Fashion merges with gaming

Leslie Holden, co-founder of The Digital Fashion Group, believes that merging fashion and gaming will provide new opportunities and a career path for young designers, "In the UK alone, around 5,000 fashion designers graduate each year with little chance of employment. I see the metaverse as an opportunity for new opportunities and new professions for creatives in fashion. We need to ensure that less fashion talent is wasted and the metaverse can provide an answer to the lack of jobs in the traditional fashion industry."

Holden continued: "The technology we use to create the metaverse was developed by the game industry, which means the tools were not developed for fashion. As with the development of the metaverse itself, we benefit from a collaborative approach. Epic Games knows this and is already investing in fashion, and I see the metaverse as the beginning of a new definition of fashion with a purpose, possibly driven by new partners. It could be a fantastic opportunity for designers."

Fashion in the metaverse must first and foremost be wearable. Or, as Richard Hobbs says, "Now what you buy in one metaverse you can't wear in another. In fact, there is not one metaverse. There are different metaverse that are built by different groups. Some are owned by companies, some are more of a community effort. But all have multiple standards, sizes and requirements that must be met in order to own and use something digital." The current rise of decentralized autonomous organizations has made the concept of NFTs and ownership of digital assets easier. And this also presents business opportunities for fashion brands and designers.

Fashion designers in the metaverse

Daniella Loftus, of "This Outfit Does Not Exist," a platform for digital fashion, thinks designers play a key role in this new universe: "The digital designer can ensure that the digital world becomes a complete experience," Loftus said.

Loftus defines digital fashion through three different manifestations: first phygital or digital fashion designed with the aim of producing physical garments. The second form is physical and digital combined: digital fashion that can be worn using augmented or virtual reality. And the third form is completely digital, that is, digital fashion sold directly to an avatar. The metaverse is all about the latter two: physical and digital combined, and digital only.

"If you look at the way we consider fashion in the physical world, it allows us to shape the perception of ourselves with the garments we wear, but also to color the perception of others about us. This is exactly the same in the metaverse; it is even reinforced there. In the metaverse, appearance and clothing (or appearance form) not only affects your own state of mind and that of the people around you, it immerses you in that virtual environment and even determines the rules of interaction among yourself," says Loftus. Designers can guide people to express themselves and make it possible to enter worlds that would otherwise be inaccessible.

What skills do designers need to develop to fulfill this guide role for the metaverse? According to Sean Chiles, co-founder of The Digital Fashion Group, "In addition to the digital mindset, fashion designers must also be able to translate emotions that come up when exploring the zeitgeist, and working with physical elements such as fabrics, technical aspects, etc. This is the connection to the physical. Mixing reality and digital, I believe, is the most important skill fashion designers need to be able to transition to a new digital reality of the future."

For Chiles, the new techniques required for digital fashion and 3D design are similar to custom or couture design where you create an outfit for one client. "Digitally you can create so many different versions of a unique piece that it creates a huge creative output, a tidal wave of creative NFTs, that can only exist within the metaverse," he said. This creates a different kind of pressure for the designer, Chiles concluded, "in the context of the metaverse and digital fashion design, mastering AI becomes really interesting because AI can help alleviate this problem."

Advances in technologies such as artificial intelligence and the increased ability of cloud servers to run 3D applications and render created files quickly are all contributing to the expansion of the metaverse. But as Richard Hobbs points out, this is open-ended and still in the early stages.

While the technology is still evolving, the industry can seize the opportunity to think about the best way to create the right mindset for this new future, seeing the metaverse as a land of limitless possibilities where we can discover new forms of social interaction.