scanning to create hyper-realistic animations of fashion garments.

It has found itself at the forefront of the burgeoning digital fashion market in recent years, working with fashion heavyweights such as Tommy Hilfiger, Puma, Adidas and Off-White.

Metaverse heats up

“In 2018 we set out to realize our vision of a digital-only fashion industry that wastes nothing but data and exploits nothing but the imagination,” The Fabricant said Thursday.

“This is a monumentous step towards that goal and a new collaborative and decentralized fashion ecosystem,” it said.

There are a variety of practical uses for digital clothing, from making the design process more streamlined and sustainable, to creating virtual fashion shows and trade fairs - something that became particularly relevant during the pandemic.

The Fabricant anticipates a world in the not-too-distant future where people will buy and rent digital clothing to be worn by avatars of themselves (or ‘digital twins’) within the fast-growing - though still nascent and speculative - metaverse.

In 2019, The Fabricant sold its first digital couture dress, called Iridescence, at an auction in New York for 9,500 US dollars.