Roblox teams up with Japan’s Bunka Fashion College on digital fashion course

Metaverse platform Roblox has unveiled the inaugural graduate collections from a collaborative project with Tokyo-based Bunka Fashion College, for which it has operated a Digital Fashion Programme, made in partnership with Dentsu Group.

The virtual fashion items and accessories the participating students designed have been displayed in an immersive exhibition on Roblox, where visitors can try on looks, vote on their favourites and purchase pieces to dress their avatars.

For the course, students were asked to work on both digital and physical items based on the theme ‘My Brand’, reflecting their personal design aesthetic. They utilised 3D content creation ecosystem Roblox Studio for the project, as well as the platform’s layered clothing technology and other tools to design and publish their creations.

In a release, Sachiko Aihara, Bunka’s president, said: “Our goal is to give our students the advantage of being at the forefront of today’s trends where technology is democratising how fashion is created and worn, and the growing scale of people’s connections and interactions in the digital world dictates trends and defines style both in the digital and physical worlds.”

The course came as an expansion to a similar project that has already wrapped up at Parsons School of Design in 2023, where students also created a variety of items and accessories for the Roblox Marketplace.

Both programmes intend to inform and equip next generation designers with technology skills for the increasingly prominent digital fashion environment, for which Roblox has reported increased demand among consumers.

Roblox said it planned to support the exhibitions of these students’ works in galleries both in Japan and abroad, while further underlining an intention to continue and expand Bunka’s digital fashion programme in the coming years.