Obviously a predictions post
Who can resist?
Forgive me, I had to. With an industry changing this quickly, it seems pretty silly to even guess who will be doing what in the coming year, but it’s a fun exercise nonetheless.
In the traditional luxury (digital!) market, Gucci continues to win the metaverse race. Big budgets and big splashes. I expect to see them continue on this path, but many of the other big-name Euro houses will enter the arena as well.
This plays into my next prediction- luxury continues to evolve for Gen Z. What is luxury when the planet is burning? EVERYTHING has been done before it seems, we’re often stuck at home, we’re definitely buying our clothes at home. Not sure I should be using “we,” I’m definitely NOT Gen-Z. What are ownership and tribe-signaling going to look like for this generation? Ok, this wasn’t a prediction, more of a question. The unbundling of influence created by social media and furthered by decentralized finance will eventually lead to a rebundling along some, as-yet-undetermined, lines.
Does anything go green? My love for the supply chain implications of Web3 Fashion is well known to anyone reading this blog since its inception. But … I haven’t seen the use cases come to fruition (I could be wrong, maybe it’s all under the radar, and the financial savings are SO BIG no one wants to do a press release for fear of losing their market edge? Maybe?)
Fancy metaverse shopping destinations start to pop up. Artful installations where you can see the clothing, maybe try it on, be immersed in the brand and the looks. Like what Rebecca Minkoff tried to do or Ralph Lauren in Roblox, but on a grander, more commerce-focused scale. Perhaps even staffed so you can ask questions? I think of my favorite fashion Instagram account, Amy Smilovic of Tibi, whose take on DTC distribution and the role of salespeople in helping individual shoppers feel amazing in their Tibi purchases is one, lovely, and two, in an Amazon world, fairly revolutionary. Not so much a prediction but a wish that we could get some of this magic in the metaverse. I think it’ll be 2023 before we see a multi-brand department store with more prominent names come to life, but I’d love to see that happen as well.
I’m certainly not the only one to say this, but we need to see Web3 become more user-friendly to see real adoption. And the reason I want to see real adoption is that it will fund and drive amazing creativity in the fashion (and a bajillion other) spaces. The lift on consumers to buy and use fashion NFTs is too high, and the design talent required is too technical currently to capture all of the creativity in the fashion space. This will undoubtedly change. Will Central St. Martin’s offer a digital fashion course? I certainly hope so.
Kardashians enter the chat! They must. And I am, as they say, here for it.
Mommies enter the chat. We all know that the idea of gamers as teenage boys is just the tip of the iceberg and the millions of middle-ish aged women who drove that farm animal game to such great heights on Facebook are a force to be reckoned with. Will the mommies enter the metaverse this year? I don’t see any inklings of this, but I think brands/games/worlds would be remiss not to find a way to capture the attention of millennial women.
Instagram enters the chat? Another one of my bugbears, why Instagram seems largely left out of AR fashion. Surely this will change in 2022.
Every reader of this newsletter will buy an NFT. For sure.
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