With everything becoming digitalized, industry experts believe that all fashion brands will have their own virtual spaces in the near future. A virtual space is a 3D digital space that offers a wide range of advantages to businesses and consumers alike. Brands can create mesmerizing, static and interactive visual content in their virtual spaces (VSLB, 2022). Fashion brands also embrace social media channels to connect with their consumers. Popular platforms such as Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok have unique characteristics and features. While moving through these diverse digital mediums, brands should maintain a consistent communication strategy. Creating visuals from virtual spaces is considered an effective way to align all the brands’ social handles (Lim et al., 2021). Also, new technologies like metaverse, AR and VR are revolutionizing marketing strategies, and fashion brands are trying to adapt to these new tech trends (e.g., Chung et al., 2019; Wang et al, 2022). However, human-to-human interaction is central to the conception of consumer experience in the fashion industry. In line with this, recent academic studies have called for different lenses to integrate traditional and futuristic fashion strategies (e.g., Duma, 2022). Although the past decade has been a game changer in the fashion industry, the global financial crisis and, more recently, COVID-19 have harshly affected the global fashion industry. Both crises caused significant shifts in consumer behaviour, competitive landscape, retail, sportswear, apparel, and the fashion brand industry’s logistics and distribution (Siddiqui, 2022). Therefore, the question arises of how fashion brands can battle against unexpected global disruption and simultaneously adapt the technological advances.
In this special issue of the Journal of Global Fashion Marketing, we seek papers that will (1) advance the fashion marketing literature by evaluating virtual space and its effects from new perspectives; (2) critically appraise and question the traditional marketing strategies can be expanded to fashion brands’ presence in virtual space; (3) provide new theoretical insights and frameworks; and/or that (4) contribute to innovative solutions in the form of utilizing large empirical data.
Potential topics for this special issue include, but are not limited to:
- Challenges and opportunities for fashion brands in virtual space
- Social robots in fashion marketing
- Value co-creation in virtual space/stores
- Fashion consumers’ experience in the metaverse
- Cultural capital and fashion entrepreneurship in cyberspace
- Fashion consumers’ ethics, privacy, and (mis)behaviour in virtual space, etc.
