Daily news and stories covering everything from the Fashion System, Investment, and AI to WEB3 and Crypto that truly matter in Metaverse Fashion.
HAS THE INTERNET MADE FASHION SELF-CONSCIOUS? | [FASHION SYSTEM]
Vogue Business
👚 This past weekend I watched the entirety of the Disney+ series Becoming Karl Lagerfeld. I excused my binge with the fact that I was somewhat on assignment for Vogue Runway. I was to watch the show and see if there was anything worth writing home, err, the website, about. I had lots of thoughts, but the last episode, in which a young and fast-ascending Thierry Mugler makes an appearance, gave me the most to think about.
👔 The story goes that Pierre Bergé, who presided over the Chambre Syndicale du prêt-à-porter (which he created in the ’70s to unite couturiers and ready-to-wear designers under one organisation), had some thoughts about the runway extravaganzas Mugler and Jean Paul Gaultier, along with their rising class of fellow designers, were putting on. “The clothes should be the spectacle,” he said, reprimanding them. But Mugler et al persisted — in the end, the tide shifted in their direction and fashion moved away from couture salons and intimate presentations.
📲 We seem to be in a similar situation today. Macro-presentations have once more become the norm. Each season, shows get bigger and louder. But the June shows in Paris, a menswear and couture twofer, cemented what has been in the air for some time now; the pendulum is swinging. Brazenly vying for attention, it seems, is passé. An X (formerly Twitter) post I read the other day summarises this: “Posting on Instagram feels so cringe now.” It’s the internet, I thought, that is causing this shift. We’ve become self-conscious. This tool that has given fashion and its makers and promoters access and exposure has also given onlookers too much information. Now they see right through us. They know too much, and we’re retracting as a result.
🏠 Daniel Roseberry changed the venue for his autumn 2024 couture show this past season. He moved from the grandeur of the Petit Palais to the privacy of the Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild basement for a smaller showcase. Backstage, as my editor Nicole Phelps reported for Vogue Runway, Roseberry said that he wanted to leave behind his reputation as a “meme-weaver”. He has, after all, made some of the most memeable couture of the past decade in only the last couple of seasons. Remember those viral animal heads and robo-babies?
⚔ Being overexposed online is a somewhat double-edged sword. The work might be popular, sure, and even well received, but it very easily becomes reduced to that. Virality. A TikTok or two, a very funny meme. This comes with its own dose of anxiety. Fashion is pop culture, but it can also be very serious — and self-serious — and being the butt of the joke is not always ideal.
POLYGON WILL MIGRATE MATIC TOKENS TO POL DURING SEPTEMBER UPGRADE | [VALUE PROPOSITION]
Decrypt
⛓ Polygon developers have scheduled the MATIC to POL token swap to begin September 4, according to a July 18 blog post. The migration has been in the works for a long time—the team first announced the plan this time last year.
🌐 Polygon developers decided to include a transition from the current MATIC token to a new POL token in a major protocol upgrade. The token swap is part of a broader move for Polygon to become a “network of networks.”
👾 The POL upgrade was implemented on July 17 on a test network in order to identify any potential issues such as bugs and vulnerabilities, according to the Polygon Labs post. This low-stakes test is meant to make it less likely for the upgrade to go sideways on the main network where real users and real assets are located.
👛 The team touts it as a “3rd generation token” with the first generation being Bitcoin and the second one Ethereum. After September 4, POL will serve as the native gas and staking asset for Polygon’s PoS blockchain in addition to validating chains in its aggregated network ecosystem.
✅ POL will allow holders to become validators on Polygon-based chains while MATIC will be deprecated as part of the upgrade. Today’s announcement highlighted that users holding MATIC on Polygon’s proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain will have their tokens upgraded into POL with no action required on their part. Still, a remote procedure call settings update in the wallet may be needed to ensure that the tokens are listed as POL instead of MATIC.
WILL THE US OR CHINA LEAD THE GLOBAL LUXURY WATCH INDUSTRY? | [FASHION SYSTEM]
Jing Daily
💸 For more than a decade, the Greater China region has powered the growth of the Swiss watch industry. Between 2010 and 2023, mainland China and Hong Kong jointly imported 67.5 billion Swiss francs ($75.5 billion) worth of Swiss watches, nearly twice as much as the US. This accounted for nearly 23% of global Swiss watch exports over that time period, according to FHH historical data sourced by Jing Daily.
💎 However, Greater China’s dominance has waned since the onset of the pandemic, while the influence of the US has increased. In the first four months of 2024, Swiss watch exports to China and Hong Kong fell by around 18%, while exports to the US rose by 4%.
🧙♀️ Watch industry analyst Oliver Müller estimates that the luxury watch market will remain weak in greater China until mid-2025, while the US will continue to be the top global market for the next two years at least. Müller notes that Greater China may have delivered “El Dorado growth with minimal effort from the watch brands” over the past two decades, but such rapid growth is unsustainable in the long term.
⌚ Currently, Greater China generates only 10% to 15% of Hublot’s global sales. Still, growth in the region is important for Hublot, “because the average price of Hublot watches sold in Greater China is the highest among all our markets,” reveals Ricardo Guadalupe, CEO of Hublot. The brand’s higher-priced Big Bang and ceramic watches perform well in Greater China, whereas entry-level watches are more popular in the US – Hublot’s biggest market.
🏠 According to Edouard Aubin, equity analyst at Morgan Stanley, middle-income consumers in China are currently under economic pressure, “because two-thirds of Chinese household wealth is tied up in real estate which is depreciating,” adding that even though the Chinese stock market has seen a slight recovery recently, it is not enough to offset the negative impact of the housing market.
COACH LEAPS INTO THE METAVERSE WITH SPRING 2024 COLLECTION ON ROBLOX AND ZEPETO | [METAPHYSICS]
WWD
🌴 It will introduce its spring 2024 collection on Roblox and Zepeto on Thursday. This move supports Coach’s “Find Your Courage” ad campaign, fostering self-expression, and allows users to explore their identities with themed digital wearables available in Roblox’s Fashion Famous 2, Fashion Klossette and Zepeto, starting Friday.
🗣 “We’ve been doing a lot of experiences in the physical space. Knowing that we launched the new campaign for spring, this felt like the right time [to enter gaming],” said Giovanni Zaccariello, senior vice president, global visual experience at Coach, on Wednesday. He said the spring campaign, launched last February, focused on self-expression and created five worlds, which connect very well with Zepeto and Roblox. He called this the entry point in gaming for Coach. “It’s step one of many,” he said.
👾 Coach selected self-expression gaming platforms that connected to the company’s “Find Your Courage” brand positioning, he said. Through an avatar, players can select who they want to be and self-express through clothing and bags. Coach’s Tabby bag was much more dominant in these games than in other games they researched, and that’s how they landed on Roblox and Zepeto.
🤖 Roblox research shows that 84 percent of Gen Z said their avatar-style influences their real-world fashion choices, and more than 50 percent prioritize their avatar’s style over their physical appearance. By choosing Roblox and Zepeto, Coach said it aims to reach millions through immersive virtual and social experiences that merge fashion with digital self-expression.
👻 The company’s “Find Your Courage” campaign follows virtual human Imma as she embarks on a journey of self-discovery and ultimately finds the courage to be real. On her journey, Imma travels through five different themed worlds, each created to speak to a different step in the journey toward self-expression, and each with its own set of ready-to-wear and accessories. Coach will bring three of these worlds into the immersive and social avatar space.
META IN TALKS TO BUY 5% STAKE IN RAY-BAN MAKER ESSILORLUXOTTICA, WSJ REPORTS | [METAPHYSICS]
Reuters
👾The potential deal could give Meta further control over the roadmap for the smart glasses at a time when tech giants including Apple are investing millions to create cutting-edge gadgets based on augmented- and mixed-reality technologies.
🌴The eyewear company was formed in 2018 through a merger of France's Essilor and Italy's Luxottica. Delfin, the holding company owned by the family of Luxottica's late founder Leonardo Del Vecchio, is its largest investor, with a stake of nearly 33%.
📈Analysts have been positive about the latest generation of the glasses, which include a Meta AI assistant and are capable of livestreaming broadcasts of what a user is seeing directly to Facebook and Instagram. "We believe Meta's Ray-Ban Smart Glasses may only be a generation or two away from finding product market fit," Bernstein analysts said earlier this month. A third-generation of the glasses is expected to be ready by the 2025 holiday-shopping season, according to the WSJ report.
INCUBATOR TO RUNAWAY: HOW CHINA NURTURES FASHION DESIGNERS | [FASHION SYSTEM]
JingDaily
🌹 China is birthing some of the most exciting and promising names in fashion today. From Jacques Wei to Sifān Chen, the mainland’s roster of talent is burgeoning; and the industry is taking note.
👠 This past year has seen the Shanghai Fashion Week calendar receive notably more airtime compared to previous seasons, while the red carpet stamp of approval from Western celebrities has brought homegrown names onto the international stage.
📉 Despite this, the mainland’s independent newcomers – some fresh out of fashion school – still face immense challenges, such as building a business in a precarious economy, timid consumer spending, and intensifying competition.
🗣 "China's open and diverse local consumers and production manufacturers are, themselves, the greatest support for young designers in China," Jingwei Yin, founder of rising label Oude Waag tells Jing Daily. "China's fashion industry has only just begun to develop, and it will take more time to develop the creative level of talent alongside market demand."
✈ Consequently, many are relocating to fashion hubs like Paris and New York, where established support networks and clearer paths to commercial success offer more promising opportunities than those available at home. Their uprooting arrives at a time when a number of local initiatives aimed at supporting domestic indie designers, such as the Yu Prize and Lane Crawford’s Creative Call Out, have dwindled.
Daily news and stories covering everything from the Fashion System, Investment, and AI to WEB3 and Crypto that truly matter in Metaverse Fashion.
HAS THE INTERNET MADE FASHION SELF-CONSCIOUS? | [FASHION SYSTEM]
Vogue Business
👚 This past weekend I watched the entirety of the Disney+ series Becoming Karl Lagerfeld. I excused my binge with the fact that I was somewhat on assignment for Vogue Runway. I was to watch the show and see if there was anything worth writing home, err, the website, about. I had lots of thoughts, but the last episode, in which a young and fast-ascending Thierry Mugler makes an appearance, gave me the most to think about.
👔 The story goes that Pierre Bergé, who presided over the Chambre Syndicale du prêt-à-porter (which he created in the ’70s to unite couturiers and ready-to-wear designers under one organisation), had some thoughts about the runway extravaganzas Mugler and Jean Paul Gaultier, along with their rising class of fellow designers, were putting on. “The clothes should be the spectacle,” he said, reprimanding them. But Mugler et al persisted — in the end, the tide shifted in their direction and fashion moved away from couture salons and intimate presentations.
📲 We seem to be in a similar situation today. Macro-presentations have once more become the norm. Each season, shows get bigger and louder. But the June shows in Paris, a menswear and couture twofer, cemented what has been in the air for some time now; the pendulum is swinging. Brazenly vying for attention, it seems, is passé. An X (formerly Twitter) post I read the other day summarises this: “Posting on Instagram feels so cringe now.” It’s the internet, I thought, that is causing this shift. We’ve become self-conscious. This tool that has given fashion and its makers and promoters access and exposure has also given onlookers too much information. Now they see right through us. They know too much, and we’re retracting as a result.
🏠 Daniel Roseberry changed the venue for his autumn 2024 couture show this past season. He moved from the grandeur of the Petit Palais to the privacy of the Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild basement for a smaller showcase. Backstage, as my editor Nicole Phelps reported for Vogue Runway, Roseberry said that he wanted to leave behind his reputation as a “meme-weaver”. He has, after all, made some of the most memeable couture of the past decade in only the last couple of seasons. Remember those viral animal heads and robo-babies?
⚔ Being overexposed online is a somewhat double-edged sword. The work might be popular, sure, and even well received, but it very easily becomes reduced to that. Virality. A TikTok or two, a very funny meme. This comes with its own dose of anxiety. Fashion is pop culture, but it can also be very serious — and self-serious — and being the butt of the joke is not always ideal.
POLYGON WILL MIGRATE MATIC TOKENS TO POL DURING SEPTEMBER UPGRADE | [VALUE PROPOSITION]
Decrypt
⛓ Polygon developers have scheduled the MATIC to POL token swap to begin September 4, according to a July 18 blog post. The migration has been in the works for a long time—the team first announced the plan this time last year.
🌐 Polygon developers decided to include a transition from the current MATIC token to a new POL token in a major protocol upgrade. The token swap is part of a broader move for Polygon to become a “network of networks.”
👾 The POL upgrade was implemented on July 17 on a test network in order to identify any potential issues such as bugs and vulnerabilities, according to the Polygon Labs post. This low-stakes test is meant to make it less likely for the upgrade to go sideways on the main network where real users and real assets are located.
👛 The team touts it as a “3rd generation token” with the first generation being Bitcoin and the second one Ethereum. After September 4, POL will serve as the native gas and staking asset for Polygon’s PoS blockchain in addition to validating chains in its aggregated network ecosystem.
✅ POL will allow holders to become validators on Polygon-based chains while MATIC will be deprecated as part of the upgrade. Today’s announcement highlighted that users holding MATIC on Polygon’s proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain will have their tokens upgraded into POL with no action required on their part. Still, a remote procedure call settings update in the wallet may be needed to ensure that the tokens are listed as POL instead of MATIC.
WILL THE US OR CHINA LEAD THE GLOBAL LUXURY WATCH INDUSTRY? | [FASHION SYSTEM]
Jing Daily
💸 For more than a decade, the Greater China region has powered the growth of the Swiss watch industry. Between 2010 and 2023, mainland China and Hong Kong jointly imported 67.5 billion Swiss francs ($75.5 billion) worth of Swiss watches, nearly twice as much as the US. This accounted for nearly 23% of global Swiss watch exports over that time period, according to FHH historical data sourced by Jing Daily.
💎 However, Greater China’s dominance has waned since the onset of the pandemic, while the influence of the US has increased. In the first four months of 2024, Swiss watch exports to China and Hong Kong fell by around 18%, while exports to the US rose by 4%.
🧙♀️ Watch industry analyst Oliver Müller estimates that the luxury watch market will remain weak in greater China until mid-2025, while the US will continue to be the top global market for the next two years at least. Müller notes that Greater China may have delivered “El Dorado growth with minimal effort from the watch brands” over the past two decades, but such rapid growth is unsustainable in the long term.
⌚ Currently, Greater China generates only 10% to 15% of Hublot’s global sales. Still, growth in the region is important for Hublot, “because the average price of Hublot watches sold in Greater China is the highest among all our markets,” reveals Ricardo Guadalupe, CEO of Hublot. The brand’s higher-priced Big Bang and ceramic watches perform well in Greater China, whereas entry-level watches are more popular in the US – Hublot’s biggest market.
🏠 According to Edouard Aubin, equity analyst at Morgan Stanley, middle-income consumers in China are currently under economic pressure, “because two-thirds of Chinese household wealth is tied up in real estate which is depreciating,” adding that even though the Chinese stock market has seen a slight recovery recently, it is not enough to offset the negative impact of the housing market.
COACH LEAPS INTO THE METAVERSE WITH SPRING 2024 COLLECTION ON ROBLOX AND ZEPETO | [METAPHYSICS]
WWD
🌴 It will introduce its spring 2024 collection on Roblox and Zepeto on Thursday. This move supports Coach’s “Find Your Courage” ad campaign, fostering self-expression, and allows users to explore their identities with themed digital wearables available in Roblox’s Fashion Famous 2, Fashion Klossette and Zepeto, starting Friday.
🗣 “We’ve been doing a lot of experiences in the physical space. Knowing that we launched the new campaign for spring, this felt like the right time [to enter gaming],” said Giovanni Zaccariello, senior vice president, global visual experience at Coach, on Wednesday. He said the spring campaign, launched last February, focused on self-expression and created five worlds, which connect very well with Zepeto and Roblox. He called this the entry point in gaming for Coach. “It’s step one of many,” he said.
👾 Coach selected self-expression gaming platforms that connected to the company’s “Find Your Courage” brand positioning, he said. Through an avatar, players can select who they want to be and self-express through clothing and bags. Coach’s Tabby bag was much more dominant in these games than in other games they researched, and that’s how they landed on Roblox and Zepeto.
🤖 Roblox research shows that 84 percent of Gen Z said their avatar-style influences their real-world fashion choices, and more than 50 percent prioritize their avatar’s style over their physical appearance. By choosing Roblox and Zepeto, Coach said it aims to reach millions through immersive virtual and social experiences that merge fashion with digital self-expression.
👻 The company’s “Find Your Courage” campaign follows virtual human Imma as she embarks on a journey of self-discovery and ultimately finds the courage to be real. On her journey, Imma travels through five different themed worlds, each created to speak to a different step in the journey toward self-expression, and each with its own set of ready-to-wear and accessories. Coach will bring three of these worlds into the immersive and social avatar space.
META IN TALKS TO BUY 5% STAKE IN RAY-BAN MAKER ESSILORLUXOTTICA, WSJ REPORTS | [METAPHYSICS]
Reuters
👾The potential deal could give Meta further control over the roadmap for the smart glasses at a time when tech giants including Apple are investing millions to create cutting-edge gadgets based on augmented- and mixed-reality technologies.
🌴The eyewear company was formed in 2018 through a merger of France's Essilor and Italy's Luxottica. Delfin, the holding company owned by the family of Luxottica's late founder Leonardo Del Vecchio, is its largest investor, with a stake of nearly 33%.
📈Analysts have been positive about the latest generation of the glasses, which include a Meta AI assistant and are capable of livestreaming broadcasts of what a user is seeing directly to Facebook and Instagram. "We believe Meta's Ray-Ban Smart Glasses may only be a generation or two away from finding product market fit," Bernstein analysts said earlier this month. A third-generation of the glasses is expected to be ready by the 2025 holiday-shopping season, according to the WSJ report.
INCUBATOR TO RUNAWAY: HOW CHINA NURTURES FASHION DESIGNERS | [FASHION SYSTEM]
JingDaily
🌹 China is birthing some of the most exciting and promising names in fashion today. From Jacques Wei to Sifān Chen, the mainland’s roster of talent is burgeoning; and the industry is taking note.
👠 This past year has seen the Shanghai Fashion Week calendar receive notably more airtime compared to previous seasons, while the red carpet stamp of approval from Western celebrities has brought homegrown names onto the international stage.
📉 Despite this, the mainland’s independent newcomers – some fresh out of fashion school – still face immense challenges, such as building a business in a precarious economy, timid consumer spending, and intensifying competition.
🗣 "China's open and diverse local consumers and production manufacturers are, themselves, the greatest support for young designers in China," Jingwei Yin, founder of rising label Oude Waag tells Jing Daily. "China's fashion industry has only just begun to develop, and it will take more time to develop the creative level of talent alongside market demand."
✈ Consequently, many are relocating to fashion hubs like Paris and New York, where established support networks and clearer paths to commercial success offer more promising opportunities than those available at home. Their uprooting arrives at a time when a number of local initiatives aimed at supporting domestic indie designers, such as the Yu Prize and Lane Crawford’s Creative Call Out, have dwindled.
Daily news and stories covering everything from the Fashion System, Investment, and AI to WEB3 and Crypto that truly matter in Metaverse Fashion.