The vice president of fashion and shopping partnerships at Meta and BoF technology correspondent Marc Bain join Lauren Sherman to discuss the company's new market experiment - which launched a virtual clothing store with Thom Browne, Balenciaga and Prada - and the future of fashion on the platform. Our comment builds on this conversation.
Key insights:
- Right now, the metaverse doesn’t represent a huge revenue stream for fashion companies. But, being a first name to the nascent space has a branding advantage.
- In the face of the trillions of Big Tech, it seems little, even if as Europeans we do not cease to envy them, the hundreds of billions of the block of interests that revolves around the great luxury brands, such as LVMH, Richemont, Estée Lauder, Kering, Prada, Hermès, etc ....
- But precisely the minor field, distinct and separated from the heart of the Net could, Once the effect of the immaterial that seeks an anchor in the material were triggered, be decisive for the balance of business and power in the field of the trillionary giants.
- The shadow of the immaterial effect that is anchored to the material can be glimpsed in the move of Facebook, now Meta, towards the metaverse as an on-demand platform.
- Fashion designers already are masters of creating their own immersive worlds — whether through shows or clothes — so it wasn’t hard to get them interested in the experience. Translating real-world texture and detail to virtual items, however, was a challenge.
- Soon, there could be outfits in virtual marketplaces that reflect different moods and scenarios. Further down the line, the metaverse will be a place of limitless expression.
- Eventually, when brands are able to make virtual items into NFTs, they’ll be able to create true ownership and scarcity, which could create the same dynamics of exclusivity and hype that drive fashion today.
Social media company Meta has launched a virtual clothing store, and Balenciaga, Prada, and Thom Browne are the first big designers to create avatar-friendly looks in Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse. The models, available for use on Instagram, Facebook and Messenger, include a Balenciaga motorcycle suit, Prada shorts and one of Thom Browne's typical grey jumpsuits. The move marks Meta's formal entry into the virtual haute couture business after Zuckerberg declared his ambitions to build the metaverse at the end of 2021.
Mark Zuckerberg has unveiled the first online fashion store for the avatars of Facebook, Messenger and Instagram, or the digital representations that will also characterize us on the horizon metaverse. Soon everyone will be able to buy clothes and accessories of famous brands on the store, including Prada, Balenciaga and Thom Browne, to make their avatar unique and distinguish it from others with thecombinations you prefer.
"As a fashion expert , it took me a while to figure out exactly what [Zuckerberg's vision for the metaverse] meant... People want all possible ways to express themselves through their avatars in the metaverse," said Eva Chen, Meta's vice president of fashion and shopping partnerships.
On balance it may seem just 'fuck', because what we buy for the avatar remains in the avatar but is not the same, immense, market that drives add-on content for video games such as the very popular Fortnite, the video game of battles?
Instead, Facebook launched the "Metaverse" as if it were the landing by Avatar on Gaia, and even renamed itself Meta to free itself from the toxic legacy of its social networks.
Beyond the fireworks of the enthusiasts of the technological shack, he is well preparing to go to manage a park of immersive and three-dimensional video games, on the simple condition of wearing a goggle helmet and a sensitive epidermis for very particular dives.
With this move, and for the first time, it goes beyond the recycling of user self-production (native pride of the Net) and introduces industrial products such as fashion accessories, clothes and shoes, in a catalog of immersive versions of video games with many hands, paid in the style of Spotify, the Swedish online music service (giving time to advertising or paying to escape it).
In a facebook post, Mark Zuckerberg said that more brands will be added soon. "Digital goods will be an important way to express oneself in the metaverse and a great engine of the creative economy."
And indeed, fashion houses are increasingly collaborating with tech companies to create digital garments. In 2021, Fortnite introduced Balenciaga skins so that players could buy items such as sweatshirts for characters to wear. In Roblox, precursor of the metaverse for the infinite possibilities of experiences and activities made possible by the worlds built by users, you can visit Gucci Town, complete with a garden with the brand's logo, and a virtual store to go shopping crazy virtual, with real money.
Suffice it to say that the first Metaverse Fashion Week in history was held at the end of March. The avatars of large and small fashion houses presented the Fall-Winter 2022/2023 collections on the Decentreland platform. For the occasion, Giovanna Graziosi Casimiro, head of the event, said: "The participating brands will show new collections or new interpretations of existing pieces. There will be a luxury shopping area, designed to resemble paris' Avenue Montaigne, and both digital and physical items will be sold."
There is neither enough not to exclude the start, more or less shortly, of an auction unprecedented in size and consequences in which Big Tech put the trillions and fashion and luxury brands, as usual, choose the master.
No one doubts, for example, that the real "masters" of the Kering group (named after the giant luxury company that bought Gucci some time ago) are the purchased and certainly not the buyer.
The effect of the immaterial that is linked to the material could be triggered with greater force even more in the field of social applications, which already today imitate each other, all the more so if the EU prescribed the faculty in favor of users to exchange messages between different platforms as already happened with phones. In this case, what kind of exclusivity would it ever be, if not the strength of a catalog?
Here then that the prices of the contents would skyrocket and that the producers could even choose, as a master of convenience, one of the giants in search of product.
Far from suffering for the mega budgets of any Zuckerberg – who every morning questions the mirror to ask him if a start-up ready to replace him has been born – the fashion industry lives restlessly, but sure of control over what it has produced, and what it produces.
Because clothes, shoes and bags are not duplicate lines of software, wandering chatter or "news" dripping from the Net, but objects defined and protected by caterve of rights. You can snatch an idea, anor style, the design of some product, but still having to produce sooner or later with risks no different from the original manufacturer.
That's why social media, well-known pirates and "parasites of chatter in the square", have left the illegal trade in fakes and similar things to submerged crime.
At the same time, the products of the luxury industry are also partly intangible and therefore very suitable for circulating on the Net, so much so that promotions, trailers and comments are crowded on social media, while platforms, such as Amazon or Zalando, deliver the material version starting from a choice made on an image. Sales method that you have simply added either to that nator before with stores.
