Draping the Digital: Historic Fashion for XR Performance
Project partners: Bath Spa University, Fashion Museum Bath, Bristol Digital Futures Institute (BDFI), Nephelie Technologies, Martin Parsons
Researchers at Bath Spa University are leading a collaboration to explore how extended reality technologies can reimagine historic fashion for contemporary performance. The project is also developing methods to unlock fashion museum archives for creative use in film, games and live virtual performance.
Historic garments are powerful cultural artefacts, yet their fragility means they are usually encountered only as static objects. Movement—how fabric drapes, flows, and responds to the body—is central to understanding their design, craft, and cultural meaning.
By combining volumetric capture using 3D Gaussian Splatting of performers with digitally reconstructed garments, the project team will enable performers to “wear” clothing that could never be worn physically. This approach opens new creative possibilities for virtual production, where historically accurate costumes can be inhabited in virtual form and period garments can be visualised, simulated, and interacted with in real time.
The project will deliver a complete workflow for translating garments from the Fashion Museum Bath into digital and virtual production environments. The pipeline spans high-resolution 3D scanning, pattern and garment reconstruction in CLO3D (a 3D fashion design software program creating virtual, true-to life garment visualization), creation of wearable virtual assets in Unreal Engine with cloth simulation, and final testing with performers in the Reality Emulator at Bristol Digital Futures Institute, in collaboration with Nephelie Technologies.
The project builds on an ongoing collaboration between Bath Spa University (Centre for Creative Technology, Future Fashion Works), Fashion Museum Bath and Nephelie Technologies that is developing new approaches to digitally reproducing collection garments, including reconstructing in CLO3D and optimising for XR.
The project is led by Dr Coral Manton, School of Design, with Gabby Shiner-Hill, Digital Fellow at Future Fashion Works, working with 3D capture expert Martin Parsons and CLO3D specialist Laura Fish. The Bath Spa University team includes Unreal Engine specialist Sam Sturtivant, production support by Nigel Fryatt and photography and lighting by Fred Reed.
Draping the Digital is one of eight university-led collaborations awarded up to £25,000 of R&D funding from the XR Network+ XR Labs Fund to develop extended reality prototypes using facilities at UK universities.
Photo by Bath Spa University.
Categories: Fashion, Performance, Research, Technology