Hey Gucci, What’s the Dress Code in the Metaverse?
By Camille Ray
Photo by Xan Santos (@555xanny @xan.gogh) | Graphics by Audrey Shen
With more people spending time online, from social media to business meetings and education resources, fashion brands are harnessing the interconnected nature of augmented realities by interlacing digital design with physical fashion via the metaverse. As a fully immersive virtual environment, the metaverse operates as an extension of reality, allowing users to seamlessly move between spheres without interaction restraints caused by location differences. Due to its far-reaching qualities, the metaverse promises an era where creativity can drive the global economy as professionals in a wide variety of disciplines launch digitized products and services.
Operating as an independent parallel virtual universe that unceasingly exists in real-time alongside players, the metaverse allows users to play, meet people and socialize, and earn or spend money on clothing, skins, or virtual goods. While the nature of the metaverse feels and looks fake, the fabricated reality exists as a virtual structure where everyday people are plugged in as avatars. With this newfound creativity to express unique self-identities, users turn to the fashion industry to seek stylish apparel and accessories, often emulating fashion statements from real life.
Photo by Alik Shehadeh (@alikgennetian) | Graphics by Audrey Shen
Presently, top fashion brands are catering to digital consumer needs by selling fashion pieces in their own defined and decentralized metaverse as NFTs – non-fungible tokens that act as certificates of ownership. Already, some of the world’s famous brands have made incursions to exploit the new market opportunities the metaverse brings, including Balenciaga, Dolce & Gabbana and Gucci. Despite being in its early stages of development, with long terms effects uncertain, the metaverse could reveal powerful opportunities for fashion to garner unparalleled revenue streams. In fact, the appeal of the metaverse comes with digital luxury demand that may provide $50 billion in additional profit by 2030, according to investment bank Morgan Stanley.
Eager to tap into untouched revenue pools, the first-ever digital fashion week called Decentraland took place last Spring, a decentralized virtual social platform on the Ethereum blockchain. After recruiting several household luxury fashion names, such as Dolce & Gabanna and Philip Plein, the multi-day event served as an encouragement for other brands to attempt digitization. With this frame of reference, Balenciaga appealed to its growing Gen-Z consumer base by teaming up with Fortnite, a widely popular online video game service, to produce its own digital product. Also available in physical stores for €725, Balenciaga produced a digitally branded hoodie that sold for more than 1000 V-Bucks, Fortnite’s game currency equivalent to €10.
In addition to engaging new markets and driving revenue, new technologies also help reduce some of the costs associated with launching a fashion collection. Web3-compatible software packages allow designers greater freedom to experiment during initial production phases. Without the need to invest in materials and test the viability of products, designers can experiment with lavish virtual collections that are polished up prior to production. Furthermore, by abandoning physical pre-production designs, including waste produced through modeling, sampling and marketing before their physical iterations are sent to production, a 30 percent reduction of a brand’s carbon footprint is possible. Thus, greatly minimizing the overall environmental impact of the entire lifecycle of a fashion item. Furthermore, when it comes to selling products, digital models of clothing alleviate problems associated with overproduction, an aspect viewed to be a major roadblock within the current fashion industry structure.
Photo by Xan Santos (@555xanny @xan.gogh) | Graphics by Audrey Shen
Considering its wide-ranged impact on various aspects of the fashion industry, as we head into a future dominated by decentralized technologies, it will be interesting to see how the future of the fashion industry continues to play out, especially as more and more brands continue to enter the metaverse with each passing day.
Styling by Kalyn Lemieux (@kxlyn__) and Elaine Kim (@elainee.kim)