Metaverse Fashion Week: the hits and misses

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Decentraland’s Metaverse Fashion Week received far more industry attention than any previous digital fashion event.

His arrival was timely, even gross exaggeration, as the metaverse and NFTs move into the popular lexicon. Virtual real estate platform Decentraland took the opportunity to recruit fashion brands and fans on its blockchain-based platform for the four-day event. The verdict so far? Mixed and possibly premature, but in terms of emotion and eyes, a success, according to metaverse brands and consultants.

“It’s just the beginning. We need to take it one step at a time,” says Giovanna Graziosi Casimiro, director of Metaverse Fashion Week (MVFW). As browsers and computers become more powerful, she adds, quality will improve and resemble more to the results that the fashion community often expects. In general, says Casimiro, the feedback from the participating brands is that they are happy with the result; the organizers are already planning to take what they learned from the first iteration and apply it to the next event, which is scheduled for a year from now.

The fashion-focused series of events, which ended on Sunday, attracted a wide variety of brands and creatives, including Etro, Dundas, Dolce & Gabbana and Estée Lauder. Still, some notable players in the metaverse, including Gucci and Ralph Lauren, did not participate. The entire experience was based on blockchain, created on land sold as NFTs and digital fashion bought and worn as NFTs.

It’s just the beginning. We have to take it one step at a time.”

For some, especially those who have been developing digital fashion for years, it was too early to broadcast a blockchain-based fashion event and too late to position it as the best that digital fashion technology can do, according to other high-profile examples. projects On LinkedIn, the digital fashion community exchanged notes: “The user experience could use some improvement to facilitate mass adoption,” wrote Anne-Christine Polet, who led PVH’s 3D initiatives before starting Hatch and Stitch. “The future feels like the past,” said Kerry Murphy, co-founder of digital fashion house The Fabricant, which created the first NFT dress ever sold. But, she added, while the user experience is “from the ’90s,” development is accelerating and will be better next year.

Based on feedback from other attendees, the graphics were rudimentary compared to previous digital fashion events, such as the Fabric of Reality show in 2020 or Gucci’s Roblox Garden in 2021, and the experience was often compromised by glitches, including delays. massive or events that turned into black screens of code, which sometimes made it difficult to experience planned events. It was also difficult to visualize engagement, as when Decentraland becomes full it automatically places visitors into multiple different arenas.

Source: www.voguebusiness.com