You wake up, yawn, stretch, ignore the texts from your uncle, and open your closet. It’s time to decide who you want to be today. Your Gucci sweater and Burberry trench hang neatly above a row of pristine Nike sneakers. But today you’re feeling somewhat less…human…and more like a highly intelligent mollusk. You spot the eight-armed hoodie you copped for this exact occasion. Today, you’re going to be an octopus.
Welcome to getting dressed in the metaverse, where your daily ritual of self-expression will be taken to its logical—and, probably more often than not, wildly illogical—extreme. The internet has already irrevocably altered the way we buy our clothes, and social media has changed the way we wear our clothes, but the advent of Web3 is about to radically shift how we think about fashion, period. In the near future, dressing yourself won’t merely be about throwing on a shirt and pants and heading out the door. It’ll be about choosing the very form—human, animal, object, or other-—you want to represent you at any given moment, and then adorning that avatar in gear dreamed up by designers freed from the limitations of the corporeal world.
A new wave of upstart tech companies is working to shape the future of personal style in the metaverse, and it’s joined by a growing number of labels from the fashion establishment that are diving into the space headfirst. Gucci launched a collaboration with the gaming platform Roblox in spring 2021, debuted a collection of NFTs in February, and purchased a plot of virtual land on The Sandbox—an Ethereum-based digital world—later that same month. Dolce & Gabbana netted a whopping 1,885.719 ETH (over $5.5 million at current exchange rates) with its Collezione Genesi NFTs last September and headlined the first-ever Metaverse Fashion Week on the Decentraland virtual world platform in March. In December, Balenciaga rolled out a new division dedicated to developing products and experiences for the metaverse, an effort that CEO Cédric Charbit predicts will take the house “to the next level.” Louis Vuitton, Burberry, Adidas, and Ralph Lauren have all dropped metaverse projects of their own in recent months. And, arguably most notable of all, Nike announced its acquisition of RTFKT in December by placing the NFT sneaker company’s logo alongside those of its iconic main brands: Nike, Jordan, Converse.
“I got chills when I saw that [Nike] press release,” says Brian Trunzo, the metaverse lead for the blockchain--technology company Polygon Studios, which recently announced a partnership with the Council of Fashion Designers of America to help usher fashion labels into the Web3 landscape. “You forget that not even LeBron is treated as a full subsidiary brand within Nike, so in a subtle way they were saying RTFKT is bigger than LeBron. It validated the space.”
All of those efforts are proof that digital fashion is here to stay, with the industry at large fully mobilized and invested in it. But in order for the “digital apparel market to dwarf the physical apparel market,” which Trunzo predicts will happen “within the next decade or two,” a few not-so-trivial roadblocks need to be navigated. The first and biggest hurdle is making the public at large understand what digital fashion even is, and why it even needs to care.
The bottom line is that many of us are already living most of our lives in the metaverse. “These days, I could argue that our lives in the physical world are our secondary lives,” says Bobby Kim, the cofounder of L.A. streetwear stalwart The Hundreds. In 2021, Kim launched an extremely popular NFT offshoot, Adam Bomb Squad, which clocked $8 million of sales in its first week and lets owners shop exclusive physical and digital clothing drops. “Our primary lives largely exist online.” If that’s the case, Kim contends, then the way we portray ourselves online should matter just as much—if not more—than the clothes we choose to wear on our physical bodies. “At its core, fashion is a means of self-expression and identity,” Kim says. “I think we’re at an inflection point in history where we’re going to redefine what fashion means. Now, there is no body.”
In the metaverse, you can theoretically take on any shape or form you wish. You can be shapeless, translucent, invisible. To get a little kooky and metaphysical, it means that fashion will soon evolve past a mere outward expression of our inner selves and instead become a truer manifestation of, as Kim puts it, “what your soul is.”
“Some people might identify as a blue square,” Kim says. “Some people might identify as a telephone pole. And that sounds really crazy and silly, and it might offend a lot of people, but just think about what that means. It’s not that these people actually think that they’re a telephone pole in the physical world. But for whatever reason, as art, that’s how they would like to express themselves, because it says something about them.” In other words: The form you choose to take in the metaverse serves the same purpose as the clothes you wear in the real world—the avatar itself is fashion.
The main thing standing in the way of that abstract vision of infinite possibilities? The technology hasn’t quite caught up with our boundless imaginations just yet. The processing capabilities on the average laptop or smartphone just aren’t up to snuff if we’re going to experience the seamless, high-definition visual expression most futurists are envisioning—some of the biggest platforms, like The Sandbox and Decentraland, remain stuck with blocky graphics that look straight out of an ’80s sci-fi movie in order to help them run smoothly across wide audiences. And at present, for all the hype and investment, the metaverse remains a difficult thing for most people to engage with. It’s currently a loose assembly of arenas—centralized gaming platforms, decentralized open worlds, the blockchain, social media—all competing for your money and attention, like a dizzying Moroccan bazaar.
That’s where innovators like Charli Cohen come into play. Cohen, a 32-year-old British fashion designer, has been at the forefront of the digital fashion revolution for close to a decade. She began experimenting with augmented reality alongside her physical fashion line as a means of engaging with a wider global audience, before eventually collaborating with games like Assassin’s Creed and helping to usher traditional fashion companies like Selfridges into Web3. Now, she’s looking to streamline the digital fashion experience through RSTLSS, her brand-new Paris Hilton–backed platform that aims to bust through the virtual walls currently stifling creators and consumers alike.
“We were doing more and more collaborations where we were placing products in multiple game and social environments,” Cohen says. “It was just a very convoluted process, very tricky with licensing, and not a great experience for the customers.” RSTLSS aims to eliminate all of that clunkiness, allowing users to customize wearables (i.e., digital clothing for their avatars), mint them as NFTs, and then take them into a whole range of metaverse locations—video games, open worlds, social media avatars—as well as buy a physical version to wear IRL. If you want, hypothetically, a new Billie Eilish hoodie, you can make a single purchase on RSTLSS and then wear that hoodie on Fortnite, in Decentraland, on Twitter, and to school.
As far as Cohen is concerned, all this will seem second nature to the vast majority of us before we even realize it. “Think about it this way: We’re having this conversation on Zoom,” she points out. “Nobody was having conversations on Zoom until 2020. Or with Web 2.0 social media, you had your early adopters and then suddenly it just became normal for everyone without their even really thinking about it. And in the same way social media is heavily tied to identity—you’re choosing a profile picture, you’re curating your Instagram grid—dressing yourself in digital clothing will become second nature, something you’re constantly doing.”
If and when that widespread adoption actually occurs, the nature of fashion—of identity—will be wholly upset in a way we haven’t seen in centuries. We’re living in an age where our nostalgia cycles have accelerated and amplified to the point that Y2K fashion is hotter now than it was 20 years ago—revisiting 2010s trends inevitably feels just around the bend. Maybe, for all the risks and controversies inherent in Web3 in its current incarnation, the metaverse holds the key for finally pushing fashion forward into its next evolution.
No one knows for sure exactly what that next phase looks like, but it doesn’t seem like the idea of brands is in danger of going anywhere: They remain an important element of identity and expression, and names like Gucci and Nike continue to hold plenty of cultural cachet in the physical and digital realms alike. If anything, the metaverse will simply give you new avenues to engage with the brands you already love—and the new ones that’ll emerge as the tides continue to change.
To that end, while some experts believe you’ll someday be spending more on digital fashion, it’ll likely never fully replace your real-life clothing. Instead, we’ll eventually reach a weirder, more fascinating space altogether, where rather than our metaverse garments taking cues from their physical counterparts—owning a digital copy of Balenciaga trousers that premiered on the runway, say—the opposite begins to happen. What will it look like when the clothes you put on your web-footed, wing-armed, seven-eyed avatar start to influence the clothes you wear to the office? How will designers translate the freedom of identity and expression we’ve all been granted online for the times we choose to unplug and interact in person?
Fashion—for all of its perceived frivolities—is only going to grow more essential, more bizarre, more expressive, more artful, more powerful as we step deeper and deeper into our crypto-fueled future.
Yang-Yi Goh is GQ’s style editor.
A version of this story originally appeared in the June/July 2022 issue with the title “The Wild Arrival of Web3 Fashion”