The world is beginning to embrace the concept of the metaverse. It is the future of the internet and includes shared virtual spaces that users can exist in perpetually. The cutting-edge fashion world is pioneering cryptocurrency, blockchain technologies, and other new digital assets.
Dolce & Gabbana Creates a First for NFT
Recently, the fashion moguls Dolce & Gabbana personally designed the world’s first fashion collection of pieces hybrid physical garments and non-fungible tokens, or NFT. The nine unique pieces of the “Collezione Genesi” were unveiled at an event in Venice, even though only some of them had a physical form. The rest are purely digital creations. This release was a collaboration with luxury marketplace UNXD, which used a blockchain platform called Polygon to facilitate its value on the Ethereum blockchain. Some brands have begun to file patents to secure digital versions of their existing product lines. Other brands have released NFT’s on gaming platforms, but this is the first major luxury fashion release of its kind.
Cryptocurrency Backs the Digital Couture
The physical pieces, shimmering in crystals and beads, were shown in Venice during the 2021 Alta Moda event. They include gold and silver versions of D&G’s “The Dress from a Dream,” an emerald, men’s three-piece called “The Glass Suit,” and an opulent pair of tiaras called “The Lion Crown” and the “The Doge Crown.” The other four pieces were solely digital and rendered of “fabrics and gems that can’t quite be found on Earth.” The collection sold for a total of nearly $5.7 million worth of Ether, the Ethereum cryptocurrency. The physical objects also have virtual NFT counterparts, including their physical appeared and stored blockchain value. The data also allows the owners the digital rights to display and wear the works in virtual spaces. The buyers included NFT collectors, a company building a crypto-commerce protocol, and Red DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization founded to invest in digital fashions.
Virtual Garments Are Proliferating
There are even new hubs of creation where avatars only wear whole fashion lines. This includes game worlds and social platforms. The trend continues to grow. There are now fashion designers that make a good living creating augmented reality looks. One platform, Decentraland, is fast becoming a new opportunity for creatives. There are even wearable augmented digital reality assets that only one person can own and contain metadata. These fashion goods can be bought and sold on the blockchain just like any other NFTs or crypto coins.
Digital Fashion Raises the Industry
New blockchain concepts like DAO, cryptos and NFT are rapidly increasing profitability. NFT sales have hit a new record of more than 10 billion dollars in total during the third quarter of 2021, 8 times their collective value the previous quarter. This trend looks to continue. The roughly 2.7 trillion dollar fashion industry is projected to double due to digital wearables in the next two decades.
Digital fashion products align with the fashion world’s values of environmental and sustainable design. Cryptocurrency and its power and flexibility to the public also offer many solutions to authentication of value and freedom of fast exchange. Fashion business experts suggest that blockchain assets such as NFT’s and augmented reality garments have a chance to create much profitable disruption in these emerging, virtual markets. Blockchain applications are bringing a new wave of interest in the metaverse. And how it meets the real world. We all have digital lifestyles as well as physical ones. So, you may as well allow your aesthetic to also contain encrypted data pertinent to your value and security. The fashion world is excellent at finding solutions for democratizing concrete value from a pure concept.
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