This season, there was a new fashion event between the Paris and Milan shows. The pandemic forced traditional runways to be replaced with videos. However, the first Crypto Fashion Week examined the future of fully digital fashion through workshops and speaker talks.
Artists, designers, and tech professionals showcased their latest innovations in cryptocurrency, blockchain technologies and artificial intelligence to bridge the gap between fashion and art.
The event, which ran from February 22 to 26, explored future trends online and offline. It featured everything from virtual sneakers being developed for sustainable consumption to people selling their designs on digital marketplaces.
Marjorie Hernandez, co-founder of Lukso fashion blockchain company, stated in a talk that digital fashion must have the experience and ownership of digital goods.
The Dematerialised is a Web3 marketplace that authenticates digital fashion. She co-founded it. HexJerzo’s digital sweater, one of the most popular on the site, was sold more than 100 times and there were only a few remaining pieces.
What can digital fashion be?
The crypto fashion week was created to explore the future digital possibilities and creative expressions that may far surpass the physical designs we see today. Digital fashion items are not only used as placeholders for actual fashion items, such as 3D models of dresses, but they can also be purchased and worn virtually.
The items shown during the video livestreams of crypto Fashion Week included black sculptural sneakers from digital footwear designers and a white, bone-like, amorphic headpiece. Although some designers chose to present their pieces on a virtual runway, the colors of the dresses were constantly changing and fluorescing, which is not possible in real life. Other shows featured models with glassy skin and shifting backgrounds, as well as the gravity-defying flow of skirts that showed the limits of digital fashion creativity.
In an interview, Kuki, the AI avatar explaining Digital Fashion to Kuki while wearing a jacket made by Adidas in collaboration with Karlie Kloss. Pandora Bots created the chatbot with a signature turquoise-colored head. It could chat live and answer questions from participants in real time.
Natalia Modoneva is a founder and CEO of DressX, which offers fashion multi-brand stores with digital collections and 3D designers. She also participated in a talk about the power of digital dressing during cryptofashion week. DressX’s team discovered that 9 percent of customers from developed countries only purchase new clothes to take pictures and share on social media. Digital fashion, according to DressX, allows for less production or no production at all and still shows off the most recent fashion trends.
Is fashion not just about clothes?
Sofiane Delloue is the founder of Newlife, an online platform for cultural research and social creativity. She asked a crucial question: “Is fashion only about clothes?”
He said that artificial intelligence could play with codes to deconstruct fashion’s meaning, aesthetics, design, creativity and art. The context in which clothing is worn has an impact on its value. A tracksuit worn in a club is a different message to a gym than one worn at home. He explained that AI can decipher the context of fashion and give value. Newlife.AI has partnered with Vogue Paris, Givenchy, Saint Laurent and Y/Project to date.
Delloue said that artificial intelligence can create a new era in social creativity. Companies and brands need to embrace digital fashion and the future of design. The first crypto fashion week gives a glimpse of the wildly creative potential of digital fashion.
