The Clumsy Theatrics of Metaverse Fashion Week
The metaverse comes for every industry eventually, but fashion is more ready for it than most.
That's because the logic of the non-fungible token (NFT) market is already informed by the logic of the fashion market. You can see it most clearly in streetwear: Before NFT drops, there were sneaker drops – limited edition releases positioned more as collector's items than everyday apparel. Even more so than with a rare run of vinyl LPs, or a set of original prints from a visual artist, you're supposed to flip those grails, those Jordans, those Red Octobers. The secondary markets are the point.
So it should hardly come as a surprise that dozens of high-profile fashion brands piled into something called "Metaverse Fashion Week" – essentially an online-only convention for clothing companies and crypto devotees – as an excuse to peddle digital collectibles.
Over a period of four days (don't let the word "week" fool you), Metaverse Fashion Week played host to a series of virtual catwalks, cocktail parties, gallery openings and DJ sets; Perry Ellis, Dolce & Gabbana, Phillipp Plein and Tommy Hilfiger were among the featured designers, all of which were promoting their own digital fashion lines.
It all happened on a metaverse platform called Decentraland, which is like a buggier version of the online social space Second Life; on a tech level, it's reminiscent of early 2000s Runescape, the fantasy role-playing game – a clunky take on an embodied chatroom.
Decentraland also comes with its own token, MANA, which players can use to purchase in-game outfits for their avatars in the form of NFTs or plots of digital land. If you want to interact at all with the platform's native economy, you'll need to shell out real dollars for these tokens (or earn them on the platform).
The market capitalization of MANA is now over $4 billion, despite the fact that Decentraland can only host 2,500 users at a time, per the tech blog New World Notes.
There were just around 1,000 people online when I logged in this weekend, split across servers (Decentraland calls them "realms"). As with massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG) like World of Warcraft, different servers host identical copies of the game, with different sets of players. It's a way of reducing stress on the network; if you want to meet up with your friends in the virtual world, you'll all need to be on the same server.
At a "Metaverse Cocktail Hour for Fashionistxs," hosted by Cash Labs, it was abundantly clear who had MANA and who didn't. My avatar was dressed plainly, with a default hairstyle and a default black turtleneck. Users with fancier gear – massive sets of wings, bear costumes, swarms of digital butterflies – stole the spotlight.
Read the full article here.
–Will Gottsegen
EmoticonEmoticon