More or Less magazine is an eco-fashion magazine founded by Jaime Perlman (former Creative Director at Vogue UK), focused on highlighting designers and methods that make the fashion industry more sustainable. We partnered with Perlman to curate a collection of fabric-free garments from 4 of Britain's most exciting young designers: Bethany Williams, Phoebe English, Fredrik Tjærandsen, and Rottingdean Bazaar. The goal was to showcase Microsoft’s Azure Spatial Anchors as well as one possible eco-friendly future for an incredibly wasteful industry. A custom Augmented Atelier app allowed the designers to craft, edit, and share their designs remotely with Microsoft technologists and fellow team members, and used AR to place their finished digital designs over physical mannequins in the studio. Augmented Atelier’s greatest ambition is to bring radical new zero-waste possibilities to the industry at large.

This project brought what is traditionally a very analogue process into the Cloud. First, we worked with Perlman to select 4 young British designers to collaborate with. Bethany Williams, Phoebe English, Fredrik Tjærandsen, and Rottingdean Bazaar were chosen for their dedication to sustainability, curiosity around technology, and willingness to experiment. Then, each designer used Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing and Spatial Anchors to adapt their design process to the digital space. In development from October 2019-September 2020, our custom app, Augmented Atelier, used the Spatial Anchors to bring zero-fabric, digital garments into the real world with AR; a 360 degree view of the garments displayed accurate volume, texture, and even movement of each piece. The greatest impact of this collaboration is in its display of unbridled creativity and innovation. The result was a zero-waste digital collection that proved that the design process can be streamlined and made more eco-friendly. Augmented Atelier is a unique prototype and the first of its kind; this is only the beginning of digital fashion and fabric-free designing.