The year is 2045. You’re walking around Manhattan—provided it’s still above water—wearing a pair of glasses that share data about the people, places, and things around you. You run into a friend. “Fire outfit!” you say, because your friend’s outfit is literally on fire. And while their Balenciaga couture cape is aflame, they seem totally relaxed about it. Because, when you yank those goggles off, you see that your friend is wearing no more than a T-shirt and sweatpants.
This scenario is one possible vision of the metaverse, the nebulous new digital frontier that Silicon Valley can’t stop talking about—and that the fashion world seems equally obsessed by. From Balenciaga to the witty emerging British upstart Stefan Cooke, it seems every fashion house wants to (literally) enter the space. What’s more, Silicon Valley has also been quick to embrace fashion as a cornerstone of its flashy new development: much ado was made of Mark Zuckerberg’s avatar swapping through wardrobe possibilities in the metaverse demo video that his company released in late October to announce their rebrand as “Meta.” All of which is turning two industries that have struggled to connect in a genuine way into unusually zealous collaborators.
But first (and don’t be embarrassed that you have to ask): what is the metaverse? No one can really say yet, because no one knows exactly how it will play out. “What we’re really talking about is the future of the internet,” says Cathy Hackl, the CEO (and Chief Metaverse Officer) of the consultancy Futures Intelligence Group, whom peers often call the “godmother of the metaverse.” She tells me that the first era of the internet—Web 1.0—facilitated the transmission of information, while Web 2.0 connected people, creating the sharing economy dominated by companies like Spotify and Facebook. Now, Hackl explains, “We’re at the evolution of Web 2.0, [and] we’re heading into web 3.0,” which will connect people, locations, and things. “And these people, spaces, and assets can be, sometimes, in a fully virtual synthetic environment.” She’s careful to clarify that the metaverse isn’t something that is owned by or exists on one particular platform—rather, it “is enabled by many different technologies. It’s not one technology and it’s not one company.” And while the metaverse can be experienced in virtual spaces, as what’s typically called “virtual reality,” that’s not the only way we’ll experience it.
So how is that fashion has come to play a significant part in whatever that experience winds up being? Silicon Valley, after all, is notoriously style averse. Long before he was defending Facebook before Congress, Mark Zuckerberg was defending his choice to wear the same T-shirt nearly everyday. And the industry’s plays at blending tech with fashion, like wearable devices or smart fabrics, have largely failed to gain traction, while the luxury industry has historically struggled to keep pace with the internet, adapting slowly to e-commerce.
The simplest answer, of course, is money. Most of the fashion world’s investments in the metaverse thus far have been through video game skins, which make up an estimated $40 billion a year market. For houses big and small, skins represent a relatively low-cost (and even sustainable!) way to engage the fashion-savvy gaming community and NFT holders eager to spend their currency in inventive and disruptive ways. (In other words, the fashion industry has gone from wanting to make less products at the outset of the pandemic, to figuring out a way to make no physical products at all—you can see how that might be pretty appealing.)
But there are culture shifts at play, too. Matthew Ball, the venture capitalist who worked with Facebook on their Meta concept video, put it this way. “While fashion is not the core focus of Northern California,” he writes by email, “it has always focused on what it is [that] users want to do online—and for a decade, that has mostly been to socialize. It makes sense that now that our ‘online lives’ can include 3D objects, fashion, and more, Silicon Valley focuses there.”
Iolo Edwards, the creator and a moderator of the Facebook community and Instagram page High Fashion Talk, sees the fashion world’s metaverse mania as the result of its evolution into a purveyor of values rather than products. Balenciaga, he reasons, is less associated in its fans’ minds with the superb quality of its clothing than its references and a cultural sensibility. Think of The Simpsons episode that served as the Spring 2022 show, Demna Gvasalia’s listening party projects with Kanye West, and the brand’s performance art-meets-red carpet dressing of Kim Kardashian: these are immediately legible to Balenciaga fans, but also to folks who might not buy the brand’s clothing. “For most people consuming Balenciaga, it’s [through] that intangible side of things. And when we go into the metaverse, it’s going to be that intangible. The meta clothing isn’t going to be tangible.”
Balenciaga, which partnered with Fortnite earlier this year and worked with Fortnite’s parent company Epic Games to create a video game for its Fall 2021 show, is cited by metaverse experts and fashion peers as the current leading innovator, but other brands are now announcing similar projects almost weekly. In mid-November, British designer Stefan Cooke announced his designs would be a part of The Sims. Burberry and Louis Vuitton are minting NFTs. And emerging to challenge these more traditional fashion houses are a new class of brands, like RTFKT, which issues virtual sneakers and other collectible items, and whose founders predict that their new world will disrupt the fashion industry’s long held myth of the singular genius designer. (You—yes, you!—can design and distribute the next great sneaker. RTFKT allows users to produce their products, meaning their digital objects can be made into physical ones.)
In fact, so advanced in their convergence of fashion and tech are these creators that they were woefully under-impressed with Zuckerberg’s fashion fantasia, which showed the much-maligned tech titan flipping through a paltry selection of looks to highlight how the metaverse allows users to create—and dress—a digital avatar. “It was very standard,” says Benoit Pagotto, an RTFKT cofounder. “It was like hoodies, T-shirts, a Halloween costume,” he says, adding that it was “fine for the demo.” (It seems that Meta already knew this was insufficient: several hours after debuting the video, the company tweeted at Balenciaga for advice on metaverse dressing. Balenciaga did not reply.) Pagotto’s cofounder Chris Le was less charitable: “Why are you showing standard-ass crap when you’re trying to sell the metaverse?”
The freedom from “standard-ass crap” is the reason someone like Hackl says, “I haven’t felt this excitement about fashion and technology ever.” Forget wearing a slightly different hoodie—the appeal of the metaverse, its proselytes say, is the way an avatar releases a user from physical realities. “It’s about unleashing creativity, pushing limits, right?” says Hackl. (Anecdotally, immolation seems to be a popular dream. Three different people I spoke to brought up the possibility of walking around engulfed, either partially or completely, in flames.) “Younger generations have always pushed limits. I think it’s part of embracing that rebellion: how are they expressing themselves in these virtual spaces?” Young people will always test boundaries in the physical world, she says, “but they’re also going to test those in the virtual spaces and see, what can I do? What can I build? How can I outfit my avatar, or what creator’s fashion am I going to buy that’s going to allow me to push the limits of how I express myself?” RTFKT’s cofounders even suggested that users have started making changes to their physical wardrobes and appearances to better reflect their digital avatars.
The fashion industry is also nervous about neglecting a community of future consumers. Typically, brands ignore customers outside their highly prescribed comfort zone until they are unable to—until, in other words, it’s convenient and profitable to engage with new potential customers. Fashion is an organic presence on platforms like Fortnite, where the kinds of boundary-pushing looks Hackl describes are already part of the experience. In April, for example, a creator named Lachlan staged a virtual fashion show, in which a giant sock monkey hopped on a pogo stick, a banana wore a tuxedo, and a player dressed as Guns n Roses guitarist Slash, only with a chiseled jaw and a chunky blonde bob. Balenciaga, with its September collaboration, merely stepped in to take formal advantage of that fandom.
But, Hackl contends, “Any fashion brand, any fashion house, needs to start to think about, what is their meta strategy?” Hackl says. “What does the brand become in the metaverse? What does it translate to? They will not be able to sell, they will not be able to keep their legacy status or be top of mind, if they do not engage the community that already inhabits these spaces.”
That may take less cajoling than metaverse skeptics think. Excepting Balenciaga, we might find it hard to believe that rarefied European luxury houses would associate themselves with tech nerds and gamers, but in fact, brands from Burberry to H&M are already calling on companies like Dimension Studios “to create digital humans, to create digital fashion and to present that in what is becoming known as the metaverse,” explains Dimension's managing director and cofounder Simon Windsor. Dimension worked on Balenciaga’s Afterworld show, for example, making the clothing photorealistic in its texture and color and rendering a futuristic world in which users could move the camera anywhere within the space, which “gives [Balenciaga] the ability to tell stories or bring experiences to life with complete creative freedom that traditional photography or filming wouldn't normally achieve that.” In other words, another major appeal of the metaverse is the way it enables fantasy—a word that fashion designers might be keen to embrace at this moment. More than ever, runway fashion is a conceptual, unattainable dream, the aura of which is used to push consumers towards logo hoodies, T-shirts, handbags,and sneakers. But the metaverse makes the possibility of selling their more ridiculous creations much more real, even if in digital form.
What’s more, digital (or physically theoretical, you might say) clothing is one solution to the supply chain crisis that has put the industry in another chokehold over the past six months, and to fashion’s general sustainability problem. In the metaverse, you don’t have to physically produce anything. “The way young people outfit their avatars is incredibly important to them,” Hackl says, then issues a mandate for the C-suite: “Direct-to-avatar is the new direct-to-consumer.”
But if there’s no physical object, what is it that consumers are buying? And how effective will traditional fashion marketing be in convincing audiences to shell out for digital goods? Already working in that space is RTFKT, which recently raised over $8 million in a seed funding round led by Andressen Horowitz. RTFKT already has an answer: “It’s access to the community of the brand,” Pagotto, the cofounder, says. “We’re a community-driven brand. Also, you have a piece of the company. Because if the company does great, the NFT that you bought is going to go up, so you become some kind of a shareholder and a member at the same time.” Producing less physical products also means the brand is more sustainable, Le reasons.
“It really is a culture thing,” Le insists, explaining how, during the recent NFT week in New York, Bored Ape Yacht Club hosted events that were only open to those who owned one of their NFTs. “It really is creating this whole new cool culture of—I don’t know, Benoit, is there a name for this kind of culture yet?”
“It’s NFT culture, I guess,” says Pagotto.
“It’s different from crypto culture, too,” says Le. “It’s a culture thing.”
I suggested that this small community of people who own one-offs was a bit like the heyday of couture, in which a small, international coterie of women were connected by their ownership of one-of-a-kind designs made by geniuses. But RTFKT is eager to disrupt that idea, too: “Fashion designers going in [to the industry], they’re from fashion school or whatever, but with the metaverse, it opens the door to a way wider range of creatives.” Le has a background in designing skins for video games, not clothing—“but that gives me, I feel like, an advantage over a lot of designers,” he said, “because I can think differently.” The metaverse’s impact on fashion may be less as a new uniform for schlubby tech bros, and more like a fantastical uniform for the new and flush generation of crypto investors.
“We don’t need to respect the legacy,” adds Benoit, who hails from France, where fashion is protected like a national treasure. “We make our own rules.”
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