Abstract

As fashion-industry activities and products get increasingly influenced by digitalisation, the ‘digital fashion’ phenomenon is rising. Exemplified by varied recent attempts to move away from traditional, physical manifestations, this development appears highly paradoxical for a field where touch and feel matter so greatly. Yet the practitioners’ efforts and a growing body of research provide diverse examples of the phenomenon, from cautious initiatives to incorporate digital elements into fashion- company offerings to completely new, born-digital players entering the industry. This extreme context of physical–digital entanglement could contribute to information- systems (IS) discourse on the role of physicality in digital innovation; however, the picture is unclear. ‘Digital fashion’ is an umbrella term, conceptually obscure when it comes to physicality’s involvement. To enrich understanding of the various configurations of the physical-and-digital in this emerging context, the review examined 162 articles on digital-fashion manifestations. By contextualising and expanding a theoretical framework drawn from sports digitalisation, it organised the literature into five clusters: digitally supported, augmented, replicated, extended, and replaced fashion, with regard to three research perspectives: of a designer, organisation, and consumer. This classification and analysis pinpointed ways in which future research into digital fashion could advance IS scholarship probing the nature of digital artefacts.

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