Is the metaverse the answer to our fast fashion nightmare?
NFT designers from The LGT Emergent Fashion Showcase
That’s right people, we’re diving into the world of NFTs (non-fungible tokens for the starting-at-square-one-folk.) The idea that I'm even attempting to tackle the subject of NFTs and the fashion industry as someone who has only just, kind of, not really grasped the concept of Bitcoin and crypto currency is ambitious. But, here goes. Luckily for all you NFT babies, I know almost as little as you and will almost certainly confuse myself in 50-100 words time. Don’t stress, we’re all in this together. What’s going to happen is I'm going to summarise the very little I know and then pose some very vague, open-ended, rhetorical (because I literally don’t know the answers) questions.
But first, let’s start with the basics: what are NFTs? Non-Fungible Tokens are digital assets that hold value in a similar way to physical art.
A lot like cryptocurrencies except NFTs are completely unique or ‘non-fungible’ meaning they can’t be exchanged. For example, if you exchanged one Bitcoin for another Bitcoin, you'll receive an exact replica. Whereas NFTs are unique meaning that you’re buying ownership of a digital file that can’t be copied. In physical art collecting terms, we can all buy a Picasso print but very few of us own an original. An NFT is the original art piece.
Why NFTs? Well, if you’re an artist it’s an exciting new market to explore that lends itself to digital mediums. Plus, NFTs have a feature that gives you a percentage every time the NFT is sold or changes hands. The more sought after it becomes, the higher that percentage. If you’re a buyer, NFTs let you financially support artists you like and give you unique usage (and bragging) rights for posting the image online. For collectors, like any speculative art, you buy a NFT hoping that one day it’s value goes up and you can sell it for profit. Basically, you invest in NFTs the same way you invest in art.
PLT NFT anyone?
What got me (and every other wanna-be journalist) thinking was the appearance of yet another Covid-19 variant - Omicron. Inevitable, sure, but still disappointing. Normality, or at least the version we all recognise, has gone forever and that’s a tough pill to swallow - on a personal and practical level. With variants popping up left, right and centre, tighter restrictions on travel and our current freedom of movement a few governmental decisions away from being stripped, the future seems more than uncertain. So, where does that leave the fashion industry? With another lockdown looming, pyjamas are in prime position to take over our lives yet again leaving everything else in our wardrobes untouched.
If our need for new clothes wanes as restrictions and lockdowns become more commonplace, should the market turn it’s back on the physical in favour of pixelated possessions instead? The sartorial metaverse remains largely untapped and, like all new technologies before it, is currently an elite exclusive. For context, one of the most covetable bags and status symbols in the world, a Birkin, sells on average for $15,000. It’s digital NFT counterpart, the ‘Baby Birkin’, sold for the equivalent of $23,500 in early 2021. I don’t know about you but both are a little out of my price range. However, if NFTs were to one day enter the mainstream and theoretically become financially accessible to the Pretty Little Thing and Asos addicts out there, could the devastating effects of fast fashion be reduced?
Our lives are increasingly spent online nowadays especially since the pandemic began in 2020, so it makes sense that our closets follow suit. In a way, they already have, with a large percentage of young people buying clothes to post on Instagram, never to be worn again. The influencer phenomeum has undoubtedly contributed to the fashion industry’s eye-watering carbon footprint and promoted over consumption from day dot. Impressionable or not, it’s hard to resist the allure of your favourite influencer posting an outfit that you could own the very next day just for a taste of the ‘cool kid’ pie. As human beings we naturally have a desire to belong and crave a sense of community. Fashion is an easy way for people to explore their identity and forge a sense of self externally. In other words, clothes have the power to show who we are and how other people see us. The problem is, social media has morphed our perception of a normal level of human visibility. Day to day, you probably bump into two people you know, lock eyes with a neighbour and barely register anyone else. And that’s if you leave the house. Check your Instagram however, and you’re visible (& easily digestible) to over one billion pairs of eyes. That’s a lot of eyes. And those eyes have been conditioned to want fresh content 24/7, 365 days a year. Or rather the algorithm wants you to want fresh content so that you stay engaged on the platform and make the top dogs more money. It is actively responsible for throwaway culture in the fashion industry. In 2017, Lucy Siegle reported in the Guardian that, ‘one in three young women, the biggest segments of consumers, consider garments worn once or twice to be old.’ One in three. So, if we take the ‘if a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it’ argument: if I wear an outfit and don’t post a picture to Instagram … was it worn at all? Something to think about.
With UK consumers alone sending 300,000 tonnes of material to be burned or dumped in landfill in 2018, surely there’s a case for fashion to go digital. We’re being influenced to buy physical clothes based on pixelated versions posted by our faves anyway so why don’t we bypass all the waste and swap LBDS for NFTs?
If @Lilmiquela, a 19 year old robot living in LA
is already selling us physical products, why can’t living and breathing influencers sell us the digital equivalent?
Some designers have already started to dip their toes into digital collections. Take Animal Crossing: New Horizons for example. It's release in 2020 couldn’t have come at a better time. Just as we were retreating from real life and a deadly virus, a virtual reality entered the picture. Designer’s quickly caught on to consumers' change in priorities and instead of releasing collections, released QR codes for consumers-turn-gamers to dress their characters up in. Clothes are intrinsically tied to a superficial sense of worth, creating assumptions and illusions about people based on what they wear. We attach meaning to high (and low) ticket items and then attach meaning to those that possess them. Wearing a pair of Bottega Veneta boots in Kelly Green is more of a status symbol than an innocent footwear choice but I’ll fight the logomania fight another day.
“Stormi you look like Mommy baby!”
“BRB gotta harvest in my Marc Jacobs coat” ≧◡≦
Fashion, like NFTs, is all about status. Although slightly different to NFTs, QR coded clothes did inflict this status element into Animal Crossing. Imagine, you visit someone’s Island and they’re wearing Marc Jacobs. Or Valentino. Or GCDs. Your character, however, is wearing last season's pixels and, frankly, it’s embarrassing. The lure of belonging, status, and image is inescapable even on a virtual island and the fashion industry is slowly clocking on. NFTs are all about collectibles and so is Fashion. A Chanel handbag is often cited as a better investment than buying a house because of it’s appreciating value. Apply that logic to the NFT Baby Birkin, the first of its kind, and you’re dealing with some eye-watering potential wealth.
Bringing the concept back to the average person without a Birkin budget, this idea of digital wear for the metaverse has already begun. A quick Google confirmed my (in hindsight, unoriginal) theory that NFTs could be the answer to our fast fashion nightmare. DressX is a digital fashion store that sells fashion NFTs to buyers in the know. Customers buy a fashion piece and submit a photo of themselves and in return they receive a digital photo back of them wearing their item. Founder, Natalie Modenova, explains that the increasing goal of fashion is to post a photo to social media and that DressX products get users quickly to that end goal, without ever purchasing anything physical. They “strongly believe that the amount of clothing produced today is way greater than humanity needs. [They] share the beauty and excitement that physical fashion creates, but [they] believe that there are ways to produce less, to produce more sustainably, and not to produce at all.”
Vogue Singapore X Dressx
Their slogan ‘Don’t shop less, shop digital fashion’ could rile up the more hardcore climate change activists out there but, personally, it’s the first creative solution I’ve seen in a while that has given me any hope. According to the UN Conference on Trade & Development, the fashion industry is considered one of the largest polluters in the world and the environmental damage is only increasing as the industry grows. As DressX writes, “The production and distribution of the fibres and garments used in fashion all contribute to different forms of environmental pollution, including water, air, and soil pollution. Some of the main factors that create pollution are vast overproduction and overconsumption of fashion items and the use of synthetic fibres.” In contrast, they claim that their digital designs produce 97% less CO2 than a physical garment and saves 3300 litres of water per piece. That’s pretty cool.
Despite the industry finding it hard to let go of physicality, things are looking up. The boom in clothes rental services and apps shows an increasing interest in slow(er) fashion and sustainability as a whole thanks to their digital interfaces. With more brands like DressX popping up and innovating new ideas to reduce production whilst still indulging our love for fashion and self-image obsession, it feels like the solution to fast fashion doesn’t have to be so all or nothing. The solution, in fact, has been right in our hands, mid-scroll, this entire time. Designers who are rigid and stubbornly cling to the familiar will find themselves stuck in the past, as the world and its people surrender to the inevitability of the metaverse. A digital renaissance is upon us and resisting progress will get us nowhere. It’s time to succumb and see where our wardrobes (and the world) end up.