In its second year, what’s working for Metaverse Fashion Week? Fewer fashion shows, more giveaways and gamification.
Over the four-day period, MVFW on Decentraland saw a total of about 60 participating brands, and an estimated 26,000 unique active users, according to Decentraland. Other estimates put unique visitors at nearly 8,900 and almost 60,000 total experience visits, according to data analysis by metaverse data platform Geeiq, looking at data provided by third-party vendors. Both figures are down from last year’s MVFW’s 108,000 unique visitors, according to data provided by Decentraland. Just over half of this year’s visitors were new to the platform, and visitors returned an average of four times throughout the week.
The event saw an uptick in participation from emerging digital fashion creators and brands, but much of the traditional fashion industry still stayed away, save for high-profile activations from Tommy Hilfiger, Coach, Boss, Dolce & Gabbana, DKNY, Dundas, Diesel and others.
After last year’s first run, the second iteration proved that while there’s still enthusiasm for the format amid a “metaverse winter”. “For the first time, we witnessed real cooperation between fashion brands and the community,” says MVFW head Giovanna Graziosi Casimiro, adding that while numbers were down, thousands more people had visited the metaverse for the first time. Still, the same cultural and technical hurdles remained, such as latent laptop speeds, humble graphics and unfamiliarity with navigation.
“We faced some hardware and software issues while trying to deploy scenes,” Casimiro acknowledges. “A big learning lesson and area of improvement is leveraging our Decentraland community to educate non-native users and onboarding them into the metaverse,” in addition to improving clarity on cross-metaverse activations.
MVFW was initiated by the Decentraland Foundation last year to, in part, attract users to its blockchain-based metaverse social platform through fashion, which enjoys a natural presence in virtual spaces due to its outsized role in communicating identity. Over four days, a range of brands, startups, designers and tech platforms opened experimental virtual spaces, products and events focused on digital fashion. A central hub and limited time period enables brands to share the risks of testing new formats while enjoying the benefits of a shared community of visitors. While the remit is officially billed as a festival to showcase digital fashion, it’s unofficially become a tentpole event for digital fashion enthusiasts and developers to meet in the metaverse. Just like fashion weeks in global fashion capitals, there was a wide variety of participants, with digital natives including DressX, The Fabricant, Auroboros and the Institute of Digital Fashion joining traditional brands.
Decentraland enables brands to sell, and the community to resell, digital wearables (sold as NFTs). A Space Combat helmet led in items sold (at 110), while Adidas Virtual Gear led in branded items sold (thanks to peer-to-peer secondary sales), with 89 resales of the originally free item that garnered 136 Mana (the Decentraland currency, converting to about $81.02) in revenue. Tommy Hilfiger’s TH - Knitted Sweater was also popular, having sold 41 for a total of 820 Mana, which is about $492. A Tommy Hilfiger TH x VH - AOP Ski Mask sold 24 times, garnering 1,080 Mana ($645).
While the event title brings to mind runway shows, the visitors to MVFW care less about sitting and watching catwalks and more about participating in quests, dance parties and free giveaways. On the opening day, Decentraland’s MVFW plazas (primarily comprised of two dedicated regions, somewhat akin to neighbourhoods made up of a few city blocks) saw a total of 3,502 unique visitors, while the runway saw just 1,132 visitors, suggesting that less than a third of those visiting Metaverse Fashion Week attend, or are interested in attending, a runway show. Geeiq provided all data for this piece on MVFW performance unless otherwise noted.
Diesel hosted a DJ set and party, where avatars danced via “emotes” and flexed their digital ensembles; they also could explore some Diesel and D-Cave digital fashion on display and claim a free red Diesel cap (token-holders had access to additional pieces).
Tommy Hilfiger had the most successful free digital wearable, with all 5,000 of its 5,000 total AI Puffers being minted, while Adidas’s red Adidas Virtual Gear MVFW23 jackets, which were an interpretation of its digital-only collection announced in November, were claimed 3,653 times out of a possible 5,000. Coach’s free Tabby Swirl wearable was claimed 553 times out of a total 100,000 (only after visitors completed a series of challenges), and DKNY’s free Bucket Hat wearable was claimed 996 times out of a total possible of 1,000.
According to Geeiq analysis, the fact that Adidas’s free coat was also resold on the peer-to-peer marketplace shows that limited-edition items with a clear community following tend to be successful.
Measuring the success of metaverse events is not just a question of sales or impressions. Often, brands value the time spent, which can be far more than the time spent on websites or social media posts. Brands who led on total time spent in their Decentraland spaces included jeweller Ben Bridge (47,695 minutes), as well as Adidas (32,989 minutes), Tommy Hilfiger (37,852), DKNY (42,721) and Coach (31,194 ). “Overall, Metaverse Fashion Week is not only about attendance but about co-creating an experience that is meaningful and then distributing that across all mediums and platforms so that people can consume digital fashion in the way they want to,” Casimiro says.
Both Coach and Ben Bridge — a breakout success story — drove engagement time by borrowing from a Roblox-style playbook in which quests, challenges and treasure hunts reward visitors with free wearables. Coach invited people to jump into a larger-than-life Tabby bag to complete a series of challenges that culminated in a final puzzle, while Ben Bridge challenged visitors to find five watches, complete a quiz using information found in the experience and find two diamond rings, with each quest being rewarded with a digital wearable. Adidas, meanwhile, drove visits by hosting a timed community event, and DKNY increased time spent dramatically when it hosted the event’s closing day party. On the second day, smart clothing brand Gaian hosted an event with musician Soulja Boy, during which people could win items, which also drove engagement.
Broadening the scope
Notably, this year the festival expanded beyond Decentraland to include additional platforms, including Spatial, Roblox, Artificial Rome, Emperia and Over. This meant that the week was as much a showcase for various platforms as it was for digital design talent.
Tommy Hilfiger designed a Decentraland portal that served effectively as a metaversal train station that linked out to its other presences in destinations such as virtual store platform Emperia and in Roblox. Boss created a virtual interpretation of its recent Miami fashion show on Spatial. House of Blueberry, a digital fashion company that gained notoriety on Second Life, hosted a fashion show in Roblox. And augmented reality platform Over hosted an event in Milan that included in-person talks and an augmented reality fashion show featuring the Balmain and Space Runners collaboration, as well as other emerging digital natives.
Some appeared in multiple spaces. Archival fashion startup Altr, participating for the first time, elected to appear in Decentraland, Spatial and in an event called “Legacy of Tomorrow” hosted on virtual world Soil, which is made by creative agency Artificial Rome. Its crisp graphics, fluid user journey and cinematic storytelling were a stark contrast to the relatively rudimentary experience of navigating Decentraland. Hosting a fashion event on this external site enabled the team to use Unreal Engine and other technologies that resulted in hyper photorealism, says Kadine James, chief metaverse officer of Artificial Rome. “We really wanted to move the dial around what a fashion experience could be using the latest technology.”
“Besides being visually stunning, it was interactive, immersive and ephemeral,” says Matt Maher, founder of innovation consultancy M7, which advises luxury brands on Web3. Legacy of Tomorrow included larger-than-life, bodiless garments moving through a sparkling glacial landscape. “Bringing that level of exclusivity and scarcity to storytelling made us want to replay the activation a few times to fully digest the experience. We believe Decentraland’s version of MVFW is very fun and becoming functional, but this activation was a glimpse into the future of virtual fashion,” Maher says.
He added that the efforts at interoperability from MVFW’s organisers, including the ability for brands to token-gate certain products and experiences with Decentraland, was an upgrade. “We feel interoperability will be the key to mass adoption of digital fashion in the future. The limitation of only wearing the product inside the digital store you purchased from will cause too much friction for the average consumer; the future of digital fashion is buy once, wear everywhere.” But true interoperability between worlds is still a pipe dream. “It is still a very manual process,” says Jessie Fu, co-founder and CEO of Altr, which translated 10 archival garments into the digital realms. “We tried our best to bring all of those garments to the three different platforms, but some garments failed because of technical limitations.”
Meanwhile, multiple people reported having issues logging in to Decentraland, including not being able to access it on certain devices or at certain times. Neli Katz, founder of media brand Meteor, found that after many attempts to purchase digital wearables, he gave up.
Of course, sometimes crashes and queues can be a sign of success: 3D designer Nikki Fuego, who is already a popular creator on Decentraland, hosted a digital runway show that was so popular that it caused latency issues, so she pivoted to a private server on Decentraland, meaning she created another “realm” through which people could join — again, not a particularly welcoming operation for outsiders. Just like in the physical world, getting in during MVFW all comes down to who you know.
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