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Gucci goes digital

Avatars, identity, digital fashion, and generational change

Gucci just launched its first digital-only sneaker. The Virtual 25 cost £11.99 through the Gucci app, and you can wear them in your social media photos, and on your VR Chat and Roblox avatars.

Lots of brands have been experimenting with digital fashion and cosmetics, like L’Oreal’s Signature Faces, but to date it’s mostly been stunts and experimentation. Now they’re taking their first steps into earning money from them; you can buy Puma in Zepeto, Adidas in Aglet, and Oscar de la Renta in Drest.

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Digital Fashion: Avatars and Virtual Identity

Inspired by two stories last week—Ralph Lauren thinks people want to shop their Bitmoji, and Helsinki Fashion Week Explores New Frontiers With Purely Digital Format—I made this short film about digital fashion:

Not long after I made it, I read Is Direct To Avatar The Next Direct To Consumer?, an excellent article by Cathy Hackl with Ryan Gill explaining digital fashion and the D2A model:

Direct-to-avatar (D2A) refers to an emerging business model selling products directly to avatars (D2A) – or digital identities – bypassing any supply chain management like dropshipping, logistics of how to get a physical product to a consumer’s door.

Ryan Gill, co-founder and CEO of Crucible

And then a further article, From Animal Crossing To Digital-Only Dresses, Is Fashion Becoming Our New Virtual Reality?, by Hannah Banks-Walker, on digital fashion in gaming and social:

The pandemic has accelerated our acceptance of blending the real world with more and more digital experiences.

Matthew Drinkwater, Head of Innovation Agency at London College of Fashion

There’s an interesting point where three accelerating trends—the use of avatars in virtual spaces, the digital intermediation of our identities, and fashion brands exploring digital tools—are meeting.

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The Celts, Art, Identity, Intelligence and Vanity

This week I went to the British Museum to see the Celts: Art and Identity exhibit. It was wonderful, a great curation of amazing objects. It finishes at the end of the month, so I advise you to go if you can.

Some of the objects are over 2,000 years old, yet beautifully crafted—such as the Great Torc of Snettisham, made from 64 fine threads of mixed gold and silver, and moulded terminals with tiny embossed details hammered by hand with great precision.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/52/Britishmuseumsnettishamgreattorc.jpg
See page for author [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons
We tend to think of our ancient ancestors as savages, yet as Warren Ellis reminded me through one of his fourth-wall breaking medieval characters in his book, Crécy:

These things are going to look primitive to you, but you have to remember that we’re not stupid. We have the same intelligence as you. We simply don’t have the same cumulative knowledge you do. So we apply our intelligence to what we have.

One thing I found very interesting is that, in Britain at least, the historical record shows that finds of mirrors (polished bronze) are followed shortly by finds of combs and cosmetics. As soon as we were able to see ourselves, we wanted to look better. That capacity to make objects of vanity was always there, but it took a discovery to unlock it. This makes me think of the adjacent possible theory:

The strange and beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore them. Each new combination opens up the possibility of other new combinations.

It also makes me think of ‘selfie culture’. History shows that we always wanted to show off pictures of ourselves, but we didn’t have the tools; painted portraits were expensive and time-consuming, as was early film. But affordable phone cameras and online social networks made the cultural shift possible. It’s not that we’ve suddenly become vain, but that we’ve always desired to be vain and are now able to fulfil that.