Weekly Roundup -My thoughts on Kim Kardashian, avatars and how Skims has this NFT game all figured out
Dolce, Vogue Italia, Balmain, and one cool start-up making interesting moves to change the operations of e-commerce dramatically. All below.
Deep thoughts on the Farfetch and DressX digital gifting to influencers.
From the Farfetch influencer campaign with DressX, this is how they shot it. (reminder, they sent influencers new digital pieces from upcoming collections and had them do a social media push)
Makes me think that shapewear, first a la Skims, and secondly, a la Kim at the Met Gala, is only going further “to the moon.” If you want your digital look to really work, and look intentional, you can’t have unrelated garments peeking out underneath. Also, see Megan Fox at the VMAs or Zoe Kravitz at the Met Gala. Naked is cool.
The bidding on their NFT crown is up to almost 500k Euro! And you have to bid in ETH, holding people without technical knowledge back. Though I guess if you can afford a digital 500k crown, you can afford someone to help you buy it.
An aside, their new campaign, shot by Juergen Teller, looks metaverse appropriate anyway.
As discussed last week, Vogue Italia launched a special hub for fashion week to celebrate sustainability and digital design. With, quel surprise, some NFT outfits. The digital designs were unique and they were fashion. Somewhere between wearable and the metaverse, particularly Niccolo Pasqualetti’s top. It’s interesting ot theink about the barriers to entry for new, digital-first designers. No negotiating with factories or hassling with stores over payment terms. What does that mean for new entrants?
Fortnite Balenciaga
This is not my forte. It’s a cool brand play. Balenciaga under Demna’s reign is really innovative and fantastic at creating buzz. But this isn’t FASHION, this is branding. Avatars need clothes in the metaverse, and maybe this will drive towards this. Also, the technical limitations of dressing avatars are far less than of dressing people, which I think is a key innovation I’m waiting for. Being able to really fit a human in AR makes both social media applications more cool but also supply chain. This was all over the internet, so I’ll just assume you’ve seen the images.
ModelMe
A cool start-up announced funding this week to do just this, use digital fashion to change the supply chain. ModelMe - from their site “ModelMe generates fashion models and are on a mission to digitise the $25B global modelling market. We design algorithms based on cutting edge research in computer vision and implement them within an intuitive B2B SaaS tool. Just one uploaded image of the garment can scale to produce an infinite range of diverse on-model fashion photos.” A space to follow.
Balmain
Released a series of NFTs, one with Vogue Singapore. On fire, so to speak! Altava and Balmain The house is digitising and subsequently minting key pieces from its F/W 2021 collection. The pieces are on sale on Brytehall—a premium NFT platform developed by Media Publishares in partnership with VIDY and Binance. Vogue SGP has also run its first Vogue digital cover NFT created by the renowned artist Chad Knight and the Fabricant
