The emergence of immersive virtual worlds opens up new possibilities for fashion designers on how to think and design garments for the digital body.

This paper aims: (i) to present a technologically advanced bodysuit for externalizing bodily perceptions of seeing, hearing, and feeling touch towards the outermost layer of the bodysuit, (ii) to then propose and elaborate on the idea of the digital garment as body substitute when bodily senses can get externalized towards non-human body-related materials and further digital materials, and (iii) to argue the findings based on an experiment conducted with participants.

To achieve these aims, it was important to develop a technologically advanced bodysuit that relocates perception areas of the body in the physical reality instead of translating them into the digital reality right away. This is due to the reason that we are desensitized nowadays when interacting with digital bodies as human body substitutes since we encounter such experiences daily through digital media.

Undergraduate fashion design students as participants experienced the relocation of body senses within an experimental setup organized in three phases. In phase one, participants experienced wearing the bodysuit without perception alteration, to then experience the relocation of seeing, hearing, and feeling touch towards the outermost layer of the bodysuit in phase two. In phase three, information from the participants was gathered through questionnaires and group discussions.

The outcomes show that all participants experienced the alteration of seeing, hearing, and feeling touch while wearing the bodysuit. Further, the questionnaires and discussion showed that the participants experienced a shifting understanding from their body-surface towards the bodysuit’s outermost layer. This then led to a new understanding from the participants’ side of the digital garment as digital body substitute which led to new ideas about what designing digital garments could include from fashion designers’ perspectives.