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Playing "The Outer Worlds 2": smaller than "Starfield", but with more humour
by Philipp Rüegg
The first Metaverse Fashion Week is an uninspired wasteland
31/3/2022
Translation: Veronica Bielawski
The graphics are glitching, the browser’s crashing – and I’m wondering what the hell I’m doing in this pixelated 3D world from the 90s. In my eyes, the event in Decentraland has little to do with fashion.
I’m standing in the front row of Dolce & Gabbana’s runway show. My neighbour’s fluorescent wings flutter around my ears. Other front row companions have bright pink tube TVs instead of heads and are wearing clothes that look like melted rainbows.
It’s 24 March, and I’m at the opening catwalk of the first Metaverse Fashion Week. Over the span of four days, fashion shows, panel discussions and shop openings are to take place here, freely accessible to the whole world. Among the participants are big names like Tommy Hilfiger and Paco Rabanne; fast-fashion brands Mango and Forever 21; and pioneers of digital-only textile craftsmanship, Auroboros and The Fabricant.
Metaverse Fashion Week (MVFW) takes place in the browser-based 3D world of Decentraland, which looks like a video game from the late 90s. The huffing and puffing Macbook Air forces me to set the graphics to low. The result is an even more rudimentary-looking virtual world.
In Decentraland, one size fits all
By the way, Brandy Melville-like conditions prevail in this land. The rule is one size fits all – as long as you’re a size XS or S. You can’t change the shape of your avatar’s body, so there are only thin bodies in Decentraland. So much for the limitless and inclusive metaverse.
Glitches and crashes galore
I start by beaming my avatar to an exhibition of designer Paco Rabanne and artist Victor Vasarely. There, I navigate my way through a convoluted museum setting, lack of virtual coordination and all. The graphics glitch, the browser crashes, and the field-of-view control via touchpad is so cumbersome that I desperately wish I could simply click through an Instagram picture spread with decent resolution and no metaverse fuss.
It takes me half an hour to find said lift and another 15 minutes to understand how to operate it. I see other what must be other Decentraland newcomers get in and out of the elevator without ever leaving the ground floor. Finally, at the top floor, I find out that my efforts were in vain: the panel never started in the first place, much to the confusion of everyone present.
Dolce & Gabbana delivers the anticlimax
Amid a pixelated light show extravaganza, the Italian fashion house finally sends its feline avatars down the runway to showcase its collection of wearable NFTs (non-fungible tokens, sort of like digital proofs of ownership). I feel like I’m trapped in a retro video-game version of the TV show «The Masked Singer». It’s hard to believe that these amateurish-looking outfits were created by a billion-dollar designer house. At least the fiasco only lasts eight minutes.
Crypto FOMO and the big marketing lie
Back in 2021, zeitgeisty luxury brand Gucci sold its Dionysus bag for about 4,000 francs (more than it costs in real life!) on the gaming platform Roblox. And RTFKT made about million francs in turnover in just seven minutes by selling a pair of NFT sneakers. It comes as no surprise, then, that this is creating a massive case of FOMO in the industry. In this case, the fear of missing out on the ultimate crypto gold rush.
Dear traditional fashion houses, don’t embarrass yourselves
Traditional high-end fashion houses with little NFT experience rushing into the digital spheres seems doomed to fail. When Italian company Etro announced a promising «Liquid Paisley» pattern on Instagram – pretty animation and all – ahead of its Decentraland show, I was definitely interested. When I see the final result in the metaverse, I can’t help but laugh. This supposedly dynamic material of the future could hardly look more static.
Sure, the metaverse is still in its infancy and will become massively more powerful in the next few years, just like hardware. After all, 30 years ago, when the World Wide Web was still in its prepubescent phase, few people could have imagined the sheer dimension the Internet would have in 2022. But until the metaverse has matured, I see no reason to subject myself to this patchwork of pixels – let alone spend money on it.
Has endless love for shoulder pads, Stratocasters and sashimi, but a limited tolerance for bad impressions of her Eastern Swiss dialect.
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