The texture and feel of an exquisite piece of fabric is enough to make any designer drool. Seeing a model walk the runway wearing their piece can be one of the proudest moments in his or her life. Design itself used to come down to the physical components of what is possible and how something realistically looked on the body…until now.

There are now designers creating clothing that will never be worn by a human. There are modern pieces of furniture filling houses made of only pixels and bandwidth. I always wondered what new trends would become popular and where fashion would go in the future, but I would have never guessed it would be online.

Shoppers spent a billion dollars on virtual goods in 2009, according to pcworld.com. This means that a billion dollars was spent on goods designed to never be worn or used in reality. These sales come from users on virtual gaming sites, such as Second Life and IMVU, which provide online “worlds” that a player can explore, create, and make relationships in.

To use the site you must first register and create your character, or “avatar,” before proceeding to buy clothing or products for them. Some sites require you to buy virtual credits and others just require an active credit card number to purchase objects.

My first thought when hearing this was, why buy “fake” things that you can never have in reality? With this unique industry growing at an incredible rate there must be reasons for why people will dish out money for online products.

It seems when you enter these gaming sites it is like playing out your own fantasy. In real life most women can’t fit into that designer size 0 dress and men don’t all look like Jake Gyllenhaal, but in a virtual world you can design your character to look anyway you desire. With the world of fashion full of airbrushed and photo shopped models it is hard to compete. As an avatar, though, you can come close to aesthetically perfect.

Buying products, much like in reality, can also accelerate you into popularity in your virtual world of choice. Someone who is handicapped in life can vicariously live through these programs and most wouldn’t mind paying for the experience to lead a different life. You can also have the ability to design and create clothing without knowing how to even thread a needle. With computer programs, the average person can create layers on bodies on which they sketch and color to design virtual clothing.

What this means is there is a growing market for virtual designers as a career. Online, designers can create 3-D clothing and sell it in virtual boutiques without requiring a large investment or capital. There are about 18 million users alone on the popular site called Second Life, and the average user spends about 100 minutes on the site with each visit, according to Time Magazine.

This is a huge audience that’s looking to buy virtual products for their avatars. Even though some of these sites have been around since the early 2000s, their recent resurgence has come with the appearance of social media sites like Farmville, Twitter, Facebook and many other smart phone apps.

Like fashion in the “real” world, clothing on these virtual sites follow trends and can be featured in virtual clothing magazines, such as Second Style Magazine. There are hundreds of virtual fashion blogs that showcase player’s designs. The sites have been known to inspire designers in the real world. It’s also possible to create designs for online characters that aren’t able to be physically constructed or worn in reality. In this way, we may one day see wearable fashion trying to figure out the technology to construct online designs. It also allows for creative expression like no one has seen before.

Learning how to design online though isn’t an easy process, especially if you’re a “noob” (if you don’t know what that means then you’re a noob). It takes extensive knowledge of using the design programs and talent on computers to create even remotely attractive products. If you want to sell clothing, it will take patience and practice. Some designers are users that become immersed in the world and go through online binges of logging on for 12 hours at a time. If you are interested in seeing the process, it’s as simple as looking at YouTube tutorials that users post.

If you haven’t heard much about virtual design it’s bound to become a major part of the fashion industry. Technology advancements which have lead to fashion apps, video games and virtual worlds to play dress-up, will soon lead to an endless array of new possibilities.

Already, retailers are installing dressing room mirrors that will show 3-D pictures of other products that go with the item you try on. Soon there might even be virtual magazines featuring new designs on avatars that you can flip through on your tablet reader and 3-D runway shows projected at fashion week. With the opportunity to achieve aesthetic perfection, avatars have the potential to become the new breed of supermodels.

For the time being though, I still believe that fashion needs that human element for years to come. Sometimes seeing something slightly imperfect is how a designer is inspired to design a new, edgy collection or even start the next big trend.

Gina Jensen is a senior majoring in retail and is a wannabe Carrie Bradshaw. Send fashion faux pas and column ideas to [email protected].