Liquid Alchemy: The Digital Amber’s Vision of Wearable Technology
There is a weightlessness to The Digital Amber’s creations—a sense of fluidity that defies the static nature of traditional accessories. In Jojo Zan’s world, materials are not simply materials; they are something malleable, something alive, something shifting between past and future. This is fashion as relic, as artefact, as speculative archaeology for a world we are yet to inherit.
At an event filled with statement maximalism and archival nostalgia, The Digital Amber’s designs whispered of something else entirely—elegance that isn’t worn but absorbed, pieces that don’t just sit on the body but become a second skin. The Relic Girl Ring, a favourite of those in the know, looks less like a solid object and more like sculptural water captured in mid-motion. Made through 3D printing, it reflects a tension between memory and material, a balance between the organic and the hyper-modern.
Jojo Zan is not simply a fashion and accessories designer—she is a digital sculptor, a futurist, an artist who sees technology as a means of expanding creative expression rather than constraining it. A graduate of the Royal College of Art, she founded The Digital Amber as an experiment in translating memory into matter, data into adornment. Her work exists at the intersection of technology and myth, exploring how the digital can materialise into something we can touch, wear, and keep close to the skin.
Zan’s journey into this world wasn’t immediate. Having studied traditional fashion design from undergraduate to postgraduate level, it was during her time in the Digital Fashion Pathway at RCA that she discovered an entirely new way of working. Through 3D modelling, 3D scanning, and 3D printing, she began using digital tools not just as a means of fabrication, but as a language in itself—one that allowed her to express fashion concepts beyond the constraints of traditional materials and techniques.
The name The Digital Amber itself is a contradiction—a substance that preserves the past yet speaks to the future. Amber has long been a symbol of fossilised time, of suspended animation. In Zan’s world, it is a metaphor for digital existence, for the fragments of identity and memory we leave behind in the vastness of the virtual.
This concept is central to The Digital Amber’s four-stage creative narrative, which imagines a world where humanity abandons physical form, leaving behind only consciousness flowing through digital networks. Each stage represents different relics, from the remnants of human identity to the artefacts of robots, AI, flora, and belief. The brand uses their digital character Relic Girls, to inspire their first statement piece, a ring, that captures this transition—a hauntingly beautiful ring design that features two intertwined, eroded female figures, embodying the shift from the physical self to a purely digital consciousness.
The latest collection, showcased at a recent pop-up event, envisions fashion accessories as a site of excavation—objects worn today but rediscovered in an imagined future. There is a sense of erosion in the designs, as if they have already withstood centuries of digital decay, their forms softened and smoothed by time.
Unlike traditional accessory-making, which relies on hand-carving wax moulds or metal casting, Jojo Zan’s 3D printing technology allows for intricate, almost impossible forms—seamless structures that shift and morph depending on the angle of light. The collection integrates sustainable, bio-based materials that naturally smooth and degrade over time, reinforcing the idea that these pieces are living artefacts.
Perhaps the most radical exploration in The Digital Amber’s portfolio is the Amber Chain necklace, where 3D-printed chainmail structures are transformed into wearable, flexible fabrics. This delicate balance of historical inspiration and hyper-modern technique is what makes The Digital Amber a leader in avant-garde fashion accessory design.
The fashion industry is often bound by tradition, by the weight of fabric structures and the permanence of fine craftsmanship. But Jojo Zan’s vision exists in an entirely different register—somewhere between the hyper-modern and the deeply ancient, a space where objects transcend time. The brand’s ring designs, with their hypnotic, fluid form, feels as if it belongs to a civilisation we are yet to discover—one where fashion accessories are less about adornment and more about transformation.
As fashion continues its obsession with blending technology and artistry, The Digital Amber serves as a reminder that the future isn’t just about smart textiles and AI-generated designs—it is about rethinking how we wear, perceive, and interact with objects. Jojo Zan’s work does not simply sit against the skin; it lingers, it shapeshifts, it reminds us that fashion, like memory, is never truly static.
In the future, humanity becomes pure information, searching the dense forest of data for their lost amber fossils.