Honestly, I am not too old for the metaverse, and to be honest, no one is; because in the metaverse we are all what we would like to be, with no age limits and no appearance limits.
I live it every day on INSAGRAM, where now everyone, even the supersonic model of the new media campaign, publishes her image only through a filter. The new generations live through filters, whether of GUCCI, LOUIS VUITTON or those of their favourite instragamers. Teenagers live ‘filtered’, but adults are not different. The average age of Instagram users declares between 25-34 years, exactly the range of customers the world’s biggest brands are targeting. Instagram has more than two billion monthly active users, 95 million published photos per day, of which almost 20 % are edited with filters (source: Relatable).
This means that the metaverse already exists and more and more we desire it because more and more we want to appear different from who we are and we seek the fulfilment of our desires without making the effort to fulfil them.
We all wear real clothes but more and more we desire to wear digital clothes. I am convinced that the metaverse is, faster and faster, reshaping our future, and the future of the fashion system. We will move from Fast Fashion to Meta Fashion.
Our avatars need clothes, as we need clothes, and none of us want to be standardised. The more anonymous you are in reality, the more you will seek recognition in the metaverse. Right now, the metaverse is still a playground, but the overlapping of worlds is very fast. Spinning mills and designers can start thinking about launching a first digital yarn, a meta yarn, digital only or figital only.
Wouldn’t it be great to be able to attend the big Monday meeting, comfortably dressed in overalls, from the living room of your home, but see yourself represented in the office meeting room by your own perfectly dressed and groomed avatar?
Wouldn’t that be much more practical, and definitely sustainable, as they say these days?
In the metaverse, this fantasy can be realised; one can have meetings from the comfort of one’s home, one can attend a fashion show, one can choose a limited edition outfit to show off at the annual planning meeting, one can even go to la premier at the theatre without having to leave one’s PC.
And the cyber designer knows this and is already drawing.
What are the frontiers of style when there are no frontiers?
In the beginning this transformation was scary, as always the unknown attracts but frightens. To date, only the most avant-garde stylists have begun to present themselves on the metaverse, but watch out, it is really time to be there. Because if in the real world times are human, in the digital world times are measured in beats and minutes turn into seconds.
And will the cyber designer be free to create his own style? NO. There is already a trend being created, the first fashion shows, the first models have sold out.
What are spinning mills waiting for to present cyber collections? The historical moment is frightening, but the metaverse comes to our aid, with cyber yarns, tactile, luminescent, floating. The new yarn frontier is thermal sensitivity.
What will be the first cyber yarn? Which will be the most innovative showroom that will present the cyber collections by exclusive invitation?
The keyword of the metaverse is not digitalisation, as many think, but exclusivity. For contingent reasons, the metaverse during Covid was open to all and the shows were visible and the collections almost tangible. What makes the fashion world magical is the exclusivity, the uniqueness, the absolute and definitely inaccessible but highly desirable beauty.
The next cyber stylist will therefore not only have to be endowed with enormous humanity, to best humanise a virtual reality in which to feel at ease, but will have to be highly sophisticated and avant-garde. He will have to be able to interact with spinning mills in order to create digitisable yarns that are both strongly textured and strongly characterised by their physicality so as to be easily distinguishable from the traditional yarns presented in the physical collections.
The essentiality of the Metaverse is the ability to interact with the real world with a close interchange. Let’s imagine yarns that react to heat, let’s imagine collections that can be presented on the metaverse, that can be actually worn but still maintain a connection to the metaverse that can interact and project a new self-image just through the viewer and the screen.
The essentiality of the metaverse is the ability to interact with the real world with a close interchange. Let’s imagine yarns that react to heat, let’s imagine collections that can be presented on the metaverse, that can be worn for real but keep alive the link with the metaverse that can interact and project a new self-image just through the viewer and the screen.
Let’s imagine technical yarns, to be worn while participating in virtual sports lessons but that can visualise, through the different temperatures of one’s real body parts, the activity of the muscles during different exercises.
Let us imagine and create, because the only real limitation of the Metaverse is the lack of imagination.
