In a digital atelier, there are no secrets.

What is it about secrecy that’s so appealing to traditional fashion? It’s an unspoken rule: whatever you do, do NOT be transparent. Confidentiality equals comfort.

No atelier in the history of couture has opened its doors and allowed absolutely anyone to turn up and view its activities. That goes against the very instinct of how fashion is supposed to behave. How can the mystery of the creative process be preserved if you let everyone witness how you do it?

Then imagine if a couture atelier gave away its patterns away for free, encouraging aspiring fashion designers to make their own versions of a couture piece, while suggesting that their interpretation had as much validity as the atelier’s own work and treated them like peers.

This is just not the fashion way to do things. And yet this is exactly what The Fabricant does every week in our digital atelier, where radical transparency is a creative act.

Anyone who shows up to our weekly live Twitch stream gets to see how we work and exactly what we’re working on. It’s a 3-hour co-creation session hosted by our fashion team, where viewers can download the 3D pattern file that we’re using and iterate their own design right alongside us. In real time, on a live project.

It’s an invitation to observe and participate in our couture house, stitch by digital stitch.

For traditional fashion transparency is a red flag. Its rules say that fashion’s audience does not need to know its methods, hear its insights or participate in its collections.

As a distributed fashion atelier working daily across 8 locations, the idea of collective participation in the non-physical space is second nature to us. Our in-house creative team collaborates every day from The Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Portugal, Spain, Tunisia, Switzerland and the U.K. Digital fashion does not need to conform to boundaries or borders.

Our new fashion future starts with a new fashion instinct. One with a hunger to be open, collaborative and inclusive, and committed to making creativity a democratic process. For The Fabricant, this is exactly how a digital atelier should behave. Technology is meant to build connection not division.

Currently the team is working on a project called ‘Re-veil’, a collection of headpieces that questions their historic function as coverings to hide one’s identity and instead reimagines them as tools for fearless self expression. Our boldest selves revealed and re-veiled.

Re-veil is co-created with Teresa Manzo, the talented digital artist that recently won our #makingstrides competition and whose work we find inspirational. The final collaboration will drop on the Foundation digital art platform on May 13th as limited edition NFTs.

Join our weekly Twitch stream to see our iteration process and co-create with us. Just like our Re-veil headpieces, we’re an an expressive digital atelier with nothing to hide.