Epic Games and digital fashion company CLO Virtual Fashion have bought shares in each other, the two companies announced on Thursday. The press release doesn’t specify how much each level of investment actually represents, but it’s a clear sign of Epic’s interest in virtual fashion as another aspect of its growing metaverse aspirations.
CLO Virtual Fashion offers tools such as fashion design software already integrated with Epic’s Unreal Engine and a marketplace where clothing designs are bought and sold. Epic has been pushing for Unreal Engine to be used outside of game development – it’s becoming increasingly popular in the automotive world – so it makes sense that Epic would want industries like fashion to use Unreal Engine as well.
“Bringing high-quality digital fashion into real-time virtual worlds is complex and can create a creative barrier for digital fashion makers,” Kim Libreri, CTO of Epic, said in a statement. “It’s exciting to see CLO Virtual Fashion’s solutions working together with Unreal Engine to help designers across industries create true-to-life digital fashion apparel.”
Epic isn’t the only company looking into virtual fashion. Digital fashion company DressX has launched clothing roblox, and earlier this year I attended the second annual Metaverse Fashion Week in Decentraland. While the metaverse hype seems to be waning, metaverse believers like Epic will likely continue to invest in virtual fashion to make it easier to look cooler in virtual worlds.