It's TED Talks Daily. I'm your host, Elise Hu.

Expressing ourselves through fashion now offers infinite creative possibilities thanks to the virtual world.

In her talk at TED Women in 2021, digital fashion maven, Gala Maria Verbonic shows us how augmented reality is changing the world of fashion and expanding possibilities for all of us.

I often get this question, why would anyone buy a piece of clothing that doesn't exist?

It's not that it doesn't exist. Digital fashion is real, and it exists in so many virtual

universes, ranging from basic social networks to a fully developed virtual world known as the

Metaverse, letting people express themselves in a way not possible before.

I've been playing video games since I remember, dressing up my game character. Actually, I enjoyed it more

than dressing up myself. Five years ago, I was running a physical fashion brand. But because of my

gaming experience, I kept thinking how and why could people wear digital garments. And there was a reason

I believed they would. In 2016, I did research on a high-based culture.

You know those people buying and selling garments that are always sold out.

As part of this research, I've joined various Facebook groups where they were gathering.

What I noticed was they were usually buying those pieces just to post a photo of themselves,

wearing it on their social channels,

and later on they would resell it. So they didn't need or want the actual garment. They wanted its image, and that image was being used online. And it made sense to me, because like most

of my generation, they had their friends, peer, role models in the virtual space.

And this is where we care to express ourselves.

This is when I started experimenting with what today we know as digital fashion.

Now I run a world's first direct-to-consumer digital fashion brand and a fashion tech house.

We've officially started last year, and our growth has been unimaginable from a traditional

fashion perspective. A part of doing our own designs, we regularly collaborate with the biggest

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