H&M Foundation Launches One-of-a-Kind CG Catwalk Model for Sustainable ‘Billion Dollar’ Collection

‘The Billion Dollar Collection’ is an innovative campaign launched today by non-profit H&M Foundation, as part of its Global Change Award supporting early-stage innovation and ideas that can make the fashion industry circular. To highlight a selection of these startups, this campaign showcases them in a new way – through a unique digital-only fashion collection and catwalk show, designed by French creative director Pauline Chardin and created in hyper-realistic CGI by Mackevision, part of Accenture Interactive.

Each garment in the collection comes with its own price tag, some up to $120 million, reflecting the estimated support each company believes it needs to achieve scale for its disruptive innovations. The details of each startup – associated with a unique garment – are featured in a digital Billion Dollar Collection Lookbook. A campaign film demonstrates how Mackevision breathed life and movement into the collection, through the creation of a one-of-a-kind avatar to wear and showcase the digital garments.

Purposefully androgenous, the key requirement for the avatar was that it shouldn’t be based on any real-life human being. Working from a selection of 3D scans, Mackevision worked in close exchange with the designer and the H&M Foundation to carefully adapt facial features and details to achieve a natural result. A huge undertaking, the project took just over five months for the studio to complete.

The collection, meticulously created in exquisite detail, is characterised by asymmetrical elements, trinket-like finishing, non-standard colors and bold volumes. For its creation, Mackevision used a complex software ecosystem, including Marvelous Designer, Houdini, Maya, vRay and Substance Painter, and worked closely with real-life designer Pauline Chardin on the final look of the garments. To make the animation feel authentic, the team at Mackevision also used motion capture technology to demonstrate the various garments.

More than ever, customers are demanding sustainable fashion while fashion companies are talking about transformation – and yet many start-ups struggle to receive the necessary support to bring their ideas to the scale required to truly change the fashion industry beyond capsule collections and pilots. If the fashion industry and its communities embrace these 10 disruptive innovations, this collection could become reality and be produced at scale.

Dominic Bitu, head of film at Mackevision, part of Accenture Interactive comments: “Digital avatars and influencers have been a big topic of discussion since Lil Miquela burst onto the scene in 2016. We wanted to create an entirely different avatar for this very special fashion collection - one the world had literally never seen before. Typically, photoreal CGI humans are created one of two ways - via a 3D scan or via modelling and texturing it manually from scratch. In order to make H&M Foundation’s avatar completely unique and not modelled on any other living human we used scans only for reference, modelling on top to create a brand new being. Our biggest challenge was finding the balance between being photoreal and not of this world, but we’re very happy with the outcome.”