Guess what! Digital fashion will soon be all over the place. On your in-game avatar, on Zoom, or on your social media. During job interviews or during attending metaverse weddings.
Digital Fashion presents the potential for creators to enter the traditionally gated fashion industry at a fraction of the cost, from anywhere in the world; opening up a fresh and profitable ecosystem to a new class of designers and brands.
The jump from Web2 to Web3
Here are the factors we believe will contribute to a constant expansion of the web3 fashion space and open a brilliant landscape of opportunities for innovators.
Web2 or the second generation of the Internet has been about social interactions and the ability to broadcast one to many. The web3 is moving from interactive to immersive. moving from hybrid spaces such as TikTok and Twitter, to fully virtual environments such as Roblox and Fortnite. The Web3 internet will not be merely consumed, it will be interacted with.
Do you have the shoes to match?
Fashion without a footprint
The apparel industry currently generates 10% of the world’s carbon emissions, 92 million tons of textiles waste per year, and 20% of global wastewater. With this in mind, the shift to digital fashion should be a no-brainer. Web3 offers the opportunity to sell self-expression without sacrificing sustainability. If a staggering view of 25,000 plastic mannequins dumped to rot breaks your heart, Web3 may have something to offer you.
Pseudonymity as a design opportunity
In the metaverse, we don’t start as who we currently are. We begin as who we’d want to be. Pseudonymity allows identity to become relative rather than fixed. The personas which form the base of your identity are not curated from your physical life but created digitally, allowing you to self-express in entirely new ways.
People will use multiple identities just as some identities will be made up of multiple people. Pseudonymity may provide a necessary refresh in our ideological and intellectual landscape because it will separate the person from the idea. Much of our current societal problems arise because we conflate the two.
Metaverses are exploding
The wave triggered by Facebook’s rebrand to Meta to reflect their metaverse aspirations hasn’t stopped ever since. Our teenagers dance the rhymes of Fortnite in their sleep and grownups are carving their avatars for Decentraland. Goldman Sachs prices the whole metaverse economy at $8 trillion by 2030 and when big bankers clap their cutleries, the party is likely to go on.
Interoperability
This boring tech phrase means that current metaverse platforms such as Meta act as walled gardens. You cannot move your fashion items outside the platform. Right now, the majority of socialization spaces only allow digital fashion to be worn on the platform they’re bought in. This is much akin to buying a pair of jeans you can’t wear out of the store. Who’d want that?
The good news is that platforms like Decentraland are interoperable right from the start. It means what you own is truly yours. You can decide to pack your bag, take those sneakers and the crazy trumpet hat you are proud of and move onto another metaverse where avatars, ahem, people are cooler.
Women haven’t arrived yet
Most of what we see in the Web3 world at the moment, including digital fashion, is dominated by males. And we all know they are the sloppier gender when it comes to most things design. Despite this, we’ve seen commendable work, art, and aesthetics in the Web3 world, from fashion to immersive worlds. Just look at the floor price for World of Women. Wait until the women arrive.
Interesting people to watch
The web3 fashion design thrills with awesome people doing incredible stuff and their number grow by the day. We’d recommend starting familiarizing yourself with the work of The Fabricant, Artisans, Charli Cohen, RED DAO.
Ready for the next digital frontier?
What new forms of self-expression will emerge? What new tools and platforms for emerging designers will be invented? What new ways of wearing, sharing, selling, distributing? Hop onto our Discord channel and tell us what you think.
Already making big strides into the world of digital fashion and need the shoes to match? Have a look at our past NFT sneakers auction and follow Swappable on Twitter to stay updated about our future digital fashion drops.
