Carlings Phygital T-Shirt Gives Virtual Fashion The Accessible Vibe Brand Land’s Been Waiting For

One (IRL) t-shirt, infinite (digital) slogans/designs and the thrilling possibility for retailers that selling a garment is far from the end of the brand-consumer journey. That’s the premise of the brand spanking new, “everyday” digital fashion concept devised by Norwegian fashion retailer Carlings in collaboration with Virtue, the international creative agency spawned by youth media monolith Vice.

Conceived to make digital fashion more attainable to the average consumer (while bespoke pieces of digital couture at $9,500 a pop may be making major industry headlines they’re unlikely to be the gateway to mass consumption) the new “gateway” concept co-opts Facebook’s open-source Spark AR software–a no-coding-necessary slice of tech built to smoothly unleash interactive AR experiences within Instagram.

Fans of the brand simply go to Carlings Instagram account, press the filter icon, select a design and point their phone camera at a particular tracking spot embedded into their €39.90 ($44) Carlings t-shirt. If you place your smartphone near the hangtag, the app opens to exactly the right spot automatically. The design surfaces as if part of the t-shirt, bolstered by alluring hyper-realism of appearing to bend and ruck with the folds of the t-shirt, as seen on screen. One basic(ish) garment equates to an instant upgrade of an online persona, especially useful if personal protest underpins your social media repertoire.

Digital Fashion? Carlings and Virtue Have Previous

It’s the second digital fashion collab for the two businesses, indicative of a pioneering attitude that’s put Carlings on the map for those outside its Scandinavian stronghold (it’s 200 or so stores span Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland). “We were originally briefed by Carlings a year are a half ago, when the focus was on just wanting to open a web-shop. We suggested to think way beyond that, to consider what we’d do if we were to reimagine that web-shop but ten years from now,” says Virtue Nordic’s executive creative director, Morten Grubak.

Countering fashion’s eco-unfriendly reputation while tapping into the rise and rise of avatar-influencers such as Lil Miquela and Shudu Gram, in December 2018 they launched a digital-only streetwear collection. To own and “wear” the digital pieces, fans uploaded an image of themselves to a microsite, coughing up €10-30 ($12-35), depending on the style. 3D-motion designers digitally add the garments to consumers’ images, which could then be shared on social. The collection (16 pieces per day, due to the skill involved in crafting a digital fit) sold out every day throughout its three-month, November-January run. It’s always raised Carlings to the top of the Google search listings without a cent (krone) spent on Adwords.

Profits were donated to international sanitation charity WaterAid, a facet of the project that’s been reprised in this instance; €10 ($11) from the sale of every t-shirt will be assigned to the same charity.

Dialling the Digi Back To Engineer Accessibility

Ironically, the focus of the second collaboration was dialling the digital innovation back, or at least re-forging those futurist flavours with more physical, IRL perimeters. “We wanted to back-peddle to an extent, to create a meaningful gateway for digital fashion and using an app we know that pretty much everyone has in their pocket,” says Grubak, conceding that the first collaboration may have been too disconnected from “real reality,” albeit zeitgeist central; it only slightly tailed a collaboration between Gucci and Silicon Valley avatar creation and messaging app called Genies that saw Gucci translate 200 pieces that fans were salivating over into digital doppelgängers, ready to clothe their tiny online clones.  

Part of the appeal with Spark AR, says Grubak, was the ease of connecting the physical world to social media. He reports that with the benefit of a few Youtube tutorials under your belt it’s apparently possible to create your own filters in just hours–a level of intuitive tech learning entirely in sync with the Virtue creative mentality: “We’ve got a young in-house team who don’t necessarily have to think digitally because it’s inherently part of their mind-set. But that doesn’t mean they’re all coders, far from it.” That lack of specific tech knowledge in favour of a more general openness to new tools is, infers Grubak, what’s allowed Virtue to be a new generation creative agency who not only conceptualise strategy in the same way as their ad land predecessors, but also provide full implementation in-house.

Katherine Hamnett’s Protest Tee Reborn

While the relatively low cost and ease of placing a marker on a t-shirt makes it an obvious garment to kick-off with, there’s are a cultural reason: the item’s long-time affinity with the vernacular of protest and subversion. Dubbed “The Last Statement T-shirt,” it’s a project primed to update the famous Katharine Hamnett slogan tee for the digital generation. “We certainly considered the world of influencers today and the notion of being able to service people who want to talk about topical ideas and make statements extremely quickly,” says Grubak.

The concept inherently also challenges the ‘wear it once’ world of superficial insta-influence, where wearing the same item twice is considered a mortifying social media faux pas. Because brands can effectively mainline different slogans and designs at will via the app and onto the t-shirt, there’s no need to write a new caption let alone change your outfit: “The idea was to create something allowing you to [positively] hack the eyeballs of [young] people in a language they understand,” says Grubak.

Drop Culture Riffs Tap Post-Purchase Opportunity

Riffing on drop culture–Carlings plans to drop new designs every Wednesday–the initiative also supports the important school of thought that suggests clothes don’t cease to exist for brands the minute the cash is handed over.

Here, there’s a far longer potential dialogue in play: the capacity to engage and potentially even sell limited edition versions of designs via the app (currently anyone with the t-shirt can access all the design drops) or, according to Carlings, “even invite the consumer into the design process itself.”

Consider, too, a tiered dissemination of designs whereby only certain people are given access to certain styles, fuelling micro movements and sub fandoms.

Next Steps: Whole Outfits

Of course, for the hardcore influencer community, when it comes to using digital fashion to slip into something new to delight your fanbase/earn those paid posts, a change of t-shirt will hardly cut the mustard. But then this is just the start. Presently, the t-shirt uses only one tracker to create a realistic looking change of shirt. Soon, says Grubak, we’ll see the use of multiple trackers so making it possible to convincingly superimpose entire outfits.

It’s another doorway to virtual living, and a world of “complicit commerce” where a new role for brands will be helping consumers stylistic reinventions on an increasingly individualised level.