Evolution of Fashion as Play in the Digital Space

Abstract This article focuses on the phenomenon in which fashion functions as play in digital media. It delves deeper than fashion’s functional purposes of decoration or physical protection and examines its emergence as an independent tool for creating play culture. This article discusses the four characteristics of play in the context of the digital space—free activity, departure from space–time, pretending, and order—then applies each characteristic based on the marketing strategies of fashion brands and social media culture. These representative topics include the pretending multi-persona, a fashion meme based on social media, voluntary play in a brand platform, and sensory expansion and departure from space–time through brand experience. This article highlights contemporary fashion as a tool for play that also functions to satisfy one’s high-order desires, such as self-expression, with digitalized clothing, having fun and getting extended sensation with a brand in any time or space, and adding a layer of emotion through social interaction in digital space. This suggests that fashion, in itself an aesthetic object in everyday life, can enhance the characteristics and values of play, when applied in the digital space.