Nerding Day: DressX 🌭

I’ve always felt the problem with clothing is that it’s a real, tangible product I can purchase and not a ghostly apparition floating over the general area of my body. I want ghost clothes. Luckily, digital fashion companies were briefly in style when we were all excited about the Metaverse, and a few are still hanging in there, so for only ninety dollars, (a picture of) you too can look like you’ve hunted and killed Grimace and are wearing his intestines as a trophy.

There are quite a few digital fashion companies out there now, but I’m going to focus on one that I think is the most egregious. They charge a ton of money for almost no product, they way overpromise on what they can deliver, and they’ve collaborated with a ton of legitimate brands like Coca-Cola, American Eagle, and Gucci, but I trust them about as much as a guy selling Hefty bags of blood from inside his trench coat.

This look from their Coca-Cola collaboration really displays the level of craft DressX is offering to their biggest brand partners. Their slogan should be, “You too can maybe look like fancy clothing is glitching into existence sort of near your body as long as you don’t move too fast!

DressX likes to talk a lot about how sustainable digital fashion is. Sure, if we could all be naked all the time, that would save a ton of energy and material; unfortunately, since these clothes don’t actually exist, they’re not saving jack shit. Also, in addition to selling digital assets, DressX sells NFTs, Mother Nature’s favorite garrote. So, if you wear a regular outfit with an NFT dress over it, you’re able to spend twice as much money and really kick the planet in the dick. As one TikTok comment said, “Yes, destroy the environment shawty. Go crypto!”

You really have to dig into DressX to figure out what they’re actually selling right now. If you look very, very, hard you can find a teeny, tiny print explanation about DressX’s actual products. It’s, in their own words, close to nothing, but don’t worry– it won’t stop them from selling it to you for sometimes hundreds of dollars.

DressX makes it seem as if what you’re purchasing from them is this amazing piece of clothing you can slap on for live streams, video chats, Metaverse avatars, Instagram pictures, or dating profiles. In reality, it sort of works for two of those things. I’ve seen a few pictures of people standing perfectly still on Instagram where they almost look like their clothes aren’t a cartoon. Since there’s no explanation on the site of how this digital asset will be applied, the only way I could figure it out was to pay DressX a dollar to Photoshop an extremely ugly bucket hat onto my head.

So, that’s where the technology is at right now. You’re paying real money to pretend to wear a make-believe hat. If you pay even more money, you can pretend to wear a diamond-encrusted lizard skin pope hat. However, if you want to wear your diamond-encrusted lizard skin pope hat to a Skype meeting with your boss, you’re out of luck.

One of the DressX applications they advertise is how you can wear the clothing on video streams, but imagine going to a Zoom meeting about the quarterly budget, and your blouse keeps popping off, or your business suit glitches away to reveal your novelty World’s Horniest Christian Grandpa t-shirt. As long as nudity and radical T-shirts are frowned upon in the workplace, digital clothing is worthless for video chat. The technology is currently on par with an episode of the 1999 children’s television program Reboot.

To be clear, this isn’t one guy in a basement running a scam. According to Forbes, DressX got fifteen million in series A funding in March of 2023. They’re the largest platform for digital-only fashion, and I think it’s because they employed a pretty ingenious strategy of making a terrible product that so enraged people they had to scream about it in the comments of their TikTok videos. As we know, the algorithm is stupid and just sees this as engagement, which means they could show investors TikToks of their product with five million views. Sure, all of these views were driven by people commenting, “This looks like shit,” but who cares! Five million people saw this shit.

They often respond to comments about how the clothes look terrible with an overly confident “Oh yeah, does this look terrible?” and then a photo of a woman in another awful dress with a hand twice the size of her head. Then a hundred thousand people respond, “Bestie, it’s giving if Pepto-Bismal didn’t fuck” and another venture capitalist firm FedEx’s them eight million dollars.

Things really took off when they started making TikToks with the headline, “Can you even tell this is a digital dress?” Of course you can. The dress looks like it was pulled off of a character from the creepy CGI Polar Express movie, and it’s blinking in and out of existence every three seconds, but that’s the point.

DressX designers include big names like Crosty, R3N3GADES, Bonko, Spark +Rebel, and if you’re trying to guess which one I made up, it’s none of them. Those are all real DressX designers. I know you assumed R3N3GADES must be fake; why two 3s instead of E, but the third E is just a regular E? I DON’T KNOW, but someone does because they really named their design company that.

They’re now holding design contests where people can use AI to make clothing inspired by famous brands, and then DressX will put them into digital production. However, even the most advanced AI still doesn’t really get the human body, so the clothing these monsters spit out end up looking like the alien from The Thing impersonating a mocap suit. DressX is the best purveyor of digital herpes jackets on the market today.

DressX assured me that the girlies love the vibe, but to me, the vibe is a robot trying to infiltrate my life like a Terminator and doing a terrible job. Can you imagine a scenario where the Nigerian prince asking you for money sent this as proof that they’re a real person? This is the most suspicious outfit I’ve ever seen. How is it possible to make digital clothing that doesn’t fit? I don’t know, but somehow DressX has accomplished it.

Remember earlier in the article when I said I paid DressX a dollar to photoshop an ugly hat on my head? What ended up happening instead was DressX stole a dollar from me. They sent me an email saying my picture was attached and it was not. When I pointed that out, I got no response. I don’t know why I expected just slightly more than that, but honestly, I’m having trouble feeling bad about not having to see what I look like in that ugly ass hat. I would rather have a dollar stolen from me, honestly. Thank you, DressX, for doing me the kindness of not delivering a product.

If you’re one of the millions of people DressX believes are out there waiting to be haunted by the ghost of pants, maybe try another company. It seems like if we can make a random person look exactly like Tom Cruise with the magic of computers we could also fake a decent jumpsuit but the technology somehow isn’t there yet.

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