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A gown from Carolina Herrera’s Spring/Summer 2023 collection won’t be available for purchase until next year, but a digital counterpart has already sold for more than $5,000 on Roblox, the virtual world platform that has become an important digital fashion playground for brands including Gucci, Tommy Hilfiger, Ralph Lauren and Burberry.
During the designer brand’s 12 September show at New York Fashion Week, supermodel Karlie Kloss closed the collection in a yellow floral belted gown. Simultaneously, Kloss appeared on Roblox wearing a digital version of the piece reinterpreted by the Roblox creator known as Lovespun. The dress was available immediately for sale in the Roblox avatar marketplace at 500 Robux (about $5). It was available for four hours and sold 432 units. In the week since, it has reached an average resale price of 188,257 Robux, or about $1,883. Resale price tends to fluctuate based on supply, and the dress has now sold multiple times for more than the equivalent of $1,000 (in Robux) and one for more than $5,000.
“It is exciting to see that there’s been such a great response to the dress, and the fact that there is such appetite and interest in celebrating fabulous fashion no matter where — from our runway show at The Plaza Hotel all the way to the metaverse,” designer Wes Gordon said via email.
This dress is the first time the brand has appeared on Roblox. It was made using Roblox’s new “layered clothing” technology, which enables more realistic-looking 3D clothing that fits any avatar body type. To bring the dress to life on Roblox, creator Lovespun reinterpreted Gordon’s printed florals as pixels — or voxels, referring to the three-dimensional version of bits and bytes that make up clothing on Roblox.
Roblox has become an important platform for illustrating the value that young consumers place on digital goods. Also at New York Fashion Week this season, Tommy Hilfiger extended the brand’s “see-now, buy-now” concept into “see-now, buy-now, wear-now” as digital versions of its runway looks became available on Roblox immediately during the 11 September show. Karlie Kloss, who Gordon said presented the idea to the brand, has also spent time on Roblox with her “Fashion Klosette Designer Showcase”, with five limited-edition digital fashion pop-up shops in July, offering both paid and free items.
“I believe there will be a deeply symbiotic relationship between physical and digital fashion and both will be reflections of how we want to express ourselves… it is only a matter of time before we see a more parallel relationship between what we see on the runways and the designs we wear and own in real life and in the digital world,” says Kloss, adding that this Herrera pilot is “only scratching the surface” of what is planned to continue to bridge these worlds.
For the most high-profile digital product drops on Roblox, the virtual versions can sell for more than their physical counterparts. In May 2021, digital Gucci bags were reselling for more than the physical versions after becoming available in the Gucci Garden experience; one bag, originally sold for about $5.50 on Roblox, resold for more than $4,000. Retail prices for the physical bags are in the $2,000-$3,000 range. Recent analysis from gaming data platform Geeiq revealed that its community prizes aesthetics just as much as — or more than — scarcity, according to the sales performance of a recent collection of digital-only Burberry bags.
As Carolina Herrera tests the waters of Roblox, brands including Nike, Gucci and Tommy Hilfiger now operate permanent worlds on the platform, whose community of more than 50 million daily users skews about 40 per cent female and 70 per cent younger than 24, according to data from Geeiq. In a recent conversation, Hilfiger shared his belief that when items become popular on Roblox, they tend to translate into physical sales.
Limited items specifically hold value on Roblox because the select players who own them must then decide whether to keep or resell the item, says Lovespun, adding that this appeal is heightened because it’s a replica of a luxury fashion runway item worn by Karlie Kloss during NYFW. “We chose to quietly release the dress, which then became a limited Roblox item after 24 hours. People only had a few hours to grab it, so that surprise factor played a huge part in the success and interest in the dress.”
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