Trend: Bought and worn, virtual fashion is exploding
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Digital clothes, put on by avatars but bought with real money, represent an increasingly popular market.
One day, digital fashion pioneers predict, everyone will be able to choose clothes in impossible colors or designs by wandering through huge virtual warehouses, put them on instantly, throw them on and start again. While physical parades are gradually returning to the major fashion capitals, outfits are already worn exclusively on the networks or in video games, a phenomenon driven by global confinement which could disrupt the sector.
These are futuristic clothes, commissioned from very young designers. The prices range from a few tens of euros, dollars or bitcoins, up to thousands, if the customer wishes a world exclusivity. Transactions are made with NFTs, “non-fungible tokens”. There are also clothes to dress up the “skin” of their favorite avatar. A world populated by computer-generated images, people wearing thick dark glasses, who move or gesticulate according to what presents itself in this "metaverse" (meta-universe) as in the film "Ready Player One" by Steven Spielberg (2018 ).
No CO₂ emissions
“We create in the total absence of the physical. Fashion is above all an experience. We don't necessarily need to physically feel the emotion of wearing fabulous clothes,” says Michaela Larosse, spokesperson for Dutch start-up The Manufacturer. With around twenty graphic artists and designers, The Manufacturer started creating digital clothing in 2018. But it was with the pandemic that its turnover “exploded”, she specifies.
The Manufacturer works with Puma or Tommy Hilfiger to design their clothes in 3D, which helps reduce production costs. But his proposal goes further and goes through the “metaverse”, which is “a collection of virtual universes”, explains Michaela Larosse.
Equipped with his virtual identity and his glasses, the customer will be able to speak with advisers, also virtual, to buy and resell his clothes to another consumer. We help the client to express themselves without using raw materials or emitting CO2. “If you choose to go naked, then that's fine. You can choose light clothing or a smoke hat”. A proposal that has everything to seduce “the under 20s who do not remember the non-digital world”.
Balenciaga in Fortnite
Three major luxury brands interviewed during Paris Fashion Week about plans in the "metaverse" declined to comment. However, these plans exist. Like Balenciaga, which forayed into the popular video game Fortnite, offering clothing and sneakers to more than 250 million players. But Jean Paul Gaultier who had been a pioneer in several aspects of fashion says that this does not interest him.
"I'm from another era and happy with my very tactile adventure with the actual garment," he says. "I don't watch video games, I couldn't have created this." But for art historian Miren Arzalluz, director of the Palais Galliera, Paris Fashion Museum, the trend is “extraordinary”.
The earliest would be best
"Digital offers a wonderful opportunity to imagine fashion and live a moment differently," she says. The DressX app, founded a year ago in San Francisco, offers hundreds of digital dresses, jewelry and artwork, for less than ten dollars a month, in line with companies like Spotify or Netflix.
There are problems to solve, in particular of accounting, underlines one of the two founders, Natalia Modenova, but it is the future. "It's like the beginning of the Internet: some brands were hesitant to put their products on sale online," recalls co-founder Daria Shapovalova. But “the sooner you position yourself, the better”.
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