In the shifting terrain of digital fashion, The Digital Amber is carving out a space that feels distinctly its own. Founded in 2024 by Beijing-born, London-based designer Jojo Zan, the label explores the balance between material and immaterial, permanence and obsolescence. With 3D-printed accessories crafted from sustainable bio-resins, The Digital Amber merges the virtual and the physical into pieces that speak to memory, erosion, and time.
A graduate of the Royal College of Art, Zan describes her creations as “future human relics.” Her foundation in phygital design, as well as augmented and virtual reality, shows in her output: wearable objects that feel equal parts artifact and avatar. Drawing from amber – a natural preserver of life for millennia – Zan asks how our digital traces might be similarly fossilised. “In the future, humanity becomes pure information, searching the dense forest of data for their lost amber fossils,” she states. Her brand occupies that tension between permanence and flux.
Digital Sculpture and AR Installation: Relic Embody, 2023
Zan’s work is tactile, refined, and quietly experimental. Chainmail-like necklaces soften with wear, edges subtly eroding over time. Made from flexible, bio-based resins, each piece develops its own surface story. The result is contemporary design that feels rooted in speculative archaeology.
This sustainable focus is intentional. The Digital Amber approaches fashion’s obsession with the new by turning to erosion, memory, and digital decay. Even in her phygital contribution to Meta’s “Queens of the Metaverse,” Jojo reimagines digital identity as something more sculptural than disposable. Zan’s aesthetic leans minimal but layered. What she calls a “liquid relic,” capturing ephemeral memory in durable forms. Think post-human jewellery with a tactility that resists the flatness of screens. Her pieces suggest a world where digital identity isn’t just worn, it’s preserved.
Now The Digital Amber presents a new photography project, and creative collaboration born from the instant synergy between her and photographer Saif. The original concept was rooted in Zan’s artistic research into the idea of “future relics” in the digital age, and Saif’s deep connection to the night as a space of observation—where street culture, urban humanity, and nature converge.
Speaking about the project, Zan shares: “We envisioned the ruins of a future civilization shaped by digital entropy—where its legacy lies not only in abandoned architecture or bodily remains, but also in the faded spiritual imprints floating in the air. If archaeology no longer uncovers stone tools or pottery shards, but instead dives into data vaults and the spectral towers of lost material culture, how must visual storytelling evolve? Can images still offer a sense of tactile reality within the immaterial context of the digital?
In this series, model Mia wears garments that resemble suspended fragments of time—digital debris fused into her silhouette under cold light and deep shadow. The costume and accessories embody exaggerated, almost invasive forms, echoing fractured bones, fossilized remnants, and interwoven, leaf-vein-like bio-synthetic lines. Crafted with biodegradable, bio-based 3D-printed materials and finished by hand through polishing and assembly, the pieces probe the blurred boundary between humanity and technology. The lens functions as the eye of a future excavator, slowly scanning the body’s surface—capturing every crack, reflection, and residue.
This is a layered meditation on time and a visual exploration of fractured identity. The resulting images are both a gaze into the present and a reflection upon what lies ahead. Ultimately, The Digital Amber returns to its essential question: if digital existence cannot be touched, then perhaps its traces are even more vital to be seen”
While fashion accelerates toward virtual everything, The Digital Amber invites a slower gaze. Jojo Zan doesn’t just design for the now. She makes artifacts for whatever comes after.
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Words: Ashley Morris
Creative Direction & Concept: Jojo Zan
Photography: Saif
Model: Mia
Costume Design & Accessories: The Digital Amber Studio
Production Assistant: Yang