louise guay, president and founder of my virtual model, presented her company’s avatar-based fashion shopping and social networking system tuesday at the moda+tecnologia gathering at the ICA. on-line shopping for clothes is notoriously unsatisfying, especially if you care about fit and detail. americans only buy 8% of their clothes on-line, as compared to 41% of computers or 21% of books [nyt]. but the clothing market is so large that this represents a larger dollar amount and it is growing faster than the other sectors. high-bandwidth internet and the web2.0 are making it possible to enhance the web shopping experience with higher-resolution images, video, three-dimensional models and now even virtual worlds and social networks. the latter function around a virtual model or avatar of yourself, configured at mvm.com, but free to travel with you to a number of fashion websites and soon maybe social networks and virtual worlds like second life. you can customize your virtual self, add your real face, and soon even see how clothes fit in 3-D. Instead of worrying about fit and quality, this kind of shopping prioritizes public appearance – virtual and physical – and social shopping, where you are led in new style directions by a community of people like you around the world. the idea of keeping an on-line persona and a trace of shopping and consumption habits could have a radical impact on the way products are manufactured, since they don’t need to exist until you decide to buy them. they may also be much easier to trade and re-use for a longer lifespan. but this will take a transformation in the way people use the web – and virtual avatars – who are just as likely to represent themselves as their exact opposites [see avatars and their creators].
