Who is the ultimate digital fashion customer?
I feel like I’m living in two worlds here. In one, you have the Business of Fashion and Vogue Business coverage of how the big players in fashion and beauty are approaching the metaverse.
And then you have the tech-y version, which is based on burning down those institutions.
Metaverse people talk a lot about interoperability, the idea that you can move your digital goods/avatars from one game or place to another. Right now, you can’t. To the point that those people who bought multimillion-dollar D&G digital apparel have two years to choose ONE place, e.g. Snapchat AR or Fortnite, in which they can use their million-dollar fashion NFT.
So who will be the early and early-ish adopters of digital fashion? My own head always goes to AR (augmented reality) for social media, classic influencer consumption, but showing off in an eco-conscious, tech-forward, inherently limited way. That’s the world I know. But the more I dive into this space I see limitations in the near term, mostly that Instagram has yet to truly enter the game, as compared to Snapchat, and that the technology isn’t quite there. The layering of outfits, shadows, etc.. will surely evolve quickly but for now they kind of take away from the cool aspects of a digital outfit selfie.
The next application is gaming, dressing your avatar. This is clearly a big thing ALREADY for millions of gamers around the world, and the idea that this will evolve and grow seems pretty obvious. But how much of the gaming application is more from the anarchy side of the equation. Balenciaga for Fortnite aside, non-rhetorical question, does Gen-Z care about brands.
As I listen to podcasts and interviews with people building this business there’s a dichotomy between discussing big brands and how they need to get into this world, hire a Chief Metaverse officer, etc. But then in practice, a lot of what appears to be happening on the platforms or sold is much more on the fringe, club-kid-looking wear. Which makes me wonder about the disconnect of the consumer. Do gamers care about Balenciaga? If anyone knows someone who bought Fortnite Balenciaga stuff, holler at me. I want to interview them!
There’s B2B as well, but I think it hardly needs discussing that there is TONS of waste in the fashion industry that 3d digital renderings of garments could ameliorate.
These questions link back to the theme of the newsletter last week, You can have any body in the metaverse, so everyone wants Bella Hadid’s…
Vogue Business covers a survey from Institute of Digital Fashion which essentially says that consumers interested in digital fashion want representation, like disabilities, skin tones, the gender spectrum, and body types. While I have some beef with the survey design, the questions seem particularly leading, it does seem crazy that in the metaverse you’d have to align with basic male-female gender constructs. You can be ANYTHING.
This is a pretty big revolution, and back to my original question, with this much change, how can we assume Gucci’s worth in this new space. Maybe brands won’t matter?
As a prediction, I can’t help thinking it will end up like Ready Player One. And that world has brands and beauty standards in a similar fashion to the way we have them today. So when you’re not bound by one of two genders when given a chance to use a body for your avatar, you’re picking a pretty attractive one by current beauty/fashion industry’s standards, regardless of secondary sex characteristics? I can’t wait to see what this push for representation leads us to.
Other fun links of the week.
I learned a new phrase from this Wunderman Thompson report: direct-to-avatar (D2A) - when you’re selling digital goods for within the metaverse straight to the avatar.
Red DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) and Boson Protocol are buying fashion NFTs and then are going to create shared ownership schemes. Like Rent the Runway? Maybe? What’s a DAO you ask? We may have to come back to this, but here’s a great tweet explaining it.
This VF article is a nice overview of the metaverse, which considering that for most people this concept is totally meaningless, could be useful.