Fashion Week and the Metaverse ! Oh Dear

This article is from my daily newsletter from CoinMarketcap... Hope you enjoy the read. Pretty soon there will be no need for models!

Last week, if you were on a certain part of social media, you were inundated with photos from one of the top fashion events of the year — Paris Fashion Week. You don’t have to be just a fashionista to follow this year’s trends, since the metaverse, Web3 and crypto fashion snuck their way in.

The most obvious example of fashion entering the metaverse was a literal metaverse fashion collection called M3talove, where instead of models walking down a runway, 3D holograms wore digital clothing (that is only digital) that would later be sold as NFTs. Another strange bedfellowship was between Balmain and MintNFT to create an NFT-based membership program running on the XRP Ledger. Alright then.

On the other hand, a more subtle metaverse reference was Loewe’s pixel collection, where models walked down the runway wearing real-but-pixelated clothing that had you blinking your eyes to see if it was real or not.

Metaverse fashion is nothing new, especially in the world of big name brands. Gucci has had “Gucci Town” on Roblex for a long time already (and virtual Gucci bags have sold there for more than the cost of a physical one) and Meta will “soon” allows their avatars to be dressed in expensive Prada and Balenciaga.

Back in February, Vogue had published an article titled: Paris Fashion Week: Next up, the metaverse. Now that the week is over — did Paris Fashion Week live up to its metaverse hype? Or did it include a few meta references, some NFT clothing, and consider that a job well done.