Highlights from a conversation on the border between digital fashion and art.

DRAUP X Nicolas Sassoon’s digital fashion collection SEEN ON SCREEN drops on April 25th.

Positioning itself on the border of digital fashion and digital art, the collection explores what happens if we embrace the digital image to approach clothing in a new way. 

Below are some of the collection’s key ideas brought out in a conversation between collaborating artist Nicolas Sassoon, DRAUP’s founder Dani Loftus and Right Click Save’s Editor-in-Chief Alex Estorick.

Q: You’ve worked across a wide range of mediums: digital art, sculpture, even physical clothes. Why digital fashion?

Nicolas: I've been working as a visual artist for 15 years now and I've done quite a few fashion collaborations over the last decade. When you deal with fashion, my experience has been that the material contingencies are very restrictive and you always have to compromise from beginning to end. 

That isn't to say that you can’t make exciting things, but because of my practice, because my work is so deeply inscribed in the digital, I always think of digital artifacts as something really exciting because by nature they're detached from these material contingencies.

Meaning, you can create impossible things, dreamlike or fantastical objects, which behave differently from physical objects and exist on their own plane. This idea of digital objects existing in their own dimension has always been a very strong vector of creativity and research in my art practice.

Q: How does your practice influence the way you approach garments? 

Nicolas: I think of garments more as a digital artist and not so much as a fashion designer. So, I approach them in terms of what “else” they could become. Since my background is in digital art and because I use a visual language that has strong optical and kinetic properties, I think about how this language can be integrated into a garment while keeping its qualities and properties as a piece of clothing. And working with digital artifacts definitely offers that possibility.

Q: And why DRAUP in particular?

Nicolas: What's really exciting in the collaboration with DRAUP is that the reference and the anchor point to fashion is a basis to start from and then go in a different direction. How can we create something new, something different that still relates to fashion? It doesn't seem like much, but I think it's a mindset that is very important to note. This is something that really attracted me in the collaboration.

Q: As an artist, how did you approach creating digital clothing? 

Nicolas: I think about clothes as objects or sculptures, that's how I approached the collection with DRAUP. My work employs a very specific visual language pertaining to early computer graphics and part of that language uses moiré patterns. One thing that's really interesting about moiré patterns, especially in the context of this collaboration, is that they have a really interesting history deeply connected to fabrics and fashion, as well as the digital.

Moiré is an optical phenomenon that happens when two images overlap and create the illusion of a third image. Moiré is a phenomenon that  “happens” physically and has a history in physical art. It's been employed by a lot of artists in optical and kinetic art, artists like Jesus Rafael Soto, Victor Vasarely, Carlos Cruz Diez, Gertrud Goldschmidt, or Bridget Riley.

But, moiré also “happens” on the digital plane. For example, moiré was a really annoying problem at the beginning of digital photography; when photographers would take photos of fabrics or architectures with intricate details and would resize their images, they would often get unwanted moiré artifacts appearing on their images. 

Moiré also has a history with fabric and textiles: the word moiré originates from Mohair, which is a very old fabric originating from the 16th century that created moiré patterns through the overlap of two very thin layers of fabric.

As an artist, I find it very important to create connections between the digital visual language that I use — which appears very ethereal, very abstract, very digital — and a broader history of arts, of decorative arts, of physical crafts.

This collaboration is the perfect setting for such connections, because when we’re using moiré on digital garments, we find these references to old textiles from the 16th century, and it feels like a form of continuity. But now, our garments exist on a digital plane, they become an interactive optical phenomenon that you can play with…

Another thing I tried to think of when working on the garments was the experience they would generate. When you make digital arts, sometimes you don't think so much of objects, but you think more of experiences, because your work is screen based or projected, and it becomes an experience more so than an object. There's no object to hold, but there is an experience to have. That is something I thought of a lot with this collaboration with DRAUP: the experience of the garment, what kind of experience they would create…

Q: How do you see the future of digital garments? 

Nicolas: For me the immediate future of digital fashion is this collection, and how it allows me to play with and experiment with certain elements that I've been wanting to play and experiment with for a long time. The title of the collection “Seen on Screen” is very fitting in that regard since we play with a lot of optical elements that are specific to screens.

In the collection, every single garment becomes an optical sculpture and an interactive object because of how we integrated the moiré patterns within them. It means there are several layers to the garments, and when you manipulate them, when you turn them around, when you zoom in or out, the moiré patterns change on the garments and create dynamic surfaces.

This type of optical behavior and responsiveness in relation to objects that appear on screen is really exciting. It creates reactive and dynamic surfaces that feel very unconventional. Some surfaces look like fabric or leather, but then other surfaces and areas are quite unusual, they react to a lot of different factors, including the user’s manipulations.

In that sense, the garments become more than just outfits: they become optical, interactive and playful objects. It's a digital art form that can be wearable and that has a form of playfulness within which I believe is a very important element in the collection.

SEEN ON SCREEN is dropping on Tuesday April 25th. Listen to the full conversation here and sign up for our allowlist.