NFTs in Fashion: A Growing Craze

Fashion has long been an outlet for the average person to show off their personality in material form. Being the breeding grounds for a multitude of aesthetics, it makes sense for fashion to be adapting to the digital world. As AI and VR increasingly make their way into daily lives, NFT clothing begins its own emergence into the fashion world. At first, it may seem ridiculous: who would pay thousands of dollars for a piece of clothing you can’t even wear in real life? But for people around the world, these NFTs (digital certifications of ownership) have become the new status symbols of the decade. 

Courtesy of Business Insider

Garnering attention from top brands including YSL, Prada, Givenchy, and even Louis Vuitton, NFTs provide a way to create designs with unconventional textiles and silhouettes defying gravity. It encourages these brands and independent creators to test the limits of their creativity in the fashion world, employing tactics that are unimaginable in the physical world. NFT based fashion companies such as The Fabricant have been surfacing, creating designs including glowing, iridescent, and mirror coated garments. With the average person spending over 2 hours a day on social media, our physical and virtual worlds seem to converge. A once dystopian concept doesn’t seem so foreign anymore, even used in contexts such as offering a competitive edge to influencers on TikTok and Instagram. The digitalization of everyday experiences meets Gen Z’s cravings for creative looks and provides a new space to explore these interests.

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Metaverse Fashion Week harnessed this growing craze and created a fashion space for solely NFT creations. Featuring a layout similar to club fairs, many luxury and mid tier brands such as Tommy Hilfiger and Prada displayed their virtual designs. The 2023 MVFW presented a Future Heritage theme, an ode to the intersection between the digital world and fashion. Individuals attended the show through online avatars which bypassed the usual selectiveness and lack of spots at typical fashion week runways. As thousands of people were able to access MVFW, it's interesting to see how NFT fashion provides accessible experiences for average consumers. 

Courtesy of Wired

However, as NFT fashion facilitates new reaches for creativity, our environment continues to be at the expense. While NFT fashion has widely been praised as an alternative to the environmentally harmful practices of conventional fashion, the process of buying and selling a single NFT uses more electricity than an average family over 9 days. In response to the ever advancing world, new and innovative experiences are in demand, slowly erasing the fine line between environmentally responsible consumption and wasteful practices.

Featured Image Courtesy of Elite Labels