METAVERSE FASHION COUNCIL

IS DUPE CULTURE OUT OF CONTROL? The Business of Fashion Key Takeaways: 👾 In the past few years, “dupes,” or cheaper facsimiles of popular products have reached a new level of ubiquity in the cultural zeitgeist. TikTok is cluttered with videos recommending alternatives for hyped products like Skims bodysuits, Staud purses, Djerf Avenue pyjamas and Miu Miu jackets; mainstream publications like Teen Vogue and Cosmopolitan regularly do the same. 👻 For brands, dealing with dupes has started to feel inevitable. Lululemon leaned in with an event encouraging people to trade in their faux-Align leggings in May. Cassey Ho, founder of activewear brand Popflex, whose ruffled “Pirouette Skort” shot to virality after Taylor Swift wore it in April, said she currently fights around 70 copycat listings per month. 🎭 There’s an ethical grey area: At what point does an item stop being a “dupe” and start being a counterfeit? But that hasn’t stopped dupe culture — which has been propelled by social media’s speedy trend cycle, ultra-fast e-commerce production and scepticism over pricing strategies — from playing a larger role in how consumers shop. With that, it has inevitably had an impact on the fashion system, particularly for independent brands, making it even more difficult to operate in an already tenuous environment. 🗣 Dupe defenders will argue that an item that looks like or mimics something is a dupe, while an item that pretends to be something is a counterfeit. But the lines are often blurred; Vidyuth Srinivasan, chief executive of luxury authentication firm Entrupy says that in practice, dupes and counterfeits are essentially the same thing. There’s no official distinction; dupes typically become dupes when someone online declares them so. 💭 Nia Thomas, a New York-based resortwear designer, said that dupes’ prevalence has forced her to think about them during the design process. Alongside concerns like wholesale appeal, colour choice and pricing, she also must consider how easy it would be to copy a product. “Dupe culture is adjacent to throw-away culture,” said Thomas, “It’s like ‘Oh I found a duplicate of this and I’ve been wearing it, and now I found something better and I’m going to get that’ … The problem is people don’t understand value anymore.” LEARN MORE: https://lnkd.in/ewgAntWW #web3 #investment #fashion #metaverse #ai

THE PAYPAL MAFIA STILL RULES SILICON VALLEY Alexei Oreskovic for Fortune Key Takeaways: 🔫 In Silicon Valley, mafias are everywhere these days. There’s the Facebook mafia, the OpenAI mafia, and the Amazon Web Services mafia, to name just a few of the tech-media-christened (not-so-criminal) cliques of powerful founders and investors who share roots at a particular tech company. 👾 The term was coined in a 2007 Fortune cover story by Jeffrey M. O’Brien, which examined the outsize influence within the tech scene of a group of men (yes, they were all men) who had launched a payments startup called PayPal almost a decade earlier. When PayPal was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002, these newly capitalized techies dispersed like seeds in the wind to germinate across the tech landscape. 👨🎓 Beneath the schtick was real clout. In the photo’s foreground is PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, whose career as a venture capitalist took off with an early bet on Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook. Behind Thiel sits a stone-faced Reid Hoffman, who founded LinkedIn and was later a founding investor in OpenAI. Roelof Botha, now a partner at Sequoia Capital, wears shades, his shirt unbuttoned. Keith Rabois, now of Khosla Ventures, sports a shiny striped button-down and the mien of someone who might have just put a rival “on ice.” 👥 One face that’s missing is former PayPal CEO Elon Musk, who couldn’t make the photo shoot. Musk had famously been fired from the PayPal C-suite by the board while he was on vacation, but by the time O’Brien was profiling the crew, the Tesla and SpaceX founder and his former colleagues had made up.  💥 Conflict remains common among the PayPal Mafia, many of whom have wielded their enormous wealth and influence to become political donors. Hoffman, a supporter of Democrats and various progressive causes, has lately clashed with Thiel and with another PayPal alum, David Sacks, over their support of Donald Trump. LEARN MORE: https://lnkd.in/d-Mhbtz5 #web3 #fashion #ai #investment #metaverse

IS IT TIME FOR SUPREME TO SELL OUT? Lei Takanashi for The Business of Fashion Key Takeaways: 💵 The New York-based streetwear juggernaut, founded in 1994, was resold by the US apparel group VF Corp. to French-Italian eyewear conglomerate EssilorLuxottica this week for $1.5 billion in cash, a significant markdown from the $2.1 billion VF paid for it in 2020. 📉 The deal gives VF Corp. access to quick cash as it seeks to shore up its balance sheet amid falling sales at its much bigger brands — such as Vans, where sales plunged 26 percent in its most recent fiscal year — and mounting debt. EssilorLuxottica gets to expand from eyewear into new categories and the opportunity to lean into Supreme-branded eyewear that it can sell through its huge distribution network. 🌹 The question is where Supreme goes from here. Like Ralph Lauren, it rose to the top with contemporary Americana, albeit a version that wasn’t fully mainstream. But today, the youth subcultures Supreme stood for no longer feel so niche. Hip-hop is massively commercialised, skateboarding and breakdancing are in the Olympics and even rebellious subcultures like graffiti have been transformed into industries ironically intertwined with corporate advertising. 👕 Even under corporate ownership, Supreme was able to scale on its own terms, given the freedom to scout skate spots before opening new stores and hire the right local scenesters to run them. After Supreme sold to EssilorLuxottica, Jebbia suggested its approach wouldn’t change, saying in a statement, “In EssilorLuxottica, we have a unique partner that understands that we are at our best when we stay true to the brand and continue to operate and grow as we have for the past 30 years.” LEARN MORE: https://lnkd.in/dSBihEJj #web3 #fashion #investment #ai #metaverse

IS LUXURY FINALLY SET FOR A SUSTAINABILITY RECKONING ? Sarah Kent for The Business of Fashion Key Takeaways: 👠 Midway through March, Italian police raided a factory complex on a quiet street in a leafy suburb of Milan, 11 kilometres from the city’s via Montenapoleone luxury shopping district.Inside the factory, they found nearly two dozen workers — several employed under the table — making leather bags and accessories for luxury giant Dior. Safety mechanisms had been removed from machinery to enable faster production, with work beginning early in the morning and continuing late into the night, according to court documents. In one instance, Dior paid the supplier €53 ($58) a piece to assemble a handbag it sold for €2,600, the documents said. 🎩 The investigation threatens the luxury sector’s most precious asset — brand image — calling into question the veracity of the craftsmanship-soaked marketing narrative luxury players routinely use to bolster the perceived quality of their products, while painting labour exploitation as a mass market problem. 📉 The threat comes at a precarious time for the luxury sector. Not only has the market cooled significantly since the heady days of the post-Covid luxury boom. But punchy price hikes amid reports of declining quality have put pressure on the perceived value of luxury products. 💸 The coming week brings the sector’s first public accounting since the Dior news broke in early June — too late in the quarter for much to show up in the numbers when LVMH reports on Tuesday. Luxury investors are anyway currently far more concerned about the fact that Chinese consumers — long the sector’s biggest growth engine — are not shopping like they used to. 📰 As in 2008, the scrutiny on luxury’s supply chain is not a standalone issue, but one of several pressure points putting cracks in luxury’s marketing facade. Soaring prices for high-end handbags already have critics grumbling vocally on social media about sticker shock amid reports of declining quality. Layer on allegations of labour exploitation and the reputational risks are mounting. LEARN MORE: https://lnkd.in/dP6TwxZg #web3 #investment #fashion #metaverse #ai

🗞 Weekly news and stories covering everything from the Fashion System, Investment, and AI to WEB3 and Crypto that truly matter in Metaverse Fashion. #web3 #investment #ai #metaverse #fashion

COACH'S BIG METAVERSE TEST Maghan McDowell for Vogue Business Key Takeaways: 👽 Even as fashion’s metaverse moment continues its quiet streak, Coach is embarking on a large-scale project that brings its ‘Find Your Courage’ campaign to metaverse worlds Roblox and Zepeto, starting on 19 July. 🎉 It celebrated the launch with a party on Wednesday night at its New York Fifth Avenue store, dubbed ‘Coach House’, inviting gaming influencers who have also been tapped to promote the appearances on their socials, along with their gifted physical goods. 🤖 Coach will have month-long integrations in Roblox fashion styling experiences Fashion Klossette (created by supermodel Karlie Kloss) and Fashion Famous 2, alongside an ongoing experience within Zepeto, where users can buy and wear Coach items developed in collaboration with creator Nova to produce short-form videos that can be posted on Zepeto’s in-game social feed. LEARN MORE: https://lnkd.in/eiki87hN #web3 #ai #metaverse #fashion #investment

SHEERLUXE DEFENDS USE OF AI INFLUENCER Emily Brown for BBC News Key Takeaways: 🗞 A popular UK lifestyle and fashion magazine has been criticised after it described an artificial intelligence (AI) "fashion and lifestyle editor" on its social media page as a "new member" of the team. 💥 But there has been backlash from fans, with one saying the company is depriving “human journalists of a job”, and they were frustrated by what they described as unachievable “beauty standards”. 🗨 In a statement, SheerLuxe said that "innovation has been central" to what the brand does but recognised that they "didn't explain it properly" and were "sorry". The company says Reem's role - like other editors at the company - is to provide recommendations for their audience, including things such as fashion, beauty and travel. Images posted on the bot's Instagram page show Reem wearing different outfits, as well as suggestions for products it uses. 📉 At the start of the week, SheerLuxe had 467,000 followers on Instagram - when we looked on Wednesday night that number had dropped, and it dropped again on Thursday. Admittedly, that was only by a couple of thousand followers, but this could reflect the reaction from some fans. It also opens up wider questions about the future of artificial intelligence and its role within journalism. LEARN MORE: https://lnkd.in/eRffrpeE #web3 #ai #investment #fashion #metaverse

METAVERSE EXPERT MATTHEW BALL STILL BELIEVES IN THE 3D INTERNET Nilay Patel and Matthew Ball for The Verge Key Takeaways: 🎹 Matt and I talked a lot about where the previous metaverse hype cycle landed us and what there is to learn from these boom and bust waves in technology. We also talked about the Apple Vision Pro as a marker or symbol of where the metaverse is now and where it has to go. If you read or watched my review when it came out, you’ll know I think the Vision Pro is sort of an end point for one set of technologies, and I wanted to know if Matt felt the same and what needs to happen to make all of this more mainstream and accessible. 📺 Matt’s overall point is that it’s tempting to think that the metaverse just fizzled out after the huge explosion of hype that came after Facebook renamed itself to Meta, hype which the lackluster Quest Pro and messy Horizon platform couldn’t really live up to. And hype which eventually got totally washed away by the arrival of generative AI. 🎥 But the metaverse didn’t just disappear. The major players — Meta, Fortnite maker Epic Games, Roblox — are all still plugging away at the idea, albeit gradually. While Meta and Apple go head-to-head on hardware, the gaming companies whose engines make the 3D internet come to life are still working on some of the core technical ideas — like interoperability and what combination of AR and VR consumers actually want. 📸 That’s all while game makers contend with an industrywide downturn that’s led to waves of layoffs in addition to a pretty stark lack of consumer enthusiasm in the whole metaverse concept. Combine all of that with some intense backlash against both AI and crypto, and you can start to see why we’re not racing as fast toward this next-generation internet as we might have once thought. LEARN MORE: https://lnkd.in/g_xb2a-R #web3 #metaverse #fashion #investment #ai

WEB3 EXPERTS CITE INNOVATION AND PR AS KEY CHALLENGES FOR NFT ADOPTION Ezra Reguerra for Cointelegraph Key Takeaways: 👻 While non-fungible tokens (NFT) may have solidified their position within crypto, Web3 professionals believe that barriers prevent broader asset class adoption. Web3 executives believe that the lack of new narratives, the reputation problem of the broader Web3 space and the complicated user experience are hindering further mass adoption of NFTs. Cointelegraph approached professionals working in the space to ask what they think hinders NFTs from broader adoption and what the space could do to overcome these barriers. 🗣 Dave Catudal, the co-founder of the social monetization platform Lyvely, believes that the space needs new narratives and more innovation. “I think the main issue with reluctant adopters is lack of innovation and fresh narrative in the space,” Catudal explained. 📢 Tyler Adams, CEO and co-founder of Web3 company COZ, expressed a similar sentiment. However, Adams believes that the reputation of the broader Web3 space affects the NFT space too. “The main barrier is the reputation of everything that involves the Web3 world. Unfortunately, the actions of a few end up affecting the image of the community as a whole,” Adams added. 💬 James T., chief operating officer at Web3 wallet Savl, believes that one of the main barriers to NFT adoption is the complicated process of creating, buying and managing NFTs. The executive believes that this can be intimidating for non-technical users. LEARN MORE: https://lnkd.in/ePvcusqX #web3 #investment #ai #metaverse #fashion

Daily news and stories covering everything from the Fashion System, Investment, and AI to WEB3 and Crypto that truly matter in Metaverse Fashion. #web3 #ai #investment #fashion #metaverse