Ziqi Zhang — BFA Fashion Design 2025

Phygital Fashion

Video: Fading Echoes

Creative Director/Producer/Editor/Animator: Ziqi Zhang
Videographer: Ziqi Zhang, Eliora Liu
Model: Lillian Siqi Rong, Kelly Qi
Music: Night Arrives(no drums) - Lynne Publishing Liscenced by Houzi
Assistant: Hanson Zhuoxi Zhao

"Fading Echoes"

Fading Echoes is a phygital fashion collection that bridges the physical and digital to explore the fragility of memory and the longing to preserve emotional remnants of childhood. Through garments that exist in both tactile form and as animated digital avatars, the project transforms personal nostalgia into wearable artifacts and surreal protectors—guardian-like creatures born from fading recollections. The collection is built through a multi-software pipeline involving CLO3D and Blender, where each physical piece is mirrored by a digital twin that animates within an immersive game-like environment.

Textiles are treated as memory vessels—pleated, frayed, beaded, and layered to evoke ephemerality and tenderness. The digital environment enhances these sensations, visualizing forgotten landscapes and dreamlike companions that echo the garments’ emotional tone. Fading Echoes ultimately proposes a new form of storytelling—where fashion serves as a portal for remembering, feeling, and connecting across time and media.

Image:
Creative Director/Producer: Ziqi Zhang
Photographer: Ziqi Zhang, Eliora Liu, Link Shanglin Li
Lighting: Link Shanglin Li
Model: Lillian Siqi Rong, Kelly Qi
Assistant: Hanson Zhuoxi Zhao

This collection bridges physical and digital worlds, drawing inspiration from cherished childhood items whose memories have faded over time. By transforming these beloved objects into ethereal guardian-like creatures within an immersive 3D game, the collection redefines fashion as a medium of storytelling and memory preservation.

The garments, existing both as tangible pieces and digital avatars, invite viewers to experience an intimate journey of nostalgia, comfort, and loss. This project challenges traditional fashion boundaries, presenting wearable art that allows us to engage with, connect to, and revisit fading memories in both real and virtual realms.

Image: ***Lavender***

This phase marks the foundation of my digital twin creation process. Garments are patterned in CLO3D, replicating the structure and craftsmanship of their physical counterparts. Once constructed, they are brought into Blender, where a custom avatar—modeled to echo the childhood item—is sculpted and rigged. This establishes a responsive digital body that can breathe, move, and emote within an animated world, bridging the tactile and virtual with technical precision.

Image: ***Panda***

To ready the garments for animated interaction, I used CLO3D Everywear primarily for weight painting and rigging, ensuring that each piece would respond naturally to the avatar’s movement. Texture maps were also baked to preserve the material’s visual nuance. This phase bridges technical execution with emotional depth, allowing the garments to flow and shift with uncanny realism—as if animated by the echoes they carry.

Image: **Game Environment Design and Creation**

To build an immersive world for my digital guardians, I designed and modeled a dreamlike 3D environment that reflects the emotional landscape of fading memory. Using Blender, I constructed spatial elements and crafted material shaders through node-based workflows, layering surface textures, reflections, and lighting effects. This environment acts as both a stage and a memoryscape—where garments, avatars, and emotion converge within a carefully constructed digital realm.

Bio

Ziqi Zhang is a fashion designer and digital artist based in New York, working at the intersection of material craftsmanship and immersive digital technology. Her practice explores memory, identity, and emotional storytelling through phygital garments—pieces that exist simultaneously in the physical world and in animated, virtual environments. She specializes in digital twinning, using tools like CLO3D, Blender, and Unreal Engine to craft intricate simulations that mirror her handmade work. Through fabric manipulation, texture layering, and visual narrative, Ziqi constructs garments that act as emotional vessels, archiving intangible moments in tactile and digital form.

“When I step away from the tangible, I embrace the chaos of my thoughts,” she reflects. In her creative process, this chaos becomes a playground—an inner landscape where color, texture, and form converge in surreal harmony. Her work invites viewers into these dreamlike realms, where the mind’s fragments are woven together with precision and poetry. For Ziqi, fashion is more than adornment—it is a portal to feeling, memory, and transformation.

ziqizhang.com zhangziqi515@gmail.com (949) 656-1733 Instagram