The Trojan of the Eye: Leveraging Blockchain for a Structural Textiles Rental in the New Era of Circular Fashion Summits
It will take a second for your brain to get used to seeing the straight out ofMinecraft pieces next to a bunch of normal-ish outfits. The trompe l’oeil effect — which translates to “trick of the eye” — is nothing new in fashion, and designers have been playing with optical illusions on garments for a long time. But this spillover of physical representations of digital garments is happening as fashion houses increasingly look to expand their place in the metaverse and market new, intangible products to consumers.
Fashion brands like Gucci, Balenciaga, Prada, and many others have crept into the metaverse by partnering with tech companies betting big on Web3. In Roblox, players can visit a virtual site called Gucci Town and purchase Gucci clothing for their avatars. Fortnite has collaborated with brands like Balenciaga on limited edition in-game skins and followed it up by selling physical Fortnite shirts and baseball caps.
Fashion’s ephemeral nature might seem an odd bedfellow for the blockchain, an online ledger that’s designed to be permanent. There are ways to harness it and other digital tools to push fashion into the future.
The pair launched the Circular Fashion Summit in 2019 and Lablaco worked with retailer H&M to introduce a blockchain-based clothes rental service in 2021.
Using digital spaces as a testbed for the real world: A case study of an on-demand label and how to use it to reduce carbon footprint
“If you don’t digitize the product itself, you cannot have any data to measure, and you don’t know what’s the impact of the fashion,” Albrighi tells CNN Business.
Kuo says digital spaces could be used as a testbed for the physical world. For example, a designer could release an item of digital clothing in 10 colors in the metaverse, and use the sales data to inform which colors to use for the real-world version. She thinks that it can reduce fashion waste if it becomes an on-demand model.
Trying on clothes in a virtual world can cause some clothes to be returned in the physical world. He adds that staging fashion shows in virtual spaces reduces the need for the fashion world to travel. The industry has a potential to reduce its carbon footprint.