Issue 54: Dressing for the Metaverse
The blurring lines of virtual/reality are changing the way we interact with fashion.
About two weeks ago, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook’s other companies would now fall under a new umbrella company called Meta. From a business perspective, the only surprise here is that this didn’t happen sooner. It’s what Google did in 2015 with the creation of parent company Alphabet. It’s a move clearly calculated to get ahead of the biggest risk Facebook, et. al. face: anti-monopoly legislation that would force the social media giant to break up its three star platforms.
But from a cultural perspective, when I saw the announcement, all I could focus on was the company’s new name and stated vision:
The metaverse is the next evolution of social connection. Our company’s vision is to help bring the metaverse to life, so we are changing our name to reflect our commitment to this future.
Ah yes, the metaverse. Everybody’s talking about it, but so far I have yet to see anyone define it well. Let’s give it a go, shall we?
As with most things that appear complicated at first, I believe there is a simple answer. And it goes back to another conviction that I’ve shared in High Noon before — that the Internet is the single most influential invention in the past 80 years. So, the metaverse is a place in our shared imagination/experience where any activity that involves some interaction with the Internet and some with so-called “real life” occurs.
Society is now permantly in the “metaverse” and there it will stay, but this is nothing new. What would be new would be leaving society — interfacing only with the local, physical, immediate world — and that is far easier said than done.
Now, let’s talk dressing for society in the metaverse…
xxSCREMES (Shawn)
The Roundup
Links to the stories you should be reading this week
The young people of NYC are gravitating toward the city’s old establishments. ✺ Dasha Nekrasova’s mainstream star is rising. ✺ After 16 years, Germany has a new chancellor. ✺ Poolsuite releases NFT memberships to raise a new round of funding (smartest use of NFTs I’ve seen yet). ✺ Tom Ford reviews House of Gucci. ✺ Though the article fails to mention the key impact Durga Chew-Bose had on the editorial style of the platform, we get an inside look at the secret power of SSENSE.
The Long Read
The week’s keynote story
Only going to read one thing? Read me.
Dressing For the Metaverse: Luxury Brands Go Virtual | Shawn Cremer | HN Original
When I was studying in Paris I took a class on the history of the city’s architecture. During our tour of the Palais Garnier, one phrase uttered by my professor there has stuck in my head these five years: she described the National Opera as the iconic place for Haussman-era Parisians “to see and be seen.”
The gilded opulence of the Palais Garnier was the backdrop in the 1870s for the fashionable to showcase their most prized assets — themselves. 150 years later and two of these things have changed while one has stayed the same. “The fashionable” now encompasses a tranche of the population that goes beyond the institutionally codified elites. It now includes everyone down to the teenage TikToker in her bedroom — elite only in the sense that she understands the cultural mechanisms that drive social capital and has the wherewithal to capitalize on them. The other aspect that has changed is the ‘setting.’ No longer do we need a spectacle of pagaentry such as an opera to see and be seen. Yes, the most culturally elite still cling to them — awards shows, galas, fashion week parties — but the rest of us don’t need them. We have THE INTERNET! Which brings me to the aspect that hasn’t changed: the most prized asset anyone with an urge to participate lucidly in culture has is themselves.
From the blogs of the aughts to the Instagrams of the teens to the virtual reality-metaverse-crossover world emerging in the twenties, the Internet has given us myriad venues (if you will) to see and be seen. And as the digital locations we now inhabit have changed the way the culturally-in-tune masses interact with fashion, the fashion brands themselves have been responding in kind.
I want to take you through a few case studies in three categories to demonstrate.
Video Games
In recent years, various video game franchises have partnered with fashion and accessory brands to created branded products, not as a capsule collection for sale at Macy’s but in the games themselves.
Two years ago, Jeremy Scott’s Moschino released a game pack for the Sims 4 in which players could dress their Sims in Moschino clothes and pursue a career as a fashion photographer. The clothes released in the game were also released as a line. Neither was very well received. Moschino buyers weren’t particularly keen to wear Sims-inspired clothes and Sims players were underwhelmed by the styles available.
Similarly, Marc Jacobs and Valentino released a set of downloadable clothes for Animal Crossing last year. This was somewhat better received overall than the Moschino x Sims collab, perhaps in part because it was released as a free downloadable asset.
And then even more recently, fashion companies have ventured into video game making themselves.
To celebrate the 200th birthday of Louis Vuitton, the iconic French house released Louis the Game. It’s a mobile phone game that follows a character through six beautifully designed worlds, throughout which she must collect 200 candles to celebrate the anniversary. It’s not at all a ‘fashion game’ in the sense you might expect. And what’s more, Louis embedded 30 NFTs throughout the game. They are only collectible via playing the game and cannot be bought or sold. They are truly assets exclusively derived from and existing in the “metaverse.”
And at the end of last year, Balenciaga, helmed by the genius Vetements founder Demna Gvasalia, released a video game they called Afterworld: The Age of Tomorrow. It’s not exactly a riveting video game; in that there are no challenges or levels. You, as the player, travel through a future world designed in Demna Gvasalia’s style, encountering various ‘NPCs’ dressed in the season’s looks. What Afterworld achieved is it very successfully gave consumers the chance to check out the clothes from 360-degrees during a time when doing it in person was out of the question.
Film & Television
While film and television has inspired runway looks from fashion houses for decades (MSGM inspired by Twin Peaks or Jun Takahashi’s Undercover pulling on imagery from Neon Genesis Evangelion), what happens when the two cross over on more than just the runway?
That’s what we got this fall with yet another metaverse venture by Demna. After a red carpet entrance for the guests of the show to (you guessed it) see and be seen, the models themselves came down the carpet, which was projected by video feed to the guests sitting inside. Then, after Demna came out for his bow, the lights were dimmed again and the audience found themselves trasnported to Springfield. In secret, Demna had partnered with Matt Groenig and the Simpsons team to create a special ten-minute episode featuring Simpsonized versions of himself, Anna Wintour, and stuffed to the gills with Balenciaga fashion. It’s an episode that underscores a love of toying with preconceived notions and staunch gatekeeping so pervasive in the fashion world.
In a different twist on the TV-fashion crossover, the much-maligned, yet quite popular Netflix original Emily In Paris will feature shoppable outfits in its next season. Netflix will feature the pieces worn in the show from a number of brands on a special shopping site. One need not have an eye and a savvy for searching specific designer pieces seen on-screen any longer. Now, embodying a favorite character’s style will be as easy as deciphering Lily Collin’s butchered French is hard.
Digital Projects
Not quite falling under traditional categories such as TV or video games, there are numerous other forays brands have taken into digital projects in the metaverse.
One oft-discussed such project is Telfar TV. Launched by Telfar Clemens, the project is aims to create a genuine collaboratively-built brand world. According to the site…
Basically we launched a TV Channel without any content — because we are tired of being content for other channels. When you watch TELFAR.TV you will see the channel take shape LIVE — and you can take part in what it becomes by sending us your videos.
Telfar TV strives to remove the umbilical cord fashion brands have to mainstream publications, YouTube, Instagram, blogs, and all of the other digital paraphanelia that props up the worlds brands must create to resonate. It seeks to stand as a truly independent entity.
While Telfar TV uses traditional kinds of content in an untraditional way, I would be remiss to exclude any discussion of augmented reality (AR) when discussing dressing for the metaverse.
A number of brands are now experimenting with fashion that…well…doesn’t exactly exist. As in, clothes that you won’t need to make any more room for in your wardrobe. Instead, you might need to upgrade your phone storage.
Gucci designed a series of virtual sneakers that people could buy for $13 and “wear” using AR accessories or apply as skins to characters in games like Roblox.
Even more abitious than the Gucci project is the “cyber fashion” created by the brand Tribute. Tribute creates AR clothing that people can purchase and use to clothe themselves digitally, then download and publish to Instagram or wherever else.
According to an interview with Paper Magazine…
Once you add the digital items to your cart, all you have to do is upload an image of yourself via Dropbox, Google Drive or a similar service and share the link with the images in the box located in the shopping cart, which the brand will use to digitally fit the item on your frame.
Tribute’s cyber fashion definitely leans into the idea put forth by Zuckerburg and others that “the metaverse is the next evolution of social connection.”
The idea of dressing for life that no longer exists wholly in the in-person, local physical space is one that on first glance may feel new. But, as I’ve investigated this, it is clear to me that this talk of the metaverse blooms directly from the innovations past 20-30 years in which we’ve become so used to our lives being inextricably linked to the Internet that it feels stranger to “leave society,” to go off the grid, than to participate in the many-tiered ways that we do with what I suppose I now feel fine calling the metaverse.
Watch
The special episode of the Simpsons created for Balenciaga’s SS22 collection.
Cheers
Since everybody’s loving old school watering holes these days, I’m bringing back a classic drink: the cosmopolitan! Dale DeGroff was a bartender at The Rainbow Room, where he perfected the cocktail made famous by Carrie Bradshaw with flamed orange.
1 oz Vodka
1 oz Orange Liquer (Triple Sec, Cointreau, or Grand Marnier)
1.5 oz Unsweetened Cranberry Juice
0.5 oz Fresh lime juice
Shake well over ice and strain into a chilled coupe glass. Express the oils of an orange rind over the top of the drink and light them.