Digital Clothing & The Metaverse: Fashion’s Friend of Foe?
Written By Yasmin Kian
Over the years, the fashion industry has developed a rebuked reputation for being resistant to change, particularly toward social and technological advances. Yet, in a reconsideration that extends style into computerized realms, the industry has surprisingly expressed great interest in investing in the evolving digital clothing space, and more broadly, the Metaverse. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who famously renamed his company Meta in October 2021, has called the Metaverse “the next chapter for the Internet”, one that pushes the boundaries of the digital world past a 2D display to weld virtual and physical reality into one.
In March of 2021, virtual sneaker brand RTFKT Studios released a line of virtual sneakers in collaboration with obscure 18-year-old digital artist FEWOCiOUS. The launch became massively successful, garnering $3.1 million USD in as little as seven minutes, a testament to the desirability and value of digital assets and Meta’s ability to abundantly compensate artists through blockchain technology.
This past March, Decentraland, a virtual reality platform for digital experiences and assets, hosted Metaverse Fashion Week and managed to host some of the biggest names in fashion including Dolce Gabbana and Tommy Hilfiger.
Online couture collective Net-A-Porter also recently confirmed a stake in an offshoot of the digital fashion movement through digital ID platform Eon which seeks to turn physical products into digital assets through the assignment of unique digital IDs.
These landmark developments in digital fashion point to the same question: is the Metaverse a subculture, the future of fashion, or both? Moreover, what do they imply about the lifespan of physical fashion on a planet with increasingly limited resources?
The Michigan Fashion Media Summit recently hosted a conversation called “The Evolution of Digital Fashion” as part of its annual fashion-business summit. The conversation was led by Francine Ballard, founder and CEO at MetaGolden, and Marc Beckman, professor at NYU Stern and CEO of DMA United. Both speakers are currently working in the digital fashion space and collectively predicted that the Metaverse will play a more significant role in fashion and daily life as the technology continues to advance. Ballard extended this prediction by positing that one day people will wear plain clothing in the real world, in which they realistically can only interact with a couple dozen people a day, and will save their most flamboyant, expressive looks for the digital world, where they will have the power to be seen by a greater number of people.
This idea of wearing fashion to “be seen” seems to form the core of one of rising Meta fashion software DressX’s many value propositions: to eliminate clothing waste by enabling users to digitally buy into trends, showcase the trendy clothing piece on social media, and then embrace the next set of trends without having produced any clothing waste. This certainly sounds appealing given that the U.S. alone “throws away up to 11.3 million tons of textile waste each year” according to Bloomberg. However, many sustainability advocates question the validity of Meta fashion’s green claims, pointing to the massive amounts of energy that Ethereum transactions consume (for context, a single ETH transaction requires a sum of energy equivalent to what the average U.S. household uses in 4.38 days).
Other skeptics argue that the art of fashion is tied to the act of turning digital or handrawn clothing renderings into physical products. Without involving seamstresses and physical fabrics, does the rise of the Metaverse implicate the imminent death of this art form?
Either way, digital fashion is likely here to stay. Couture brands like Prada and Louis Vuitton have clambered to get involved, and wealthy fashion fiends around the globe have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in exclusive digital drops. One thing is for certain: contrary to what proponents of the Metaverse promise, digital assets, including digital fashion, won’t change the way capitalism functions; rather, they’re pixelated extensions of a very familiar system.
Sources:
https://hypebeast.com/2021/3/rtfkt-studios-fewocious-sale-nfts
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-fashion-industry-environmental-impact/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBZ6Bd0LDjs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36VYNLOeNV8