Taskin Göc, whose designer work doesn't limit to just digital garments but the whole ‘what can be digital reality and its story, brings light upon the sustainable side of fashion within his rustic style for a world that he imagines being a boiling pot of digital craftsmanship in close by coming future.

Taskin my first question comes from my curiosity about your background and pre-fashion life. When did you first encounter the fashion world and how was life before this?

I don‘t remember a time in my life when I wasn‘t interested in creating or embellishing things around me. As a kid, I was quite shy and I used to spend much time creating custom assets for video games I played, such as The Sims or SecondLife. I even rented my own space on SecondLife to open a clothing shop to sell pieces I created. However, I did not consider this to be fashion related.
I started designing and making clothes when I was a young teenager. I was generally disappointed in “boys‘“ or “men's” clothing but also too shy to wear anything from the “girls‘“ section. Therefore I asked my parents to buy me a sewing machine and I started making my own garments such as floor-length t-shirts and stuff. At age 15 or so, I started interning at different studios in Berlin, after class, and during holidays. This is how I learned a lot of the techniques my work is based on today. I then even worked as a patternmaker before studying fashion design.

Please take us through your initial phases of exploring your crafts and the digital landscape that you later merged for the immersive side of the fashion experience. What challenges and benefits did your concepts and ideas go through?

I actually don’t separate digital and physical reality that much from one another. Most of us live in both realities simultaneously and they do influence each other significantly. I interpret the current time as transitional: a time in which we figure out the relevance of the technology we have. I like to think of myself as a hybrid designer because my digital and physical designs are based on a shared workflow. This means that my physical garments are based on digital simulations for example. But what I do digitally is also based on traditional ideas of pattern construction and garment making.
It is actually not that obvious that digital fashion relies on these techniques. (Digital fashion could literally be anything — sculpted, simulations of elements such as fire, hair or smoke, and so on). However, I consciously chose something that is rooted in tradition: cutting shapes out of a two-dimensional surface and then assembling these pieces to create volume. We only do that because of the way fabrics have been woven for the last centuries. The moment I digitize this approach, it already becomes a hybrid.
What’s challenging is to make a hybrid or digital garment that is not meant for collecting, but for wearing. Eventually, I create pieces that are meant to alter the way you feel in your body, and how you see and carry yourself. This is something very immediate and sensual, which does not necessarily relate to exclusivity or collector’s value.

Your collective theme and the creative direction surrounding the subjects of decay and post-modernism. A style that is newfangled. Please tell us why you felt the need to work on this and how was the overall creative flow.

I like to call this opulent realism and it opposes the idea of putting effort into maintaining things that are naturally falling apart. This kind of decay, as you describe it, is holding a lot of emotional value as it represents different sentiments over a period of time. And I believe that it is this rawness and intensity that is relevant to many of us after a long time of muted lifestyles and depression.
I like to play with the paradoxicality in this hybrid physical-digital context: visual signs of decay are the result of physical influences: weathering, grime, sunshine, and mechanical force. In digital space there is no dirt, all these effects are fully simulated and therefore they get a new meaning.
Lastly, I question what is real and what is not. To many, digital fashion is less real than physical garments. But the way I consumed fashion since the early 2010s, starting on Tumblr and blogs, is digital first. Most of the time I looked at fashion items in photos and videos (which depict, in a sense, digital space) before I might have seen them in a store or in the streets. To me, the digital fashion item (such as a specific handbag or shoe) has always been the original while the physical merchandise is a simulacrum or a copy. Think of the physical castle in Disney world which is just a copy of the original one that exists in the movies. In a sense, most of these ideas evolved out of a postmodern tradition.

Let's talk about the digital images that support your work for better presentations. What you would speak on the idea of metaverse as a great means of innovative fashion experience but poorish phase for actual tangible crafts that may fade if not preserved…

What I like about the idea of a metaverse is that you can choose your surroundings and you can connect to your tribe(s). In physical reality, we might not always be able to live in our favorite neighborhoods or exclusively move in safe spaces. Therefore, I am not only interested in technological innovation, but the democratic aspect of fashion in the metaverse. It could be a safe space to wear whatever you want, potentially for a fraction of the price it would cost to create a physical iteration of your dream dress.
Although material and immaterial garments broadly speak to the same abstract desires, digital fashion will not replace traditional, tangible craftsmanship. How many intricately crafted garments do we own on average right now? Hopefully, digital fashion will reduce the consumption of fast fashion one day. (How often do we look at a garment and think about how good it would look in our feed - we purchase these pieces because of their looks, not because of the way they were made). And the large-scale industrial production of such clothes certainly does not preserve craftsmanship.
When I worked in one of Chanel‘s Métier‘s d‘Art ateliers in Paris in 2020, I had the chance to experience the magic of Haute Couture firsthand. And I found that it rarely translates well into digital imagery because so much of its allure gets lost. Therefore I like to challenge myself and other digital creators to think about the possibility of digital fashion to communicate those qualities. What if the savoir-faire was not a video campaign but a digital layer that surrounds a crafted garment as you wear it?

How important virtual dynamics of the fashion experiences have become for various digital experiences. For example, films and games have a huge market for this already and now AR VR is slowly becoming part of e-commerce shopping. So what is the overall importance of the digital side of fashion that will or does influence the way we would want to experience physical fashion? Especially when the lines between digital and physical are beginning to merge slowly. What effects it would make from both the creative and design perspective along with the consumer behavior that you as a designer have to keep in mind?

The importance of digital fashion reaches from sustainability aspects to the wearer’s personal experience. The software we use helps to reduce the resources needed for prototyping and to visualize products. That way, garments could be designed first and produced after purchase, resulting in less stock and overproduction!
On a different note, I find it old-fashioned to buy physical pieces which will be worn only once or twice and then live a sad life in someone’s wardrobe. Personally, I wouldn’t know when to wear all the eccentric coats and dresses that I admire and would like to own. Digital experiences allow us to express parts of our identities that sometimes don’t fit into physical spaces.

Art and fashion are both playfully inspiring and intimidating subjects. What do you have to say about the grey area that remains and feeds the creative tangent as a creative mind? In other words.. What more did you wish to include but refrained from because of design-oriented limitations?

I usually don’t think of clothes first when I design but of a whole universe. In my workflow, I create spaces, and then I think of the people who inhabit those spaces, what they like and fear, and lastly, what they’d wear. On my Instagram, you can see that I communicate some of those aspects. However, I’d like these spaces to be experienceable too in the future!

Last but not least.. Would you say avant-garde always be the future of fashion? What are your wildest visions for say 2030?
There will always be creatives who think differently and who open up new realities for us to inhabit. I understand avant-garde as a radical approach, but not for the sake of being radical. In 2030, I hope to see a multitude of digital realities that we can pop in and out of anytime. With this merging of the tangible and immaterial, my concept for hybrid clothing might become a reality for people all around the world. Imagine a person wearing a cotton dress that has layers of embellishments growing out of its seams as you look at it through your camera.
Mixed reality might allow us to buy fewer physical clothes because we can choose different virtual auras that surround us and express who we want to be and which tribe(s) we belong to. These tribes will gain more and more importance as they are our chosen surroundings. Who cares what the people in the metro think of my outfit? We will put more effort into pulling a look within shared digital or mixed reality spaces, where hundreds or thousands of like-minded people will see and interact with you.
Last but not least, it will become clear what “digital craftsmanship” means. Digital fashion might look like one homogeneous cultural practice at the moment, although it is just a medium. There will be digital craftsmen and artisans who use the software in unexpected and virtuous ways. This could lead to the breakdown of this false “crafts vs. digital” dichotomy.