Metaverse Fashion Week to return next year

The second iteration in late March will bridge Decentraland with other virtual worlds, with a focus on digital-physical crossovers and more support for brands.
Metaverse Fashion Week to return next year
Photo: Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images

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Metaverse Fashion Week (MVFW), an all-digital series of fashion experiences on virtual real estate platform Decentraland, is returning for its second run on 28-31 March, this time armed with the learnings from the first edition to help brands make better use of the all-virtual moment. 

Key additions to the 2023 event include physical-digital bridges, support for brands, and, perhaps most notably, interoperability between virtual worlds. For the first time, MVFW will enable digital collections to migrate between other digital platforms; in addition to Decentraland, designers can also appear in the Spatial and Over metaverses, similar to how fashion month spans various governing bodies, venues and cities. Additionally, digital twins will bring new utility.

Decentraland is a blockchain-based, decentralised, virtual social world in which people can buy plots of land and digital goods as NFTs. The all-digital space hosts events and permanent spaces, and visitors can explore as guests or by connecting their crypto wallets and customising their avatars with digital clothing and more, all sold as NFTs. For the inaugural MVFW, held on Decentraland in March 2022, participating brands included Etro, Dundas, Paco Rabanne, Selfridges, Tommy Hilfiger, Guo Pei, Dolce & Gabbana, Philipp Plein, Hogan and Esteé Lauder, in addition to digital startups including D-Cave (from OTB Group’s Stefano Rosso) and Auroboros. Organisers reported more than 108,000 guests and distribution of more than 165,000 wearables. 

Last year's Metaverse Fashion Week participants included Dundas, Dolce & Gabbana and Estée Lauder.

Photo: Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images

“The biggest learning was creating more time for brands to develop their ideas and creating a more sustainable business model to distribute the responsibility among more studios already working with brands, rather than trying to do something from scratch,” says Giovanna Graziosi Casimiro, head of MVFW.

Participants for MVFW23, which is themed “Future Heritage”, will be announced in January, and Decentraland has built an advisory board to select participating designers; representatives include the Institute of Digital Fashion, Fashion3 by Mad Global, House of Web3 and The Fabricant; and luxury NFT marketplace UNXD will return as a co-creator. Miami Fashion Week, which is recognised by the Council of Fashion Designers of America, will participate with a special experience and runway shows in the Luxury Fashion District. 

An official MVFW supermodel, DCL community member Tangpoko, will be the main model this season, and the season two winner of HBO Max series The Hype, Barth, will present a runway show and wearable collection.

Other confirmed players are those that support the event’s infrastructure. Decentralised commerce protocol Boson Protocol will enable brands to NFTs that can be traded, held, gifted or redeemed for a physical item; DressX will help brands offer augmented-reality capabilities; Tokens.com subsidiary Metaverse Group will return to host the luxury portion of the show in its Luxury Fashion District; Phygicode will help in hybrid solutions; 3D asset creators Threedium will return (and operate their own luxury mall); and David Cash’s Cash Labs will produce experiences.

Last season, D&G developed linked NFT wearables from its 20-look MVFW22 digital collection. NFT holders of this inaugural collection will have access to future D&G airdrops. Tangpoko — the DCL community member who will be the main model this season — created the imagery. 

Photo: Courtesy of Tangpoko

The first Metaverse Fashion Week was the first of its kind and drew unprecedented interest from the traditional fashion community. But technical limitations dimmed the experience; there were issues with graphics and glitches, in part due to limits in computing power. By having a collective event, brands shared both the risks and rewards of blockchain-based metaverse experimentation (which is partly why brands with larger budgets and expertise, such as Nike, Adidas and Gucci, watched from the sidelines).

This year, organisers hope to provide brands more time to develop, more infrastructure for successful executions and hope to enjoy a year’s worth of knowledge-sharing. Still, fashion tends to be a sceptical, impatient crowd, so the pressure is on to build.

Casimiro says that by expanding into other metaverse platforms, brands aren’t limited to one specific visual narrative. Brands can even connect their own metaverses. We need to diversify the discussion and expand the aesthetics. If metaverses want to survive, they need to look into what brands need today and tell their story in a more adaptive way.” Plus, she adds, fashion offers an excellent metaverse use case. “We don’t all want to look like dull copies of the same avatar in our digital lives … we all want to individualise and curate the personal aesthetics that we are recognised for.” 

Decentraland is offering development tools to create wearables and emotes (avatar movements) and introducing “MVFW Neo”, an initiative to support emerging designers, both digitally native and physical. This follows on from Casimiro’s commitment to offering more educational workshops to help brands understand how to sell wearables and customise their spaces. Brands can also “rent” land for a fixed period of time.

Last year’s MVFW was an experiment, as Dundas co-founder Evangelo Bousis told Vogue Business at the time. It was a first foray for many key fashion players, and Decentraland visits spiked throughout the week in comparison to weekly average figures. The second iteration offers a chance to combine realistic expectations with an improved user journey. 

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Previewing Metaverse Fashion Week: Digital fashion’s big experiment

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