Fashion in the Metaverse: Rewriting the Rules of Fashion

Today’s generation is living in a digital era where technology is the key player in society and the economy. While the pandemic still kicks in for almost two years now, digital platforms drive the speed of knowledge dissemination globally.

Further, virtual classrooms were introduced and have been the global trend in order to adhere to isolation and social distancing protocols.

The Metaverse Explored

Embracing the Metaverse

The metaverse is the next leap, the next big thing in the cyberspace community. It is the innovative integration of the physical, virtual, and augmented reality in a shared digitized space.

It is the four-dimensional (4D) counterpart of the world wide web where people can collaborate in the virtual realm. This also allows fashion designers to hone their freedom and creativity while sharing it with a joint online community.

Facebook has taken the lead in enabling a virtual realm of the online community. Mark Zuckerberg has recently announced in late October 2021 its rebranding to Meta. The famed social network has just committed itself to investing and jumping into the future of cyberspace.

Human interactions have also been progressing via cyberspace. It has extended even to classes and concerts, video games and online stores, trades, and businesses, leading to the fame of non-fungible tokens or NFTs.

Cryptocurrency, a decentralized digital medium of exchange that uses blockchain technology, has been sweeping the Millennials and Gen Z off their feet for quite some time now. Digital assets in the form of NFTs are the newest form of investment in today’s era.

Alongside the evolution of trade and investments is the birth of fashion in the metaverse – freedom and creativity-oriented cyberspace where major fashion houses enter the Metaverse to launch their consumer brands in digital format.

Digitized Fashion Experience

Understanding Digital Fashion: Online fashion shows have been kicking off and taking it up a notch for most fashion houses, making fashion a digital reality for the consumers and fanatics of the NFTs. Over the years, the fashion industry has been looking for ways to innovate and combine physical and digital fashion and has come up with the three facets to digital fashion.

Facets to Digital Fashion:

  • Phygital: This type is the inclination to create physical garments via digital fashion’s online platforms. Physical clothes are digitally created and enhanced via cyberspace and there is no actual integration of virtual and physical worlds since the output is in the physical form though created virtually.
  • Physical and digital combined: This makes digital clothes accessible and readily available to wear using augmented or virtual reality. You can wear a blazing cape virtually and be physically relaxed since you’re just wearing a shirt and some blue jeans. This type makes the blend of physical and digitized fashion possible in cyberspace.
  • Fully digital: Fully digital is a fashion that is made directly available to purchase for an avatar. Everything is virtual and in cyberspace only.

Fashion in the metaverse is all about the latter types which are “physical and digital combined” and fully digitized type or “digital-only”.

It is evident that virtual fashion is not quite the rage. People are still patronizing classy and fashionable dresses via online stores, which are affordable and way cheaper, and which can be physically worn. But this lifts up the hope of the fashion industry in terms of bringing innovative solutions to the excesses of “fast fashion” and overproduction.

Annual greenhouse gas emissions of apparel and footwear brands have been climbing due to physical garment production. Creating a digitized perspective saves up the production costs and wastes, where clothes are not necessarily made to serve a specific purpose or to fit certain body types.

Avatars of Fashion

The Metaverse Realm Opened: It is not without much surprise that to date, luxury brands are showing interest in the metaverse. They take slow but sure baby steps in jumping into the rabbit hole which is the digital universe of fashion – the fashion metaverse.

Such luxurious brands and major fashion houses include Balenciaga, Vans, Dolce & Gabbana, UNXD, Gucci, Fabricant, and Burberry among others. Most of these fashion houses have entered into collaborations with gaming companies like Fortnite and Roblox for maximized digitization and to enable the availability of NFTs via digitized couture.

Some renowned collaborations are Balenciaga and Fortnite and Burberry and Tencent. Most of these joint ventures reserve the right of exclusivity to the online players to purchase the physical counterpart of the digitized clothing on the game.

These are like limited-edition garments featured in online games. Due to recent developments and mounting breakthroughs of fashion in the metaverse, it seems that more and more fashion brands are considering entering cyberspace.

“Collezione Genesi”, conceived and brought into life in the digital space by UNXD, was a curated marketplace for digital luxury and culture. It was said to have been the most complex fashion FT ever created so far. They have created a whole new digital store for the consumers to explore and discover.

Ever since its announcement, the said cryptocurrency’s value went up to 10 percent as of October 2021. This increased the value of the whole collection to $6.1 million. Let’s take note that the collection is valued in terms of market rates rather than the valuation at the auction’s close.

If you’re ever wondering why this has been such an epic leap, Dolce & Gabbana posted their fashion pieces via their Instagram account, featuring unparalleled resemblance to futuristic dresses. Iconic fashion garments include silver robotic clothing and blackout sunglasses.

The fashion shows even feature avatars wearing high-end pieces of jewelry, accessories, and other luxury items.

One company that has embraced the metaverse fashion without reluctance is Fabricant, which has carved its name in the metaverse fashion history. It engaged in a partnership with Crypto Kitties in order to come up with a masterpiece called Iridescence dress.

Iridescence is the world’s first digital-only dress, subsequently sold in 2019 at an auction for a staggering price of $9,500. This stirred up the flame of interest in different fashion industries, having been intrigued and excited altogether with the success of digital fashion.