TOP 10 METAVERSE FASHION NEWS OF THE WEEK 01.22.23
Digital fashion event during London Fashion Week 2023.
Presented by Digital Fashion Week NY and MAD Global, hosted by Epic Games
Partners of the Metaverse Fashion Council - Digital Fashion Week NY and MAD Global are teaming up to host the Digital Fashion Week, a two-day phygital fashion event providing tangible and immaterial experiences that connect fashion to people, and people to fashion in a new and exciting way during London's Fashion Week in February 2023.
It will be held at Epic Games' Innovation Lab in Fitzrovia, London, which is a hub for the creative community and offers creators the ability to produce real-time content and immersive virtual experiences using the Unreal Engine software. The space features a new curved LED volume using Brompton Technology as a testament for Epic Games to empower new ways for content creation using the latest technology advance as well as a mix of traditional and LED lighting.
Metaverse Fashion Council member Berlin-based startup yoona.ai (Techstars ´21) has just concluded the first successful week of its revolutionary digital event, The Berlin Metaverse®. Held from January 16th to 20th, the event brought together experts in fashion, tech professionals, and interested parties to discuss the future of fashion in relation to technology, digitization, and sustainability.
"TheBerlinMetaverse® is an example of how events like this are crucial in considering new advancements made by industry leaders and newcomers alike, especially those relying on technological advances.” says Anna Franziska Michel, founder of yoona.ai (Techstars ´21)
Attendees were able to interact with fashion brands, view immersive digital fashion showrooms and collections, and learn about the latest developments in the industry through case studies and inspiring panels and talks.
Throughout the five-day event, attendees expressed enthusiasm for the potential of technology to improve the sustainability of the fashion industry through digital solutions. Networking opportunities were also plentiful, as attendees exchanged ideas on the possibilities of technology in the industry and formed valuable connections.
Yoona.ai's innovative "phygital" concept, which combines physical and digital elements to create an immersive shopping experience, was a highlight of the event.
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L'Oréal beauty brand NYX Professional Makeup announced GORJS, the world’s first beauty decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) and limited-edition FKWME Pass NFT collection.
The FKWME Pass NFT is the key to joining the GORJS DAO and getting early access to all the work that GORJS creators will soon bring to life.
There are 1,000 FKWME Pass whose benefits include early access to GORJS-participating creators’ NFT projects with a spot in the allowlist. There will be 400 GORJS tokens claimable post-mint for immediate governance upon voting systems launch.
The allowlist registration began yesterday and will close on January 30th. The allowlist winners will be able to mint the FKWME Pass starting on January 31st and the general sale begins on February 1st.
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Curated by Clare Tattersall, founder of the Digital Fashion Week NY, advisory board member of the Metaverse Fashion Counci annonces a two-day phygital fashion event providing tangible and immaterial experiences that connect fashion to people, and people to fashion in a new and exciting way during New York’s Fashion Week in February 2023.
The Web3 3.0 event will provide information, inspiration, and networking opportunities, as well as deep discussions and immersive phygital experiences. The event will give designers from around the world the chance to showcase their designs and services to a global audience. The event will feature panel discussions, presentations, and a curated digital fashion show and immersive experiences from leading digital artists.
⛱ Thursday, 9th February 11a-4p EST
IRL Networking and speaker event followed by a cocktail reception.
NYC
🩻 Friday, 10th February 11a-5p EST
URL Virtual panel discussions with global leaders in the fashion technology industry.
A curated panel discussion to address critical issues in the fashion industry and offer expert solutions to questions about the future of fashion.
🩺 Saturday, 11th February | 2p-7p
IRL Animation screening from 2 to 4pm followed by a phygital fashion show and experiences including Virtual Try-on, XR, VR, AR, Metaverse Experience and NFT drop.
🪬 Tickets: https://lnkd.in/g4F5xMDU
Location: Exclusive location to be revealed.
🎊 DESIGNERS:
Anastasia Sladkova - Eyenastya Angelescu Designs BETH LI Clo B Yoann De Geetere Edvard Nielsen Eliz Gener Estelle Pearce Maya ES Mayam.space Nicole Holtan The Immersive Kind Up Cos x Tokyo White SHIU-HUEI (Erika) WANG Svitlana Volkova Anthony Murray Vous Metaverse Creative Collective Zoha Khan
⛲️ PURE DIGITAL:
Bee Davies Dragana Todorović Edvard Nielsen EFSA Team Estelle Pearce Ilona Song Kamala Atakishiyeva Lorena Bello Ávila Maya ES MERCURY DASHA Metaneon Narina Gasparova Nina Ibañez Orthodoxx Renata Rakossy Shiu Studio Teodora Kuzeva ZeroSixOne (featured designer)
🛡 Phygital DESIGNERS:
Right Direction DOPE Universe The MOS brand Sylvia Heisel
Panels and Speakers
Moderator — Coy Griffin
David Giordano: Brand Builder -- Brand New Vision
Maxim Raykhrud: CPO: ZERO10
How do we create mass adoption of digital assets from a consumer stand point?
Moderator— Pavan Bahl: UNRVLD
Sasha Tityanko: CEO Sensorium
Jessica Quillin: Content Strategist: Its a Working Title
Fashion Show in the Metaverse. What does it mean for the future of models, beauty and body image?
AI: What is it and what do we need to know
Fireside chat:
James Joseph: CyberMagazine
David Stamatis – FTRworld
Virtual personalities. What is the future of social engagement, data and our wallets?
— Moderator— Pavan Bahl: UNRVLD
Allie Burger: Etta
Digital Fashion Week NY
DFWNY is the lens through which we can see the future of the fashion industry. A hybrid fashion show and immersive exhibition, DFWNY explores the shifting realities of fashion as seen through the optics of IRL X URL. By juxtaposing new technology with top fashion designers, the show explores innovative ways of wearing, interacting with and discussing fashion.
Contact:
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David Baszucki, founder and CEO of Roblox
"2022 was a great year for Roblox. We are optimistically driving our vision to reimagine the way people come together, and we’re realizing it by enabling deeper forms of expression, communication, and immersion.
The investments we are making to expand the engagement of Roblox across geographies and age groups are paying off. Our community grew by 23% this year to more than 56 million daily global users. And our users spent over 49.3 billion hours coming together to create, play, explore, learn, and connect. Today, more than half of the people on Roblox are 13 and older, demonstrating our platform’s appeal to a broad range of audiences.
Innovation and improvements across every aspect of Roblox played a key role in driving our growth. Here are some of our major accomplishments from 2022.
📍 Enabling Self-Expression and Connection
With the launch of Layered Clothing, we continued to empower people to express themselves and their identity creatively. This feature enables clothing and accessories to fit any avatar body type. Items like shirts, dresses, sweaters, jackets, and pants are now worn in layers and copy the way apparel fits and drapes on individuals in the real world. This provides our community with the power to create never-before-seen clothing and accessory types. Users can mix and match an incredible range of body styles and outfits, taking avatar customization possibilities to the next level. Since launch, we have seen over 115 million people own a layered clothing item.
We also continued to expand the quality and immersion of social interactions on Roblox. Now, people verified as ages 13 and older can use Chat with their voice to speak aloud with one another. "
Recommended by LinkedIn
📌 Expanding Creator Opportunities
Other important innovations were focused on accelerating our vision of making creation accessible to everyone on Roblox. We’re building tools so anyone from new creators to big development studios can bring their creations to fruition.
In 2022, our community visited more than 15 million experiences on the platform, and developers and creators published more than 15,000 experiences every single day. To support this creation flywheel, we made advancements to Roblox Studio, our free development software for building and publishing 3D content."
🎢 Evolving our Virtual Economy
In 2022, our Economy team achieved an important milestone: more than 90% of items published in Marketplace are now made by creators, getting us even closer to the point where all content within Roblox is fully user-generated. We’re continuing to improve user discovery in Marketplace, so people can find items they want in a way that will redefine the user journey."
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💎 Jillian Godsil, MA, BA (hons), Metaverse Fashion Council advisory board member for Cointelegraph
"2022 was the year the wheels fell off the metaverse bandwagon, which had been the most hyped narrative as the year began. By far the worst-performing sector in blockchain, the average drawdown was 89%."
"📯 BORGET Sebastien, chief operations officer and co-founder of The Sandbox, has been on the road a lot lately visiting the company’s new offices. He speaks from Argentina when we talk just before Christmas about the performance of metaverse platforms in 2022.
Many pundits say it’s been a mixed year at best for adoption, pointing to DappRadar statistics that appeared to indicate daily average visitors to The Sandbox were as low as 500, with just 50 people wandering about Decentraland. However, both companies actively pushed back on these stats, claiming the figures only reflected the number of daily users who made a transaction — not the number of daily visitors overall.
🦄 Can metaverse replace the real world?
Upland Software, also founded four years ago, is a virtual property trading game mapped to the real world on the EOS blockchain platform and is often described as Monopoly on the blockchain. The Sandbox and Upland are both parts of the Open Metaverse Alliance, which is chaired by Upland co-founder and CEO Dirk Lueth.
“When we founded Upland in 2018, very few people had even heard of the word ‘metaverse,’” says Lueth, noting that these days, “the future is at least envisioned — I’d call that progress.”
🛳 Digital goods as the killer app
Alien Worlds is an NFT-driven game in which users collect and trade unique digital items minted primarily on the Wax blockchain. Players compete to earn Alien Worlds’ in-game token, Trilium (TLM), which is needed to control one of the six rival DAOs.
Marja Konttinen, marketing director of the Decentraland Foundation, puts forward a compelling case for digital ownership in a different context: fashion. Decentraland is a 3D virtual world browser-based platform that opened to the public in February 2020.
🚁 Play-to-earn builds the metaverse
The other important development bringing us closer to the metaverse is the play-to-earn phenomenon spear-headed by the blockchain game Axie Infinity. The huge growth during the pandemic, and subsequent sharp decline after, did not dampen the enthusiasm of Yield Guild Games (YGG) for the sector.
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by Anastasiia Komarnytska, Metaverse Fashion Council advisor board member
"I have spent half of my marketing career working with corporate sharks and the other half working with tech startups. Both teams can generate brilliant ideas and products based on experience and internal drive.
The world of fashion is constantly evolving, and we have seen how big fashion names like Prada, Gucci, Nike, Off-White, Rolex, and Adidas have begun to heavily incorporate web3 technology in 2022, mostly by showcasing unique digital art and wearables.
Web3 technology is used to create virtual fashion shows, allowing customers to interact with the clothes in a digital environment. This greatly increases the reach of fashion shows, making them accessible to people all over the world.
Another potential use for web3 in fashion is the use of digital collectibles. These digital assets can be used to represent ownership of physical garments and can be bought, sold, and traded on the blockchain.
The value of the metaverse industry is projected to hit about $13 trillion by 2030, with fashion and luxury retail representing $50 billion, a study from Chalhoub Group shows."
"Startups have the advantage of being able to enter the market rapidly. Their ability to swiftly develop and introduce not only products but also marketing strategies can be intimidating to established companies. Furthermore, startups typically foster a culture that promotes a growth mindset, which drives their teams to continually innovate, overcome challenges, and find opportunities for expansion.
That's what we need in a decentralized web today.
To quote Filippo Chisari, Web3 Strategic Advisor “Brands are starting to experiment with customer-facing use cases of blockchain, and the next phase would be using the technology to improve business processes.” And here startups can help us with this next phase. They have a more prominent inclination toward problem-solving compared to their archaic corporate counterparts (no offense here:)"
We know that web3 marketing and communication are different but the tools we have are still limited. “Storytelling is a powerful communication tool but we are lacking it in the web3/blockchain space. We need to deliver a simple, understandable story to shape public perception", comments Costantino Roselli, Founder & CEO at digital luxury fashion studio NTZNS. It is time to revolutionize advertising and marketing ecosystems with new platforms.
The best way to start a web3 fashion startup is to start small and build from there. This means starting with a small pilot project that allows you to test your ideas and see what works and what doesn't. You can then use this pilot project to raise funding and build a larger, more sustainable startup."
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"With a Series A round led by Alexis Ohanian Sr.’s 776 Capital , SYKY is building out its team and unveiling the first part of its strategy: membership NFTs with 50 granted to emerging designers.
SYKY, the digital fashion startup founded by Ralph Lauren’s former chief digital officer Alice Delahunt, has raised $9.5 million in a series A funding round led by Reddit, Inc. co-founder Alexis Ohanian Sr.’s VC firm Seven Seven Six. Brevan Howard Digital, Leadout Capital, First Light Capital and Polygon Ventures Group also participated in the round. Delahunt says Syky (pronounced “psyche”) is using the funding to build out its leadership team, as it begins incubating aspiring designers. The funding is a bet on luxury veteran Delahunt’s vision for digital fashion at a time when crypto funding has shrunken for many in the space.
“Alice is the perfect example of ‘founder-market fit’; she was ahead of everyone in pioneering digital fashion initiatives at Burberry and Ralph Lauren and now she is bringing her unique talents and foresight to Web3,” says Colleen Sullivan, co-head of ventures at Brevan Howard Digital, the crypto and digital asset division of the hedge fund management firm. She adds that Syky is building a “visually appealing experience that is inherently social, sustainable, and open to anyone in the world with an internet connection”.
New hires have already joined the company: Delahunt has recruited Roxanne Barretto Iyer as COO (who worked with Delahunt at Ralph Lauren and was more recently at The Estée Lauder Companies Inc.); Jonathan Bennett as CTO (who worked with Delahunt at Burberry); and Rachel Crowther as creative director (also from Burberry). It is also working with creative agency Frosty.
Syky launched in November 2022 as a blockchain-based platform designed to bridge the ongoing divide between emerging digital fashion talent, the mainstream fashion industry and consumers. Its business model is three-pronged, focusing on community for Web3 and fashion; a collective for next-gen designers to showcase their work; and a platform for people to buy, sell and trade their collections."
“We believe in Alice’s vision to build the leading fashion platform and community for the next generation of designers and consumers,” Alexis Ohanian Sr. says of the SYKY investment, adding that there is “limitless potential” in Web3. “The ideals of fashion can bring to bear the best virtues of an open internet and creative expression. With culture so greatly influenced by the runway, digital fashion will expand opportunities for creatives and consumers.”
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Fashion brands including Gucci are getting comfortable on the platform, with celebrity partnerships driving engagement and fanfare.
"Roblox strategies are maturing as fashion brands get comfortable. Strategies vary, but one common finding among brands such as Tommy Hilfiger, Carolina Herrera and Gucci is that celebrity partners attract visitors and, often, purchases of in-game apparel and accessories. Celebrity appeal is helping brands on Roblox win favour among its almost 60 million global daily active users, 60 per cent of whom are Gen Z, according to the company.
As more brands invest in Roblox, its maturity is following a path that is not unlike Instagram 10 years ago — it’s now on its way to becoming table stakes and can lift both brand engagement and sales. The focus is on building communities and driving revenue. Just like brands saw during the evolution of Web2 and social media platforms, merely appearing in Roblox is no longer novel, says Samuel Jordan, a leading Roblox fashion designer who has made millions selling assets as “Builder Boy” and partnered with brands including Stella McCartney and Burberry. Now, he says, the focus is less on the fact that brands exist on Roblox, but rather on what they are doing that is unique.
“It used to be that a brand comes and every outlet covers it. Now, it's more specialty and what is unique that is happening? Brands are wanting to do what is first or new,” he says."
"In recent months, people could pay to play the character of race car driver Lando Norris in McLaren’s Formula 1 Racing experience; and basketball star LeBron James coached players in Nikeland. Gucci brought Miley Cyrus into the metaverse; Carolina Herrera worked with Karlie Kloss to digitise a runway gown; Dundas harnessed a Met Gala moment to sell thousands of digital crowns; and Tommy Hilfiger tapped virtual celebrities from SUPERPLASTIC® to sport runway looks. Pop singer Zara Larsson made more than a million dollars selling virtual merch after seven months on Roblox."
Brands and creators have a range of options. They can create their own worlds and partner with celebrities to create avatars to appear in them; they can also create and sell digital assets within their worlds or sell standalone items within Roblox’s avatar marketplace. They earn a larger percentage of the revenue (70 per cent) when they sell within their own experiences, but tend to get more promotion for the items if they sell in the Avatar Store (where they keep 30 per cent). Items can be limited edition in terms of quantity or time sold. These “limiteds” often drive up engagement, repeat visits and peer-to-peer resale value on the secondary market.
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"Maison Valentino Jumps Onto Fashion’s Booming Artificial Intelligence Trend For Latest Campaign
What Happened: Italian fashion house Maison Valentino has harnessed the power of Web3 technology for its latest campaign. To unveil its new “Essential” line of luxury staples, the brand shot its collection entirely through artificial intelligence as a way of exploring the relationship between AI and fashion, and bringing this new hybrid world to light.
The Verdict: The first couple of weeks of this year alone have seen a boom in the popularity of AI. Global creatives are using the technology to explore the possibilities of unique collaborations, conceptual designs, and boundary-pushing ideas. As a result, artificial intelligence is set to be a major trend for 2023 in luxury fashion. Valentino’s latest project is only the beginning."
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🌚 Navigating an unreliable crypto market
Crypto investments mean channeling money into a highly volatile market, while new technology is hard to grasp and integrate into people’s everyday routines. Pair this with unclear value, and it’s evident why NFTs have experienced a slump in popularity.
Metaverse Producer at Decentraland and Head of Metaverse Fashion Week Dr. Giovanna Graziosi Casimiro believes that blockchain’s reinvention following its crash can lead to a stronger market in the long run. “The blockchain world is also passing through phases of adjustment and consolidating its core values,” she outlines. “For me, the crash of a sector is the opportunity to reevaluate and look back to the ones who came before us and shaped the basis of what we are building.”
🎊 Releasing drops in a time of recession and market controversy
“The current market conditions definitely pose a challenge for brands that are launching NFTs in 2023, but I still think several brands will continue to power through with experimentation, activations and Web3 community development,” Founder and Chief Metaverse Officer of consultancy firm Journey Cathy Hackl says. To encourage consumers to invest, even during times of economic crisis, labels need to consider making the purchasing process as seamless as possible.
⛲️ NFTs hold huge opportunities for growth, but brands need to ensure that they’re executing the trend right
Big names have flocked to solidify their status in Web3. But lack of technological understanding and lax strategies mean that many efforts fail to make an impact. NYFW’s NFT keys hailed exciting prospects for the fashion community, but many of the holders were denied access to areas they were initially promised. RTFKT’s latest drop also came under fire due to disappointing US-based restrictions and unexpected costs, leaving buyers confused in the process.
💥 Does the future of NFTs look bright?
“In 2023 we will see fashion and Web3 get even closer despite the current market, but with a focus on community, loyalty, co-creation, and not on crypto,” Cathy Hackl says. “As the industry’s use of Web3 tools matures, so does the understanding that for many brands this is a longer term play and not just a marketing activation.”
The metaverse and fashion hold colossal potential. But cultural changes as big as Web3 need time to gain momentum. Now, it’s down to brands to prove that the digital world, and NFTs, are here to stay.
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Interesting, Thanks for Sharing! 😃
Great round up. Thank you so much for the mention!! I greatly appreciate the support of this amazing community.
Technology & Growth Advisor to Global Fashion industry in 50+ countries for 39 years | AI for Fashion & Apparel
1y👍