Weekly news and stories covering everything from the Fashion System, Investment, and AI to WEB3 and Crypto that truly matter in Metaverse Fashion.
THE JOURNEY TO METAVERSE FASHION WEEK 2024 BEGINS | [PRESS-RELEASE]
The Metaverse Fashion Council is thrilled to announce that the Metaverse Fashion Week that is programmed for the 20th-24th of November 2024 will take place at the San Francisco City Hall!
The Metaverse Fashion Week, is a global event that will continuously happen during 4 days non-stop around the whole around, through all the time zones. The culmination of the Metaverse Fashion Week will take place on 24th on November at the San Francisco City Hall, the most beautiful building in California.
“I'm beyond thrilled to finally spill the best-kept secret: the grand finale of Metaverse Fashion Week 2024 will take place at the iconic San Francisco City Hall, right in the heart of our beloved Silicon Valley! 🌟 Don’t miss out—join the METAVERSE FASHION COUNCIL today and unlock all the exclusive privileges of the biggest and most influential community in the metaverse!” - said Anna Karenina, the founder of Metaverse Fashion Council.
Additionally, the Metaverse Fashion Council is launching the Metaverse Fashion Awards, which aims to recognize the most influential brands, people, and companies across a wide range of categories, from the TOP 10 startups to the TOP 10 Metaverse Fashion cities. The final awards ceremony will take place on November 24th at San Francisco City Hall.
Finally, the Metaverse Fashion Council invites everyone to become an active member of our community and contribute to our collective goals. Membership with the Metaverse Fashion Council grants you access to:
MYAVANA RAISES 5.9. MILLION US DOLLARS TO DRIVE HAIR INNOVATION | [SINGULARITY]
FashionUnited
💰 US-based Myavana, a pioneer in Black-led AI-driven personalised haircare technology, has closed a 5.9 million US dollar funding round led by Prisma Ventures, Ulta Beauty's innovation fund.
💈 The Atlanta-based startup, founded by Candace Mitchell in 2012, has developed a proprietary AI-driven personalised haircare software system, including hair strand analysis and the world’s largest database of textured hair care data.
💇♂️ Myavana said in a statement that the infusion of capital underscores its role in “revolutionising the global hair care market,” which is projected to reach 113 billion US dollars by 2031, to help it accelerate its “unique market position” and personalised data-driven hair insights for retailers, salons, brands, and consumers.
🗣 Candace Mitchell, chief executive and founder of Myavana, said: "A person's hair is as unique to them as a fingerprint, and we've unlocked powerful, personalised insights with our AI platform. "Hair is the longest record of your body's health, providing as much as a decade of information about a person's health and needs. I'm grateful to our investors who see the long-term potential and share our mission."
🤝 Its real-time data analytics platform enables partners like Ulta and Amazon to drive purchases with its Hair RI solution. Myavana has also collaborated with the National Black-Owned Beauty Supply Association and Braintrust Founders Studio, facilitating distribution to over 1,000 retailers and salons.
IS IT TIME TO APPOINT A CHIEF AI OFFICER? NOT SO FAST SAY EXPERTS | [SINGULARITY]
Fortune
🤖 “Do You Really Need a Chief AI Officer?” is the title of an interesting new report in MIT Sloan Management Review that delves into this topic. The authors have experience in analyzing the potential value of CAIOs, and four have been chief digital officers across a variety of industries. Some of the pros of having a CAIO is to steer the AI focus and prioritization companywide, which can centralize management of AI risks, and reduce internal deficiencies.
💥 But there are cons as well. For example, adding the position of CAIO can create tension in the existing C-suite with the CIO, CTO, chief operating officer, or the chief digital or chief data officer, according to the report. Another obstacle: “CAIOs could be tempted to pursue AI for the sake of AI rather than in the service of business objectives,” the authors write. And the additional costs of adding a CAIO position may outweigh the benefits.
🗣 I asked a coauthor of the report, Michael Wade , a professor of strategy and digital at the International Institute for Management Development, how a company can effectively assess the need to create this C-suite role. There are a number of factors, like current AI competence, he said. However, there is one particularly important factor. “In organizations where AI can have a major impact on competitiveness, the scales may be tipped in favor of appointing a CAIO,” Wade said. For example, companies in the tech or financial services sectors, “where data management and insights are key sources of differentiation, may see significant benefits from coordinating AI initiatives centrally,” he said.
🤝 How does he think a CAIO could work in tandem with a CFO to implement AI strategy across the organization? Wade referred to the importance of not getting “caught up in the hype and jumping on AI for the sake of AI.” In terms of ROI expectations, the CAIO should be held to the same standards as other parts of the organization, he said. “CFOs can work with CAIOs to set financial goals for AI projects, and where necessary, hold them accountable,” Wade said.
💭 But Wade doesn’t think the CAIO role will eventually become a mainstay in the C-suite. When appointing a CAIO is advisable, the role should not become a permanent position, the authors state in the report. They advise for it to be a fixed-term appointment building a set of enterprise AI capabilities that will ultimately be handed over to the business or technology organizations.
SS25: COPENHAGEN FASHION WEEK BETWEEN CREATIVITY, INCLUSION AND COMMERCE | [FASHION SYSTEM]
FashionUnited
⚔ Berlin Fashion Week may be keen to become the next London of fashion – a place that fosters and produces young creative talent – but Copenhagen also wants to have its say, and rightly so.
🏹 Copenhagen Fashion Week has long since emerged from the shadow of the established Fashion Weeks and is also forging ahead with a role model function, as sustainability and the support of young talent are paramount in the Danish capital. But how does the Zalando-sponsored Fashion Week combine progressive action and commercial success?
🏆 It is thanks to one of these young talents that the increasingly important topics of accessibility and inclusivity were also addressed in Copenhagen this season. Irish designer Sinéad O’Dwyer, who has been supported by the British Fashion Council's NewGen initiative for the past three years, moved from London to the Danish capital after being named the winner of the Zalando Visionary Award. The award brought her 50,000 euros and a spot on the Copenhagen Fashion Week programme.
👗 On the catwalk, strappy dresses, bodysuits and cut-out silhouettes were presented, complemented by O'Dwyer's first foray into the denim world. The designer offered audio descriptions and fabric samples for each look to blind and visually impaired viewers. But the inclusion was not limited to the audience: blind activist Lucy Edwards walked the runway with her guide dog Miss Molly. It was the first time a blind model had such a performance at Copenhagen Fashion Week, setting a new benchmark for inclusion.
SOUNDCLOUD LAUNCHES ITS OWN MERCH STORE, WILL LET ARTISTS CREATE THEIR OWN DESIGNS | [METAPHYSICS]
TechCrunch
💥 Music streaming service SoundCloud has launched a merch marketplace called SoundCloud Store. The store will sell SoundCloud-themed items, but will also act as a service for artists to put out their own designs. The first edition of the store features designs from Wiz Khalifa, Denzel Curry, wolfacejoeyy, Bk The Rula, and Armani White. Plus, the company is working with select Next Pro artists — SoundCloud’s paid service for artists — to let them submit their own designs.
💹 SoundCloud said that once the artist submits a design, the company will create mock-ups for them, produce goods for them, and list the items on the SoundCloud store. What’s more, the company will handle fan engagement and social promotion for these merch. At this moment, the service does not take any fee from the artists while passing on 100% of the profits from sales.
🎵 Social platforms are keen to offer artists and creators ways to sell stuff and earn money. Both Spotify and Amazon Music offer artists to sell merchandise. While Spotify has tools that let artists host their merchandise catalog on their pages, Amazon Music has tied up with Bandsintown for similar services.
NFC-EMBEDDED CLOTHES IS THE NEW WAY OF GOING PHYGITAL | [METAPHYSICS]
Alexis Beck for Metaverse Fashion MAGAZINE
📉 We are currently witnessing an extremely challenging period for the traditional fashion system. In the context of a broader global financial crisis, Monday, August 5th, marked perhaps the worst day for the fashion industry since the COVID-19 pandemic and its associated restrictions. On this day, share prices of fashion giants plummeted by 2 to 5% across various brands. The world is entering a period of heightened financial instability, and the fashion industry, in its current form, is proving to be one of the most vulnerable. This ongoing crisis only exacerbates the decline in market capitalization that the fashion industry has been experiencing for over a year.
🎮 This challenging period is pushing traditional fashion towards a symbiosis with the thriving tech world, whose capitalization remains stable despite global challenges. Fashion brands have long been present in the digital landscape of Web2—it's difficult to imagine the industry without its presence on social media, influencers raising brand awareness, or online sales platforms. However, it is now time for brands to take another step forward and further merge with the evolving digital landscape
🎊 We’ve seen numerous brands, such as Coach and Vans, creating their own experiences in Roblox. We’ve also witnessed traditional fashion items making their appearance in Fortnite, as with Versace’s Mercury Sneaker or the 3-stripes brand creating in-game skins for Epic Games product. In both cases, physical fashion is digitizing their physical items and replicating them in the digital realm.
🦄 It seems there is another way for brands to go phygital—by directly embedding digital reality into physical clothes. This is the vision of fashion and tech symbiosis championed by PhygitalMining.
🤖 PhygitalMining is a platform that offers NFC-backed technology, allowing an NFC (near-field communication) chip to be instantly embedded into any physical item. Each item is also paired with an NFT (non-fungible token) that links the physical clothing with a digital asset, certifying its ownership. Instead of bringing physical items into the digital realm, PhygitalMining weaves the digital paradigm into the physical item
Brands supported by PhygitalMining’s NFC technology will make their global debut during Metaverse FASHION WEEK, taking place from November 20-24 worldwide and at San Francisco City Hall.
FASHION AI : CUTTING THROUGH THE FABRIC OF FALSITY | [SINGULARITY]
FashionUnited
🤖 Spanish fast fashion giant Mango released its new ‘Mango Teen’ advertising campaign last month to much fanfare. At first glance, the advert – featuring a model wearing a colourful cropped top, posed against a desert backdrop – is similar to a plethora of other summer campaigns aimed at teenage girls. But upon closer scrutiny, something else becomes clear – none of it is real.
🦄 Mango’s campaign was created entirely with generative AI in a collaboration between its “design, art and styling, dataset and artificial intelligence (AI) model training, and photography studio, among others,” according to its press release. But while the industry celebrates its groundbreaking innovation, a host of lawsuits, regulations and consumer frustrations threaten to slow AI in its tracks.
👚 That workers in the fashion industry are underpaid and mistreated is well documented, but the use of generative AI is compounding the problems. In 2023, Taiwanese-American model Shereen Wu discovered that a prominent fashion designer, Michael Costello, for whom she had modelled, had uploaded a digitally altered runway photo of her on his Instagram page. The issue? Wu had been altered to look white. To aggravate the situation, Wu had been reliant on the images from the fashion show to increase her exposure in the industry – she hadn’t even been paid by the designer. Now, she was completely unrecognisable.
💥 Fashion designers and artists are also struggling with the fallout from a shift to using generative AI in the industry. Lawsuits filed against fashion retail platform Shein highlight the frustrations of artists who claim that their work is being copied and reproduced by secret algorithms designed to scrape data. This, it is alleged, helps Shein to identify trends and reproduce copies of popular designs. While IP infringement claims are nothing new in the fashion industry, the use of AI to train algorithms and reproduce popular designs has added a complicated layer to an already problematic issue for designers.
💭 Because of the speed at which generative AI has developed, legal systems have struggled to keep up with IP questions and ethical conundrums that have arisen. Finally, however, we are seeing some traction, at least in Europe. The European Artificial Intelligence Act, which came into force on August 1, will require brands operating within the EU to clearly label AI generated content so that customers are aware that AI has been leveraged. The Act will also require the disclosure of training data used to develop AI systems, which will, in theory, discourage brands from using images and designs protected by copyright law without the owner’s consent.
THE WORST BRANDING BLUNDERS OF THE AI ERA—SO FAR | [SINGULARITY]
Fast Company
📢 Plenty of brands seem eager to signal their artificial intelligence chops these days—maybe too eager. Consider Toys “R” Us. It set out to grab attention at the recent Cannes Lions festival, and beyond, with a bold example of AI as a creative tool. And what it touted as the first brand video generated with AI certainly got a strong reaction. In short, many found it creepy and off-putting, as well as a slight to human ad creatives. Jeff Beer, Fast Company‘s senior staff editor covering advertising and branding, pronounced it an “abomination.”
🎞 In fact, the spot’s dreamy depiction of the chain’s origin story, made with OpenAI’s text-to-video tool, Sora, became just the latest example of a brand scrambling to embrace—and being seen to embrace—AI’s potential, and basically stepping on a rake. It should be (yet another) reminder of what brands have to lose in the rush to do something, anything, involving AI. Whatever the ambition, it ended up the most recent high-profile entry on the roster of the biggest brand mistakes of the AI era. So far.
🍔 But it certainly has a wide variety of company. Just a few weeks ago, McDonald’s pulled the plug on an experiment with AI handling drive-through orders. The system’s botched interpretations of certain orders—mistakenly accepting that customers had asked for hundreds of McNuggets or ice cream with bacon on it—went viral on social media. The burger giant announced it would “explore voice-ordering solutions more broadly,” essentially conceding that the technology’s not ready for prime time just yet. (McDonald’s wasn’t the only brand burned by the incident; the episode was also a bad look for IBM, McDonald’s tech partner on the effort.)
⚖ Earlier this year, a Canadian tribunal ruled that Air Canada would have to repay one of its customers who received erroneous information about its bereavement policy rules from the airline’s chatbot. Air Canada’s defense involved an argument that the chatbot was in effect a separate legal entity “responsible for its own actions.” The amount in dispute was around $600 (plus tribunal fees)—which just makes the brand-mistake cost seem even more ridiculous.
HOW SPORTSWEAR BRANDS ARE WINNING THE BATTLE FOR GEN Z'S LOYALTY | [FASHION SYSTEM]
Vogue Business
💡 A year packed with high-profile sporting events was always going to give sportswear a leg-up, and positioning yourself at the centre of multiple global spectacles is a fairly effective marketing technique. But beyond the summer of sport, there are some evergreen lessons that other sectors could learn from the brands dressing the world’s top athletes.
📊 A recent report from research firm Bernstein, based on a survey of 3,500 US consumers, found that only 32 per cent of Gen Zs care about brand when purchasing non-sportswear apparel or footwear. “But in sportswear, brands still matter,” says Aneesha Sherman, VP of US apparel at Bernstein. “We’ve done this survey every year since 2019, and this finding just keeps emerging more and more.”
🏅 Gen Z consumers from youth marketing agency Archrival’s Gen Z insight network say that loyalty to certain sportswear labels partly comes down to a perception of higher quality and durability. Case in point: Nike — which topped the charts for performance and quality among sportswear brands in Bernstein’s study — consistently outperforms its rivals in terms of annual sales. Last year, the company made more than double the revenue of its closest competitor ($51.5 billion versus Adidas’s $23 billion).
👨⚕️ Sportswear brands are also benefiting from Gen Z’s increased focus on health and wellness, and changing attitudes towards sport itself — a finding reflected in a new report from strategic foresight consultancy The Future Laboratory.
'FORTNITE' MAKES EPIC GAMES LAUNCHES ITS APP STORE ON IOS IN THE EU, WORLDWIDE ON ANDROID | [METAPHYSICS]
TechCrunch
💥 Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, announced on Friday that it has officially launched its rival iOS app store in the European Union. The Epic Games Store is also launching on Android worldwide. The app store is launching with games including Fortnite, Rocket League Sideswipe, and Fall Guys. The company says it’s working with developers to launch their games on the Epic Games Store in the future.
📱 Epic Games is also bringing its games to independent mobile store AltStore PAL, which announced yesterday that its app store would be available for free thanks to a grant from Epic Games. In the future, Epic Games plans to bring its games to Aptoide’s iOS store in the EU and ONE Store on Android, the company said.
🍏 Fortnite’s return to iOS comes over four years after Apple first removed the game from its App Store. Its return follows years of legal battles between the two companies, in addition to regulatory changes brought by EU’s Digital Markets Act, which is forcing Apple to open up to new rivals.
📢 “The tide is turning and the mobile ecosystem is finally opening up to competition,” said Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney in a statement. “We are grateful to the European Commission for making it possible to launch the Epic Games Store and offer our games to iOS users in the European Union. Now European iOS users and all Android users can access our store and games, as they’ve always been able to do on open platforms like PC and Mac. The fight is far from over, but this is tangible progress for developers and consumers who can begin to benefit from competition and choice.”
THE JOURNEY TO METAVERSE FASHION WEEK 2024 BEGINS | [PRESS-RELEASE]
The Metaverse Fashion Council is thrilled to announce that the Metaverse Fashion Week that is programmed for the 20th-24th of November 2024 will take place at the San Francisco City Hall!
The Metaverse Fashion Week, is a global event that will continuously happen during 4 days non-stop around the whole around, through all the time zones. The culmination of the Metaverse Fashion Week will take place on 24th on November at the San Francisco City Hall, the most beautiful building in California.
“I'm beyond thrilled to finally spill the best-kept secret: the grand finale of Metaverse Fashion Week 2024 will take place at the iconic San Francisco City Hall, right in the heart of our beloved Silicon Valley! 🌟 Don’t miss out—join the METAVERSE FASHION COUNCIL today and unlock all the exclusive privileges of the biggest and most influential community in the metaverse!” - said Anna Karenina, the founder of Metaverse Fashion Council.
Additionally, the Metaverse Fashion Council is launching the Metaverse Fashion Awards, which aims to recognize the most influential brands, people, and companies across a wide range of categories, from the TOP 10 startups to the TOP 10 Metaverse Fashion cities. The final awards ceremony will take place on November 24th at San Francisco City Hall.
Finally, the Metaverse Fashion Council invites everyone to become an active member of our community and contribute to our collective goals. Membership with the Metaverse Fashion Council grants you access to:
- Exclusive Media Content: Enjoy premium content available only to members.
- Metaverse Fashion Awards: Nominate and vote for top leaders in each of the 10 categories.
- Metaverse Fashion Summit: Engage in panels, webinars, and roundtable discussions.
- Educational Resources: Access webinars, newsletters, analyses, and other valuable materials.
- Talent Score Development: Build and track your personal Talent Score within the community.
MYAVANA RAISES 5.9. MILLION US DOLLARS TO DRIVE HAIR INNOVATION | [SINGULARITY]
FashionUnited
💰 US-based Myavana, a pioneer in Black-led AI-driven personalised haircare technology, has closed a 5.9 million US dollar funding round led by Prisma Ventures, Ulta Beauty's innovation fund.
💈 The Atlanta-based startup, founded by Candace Mitchell in 2012, has developed a proprietary AI-driven personalised haircare software system, including hair strand analysis and the world’s largest database of textured hair care data.
💇♂️ Myavana said in a statement that the infusion of capital underscores its role in “revolutionising the global hair care market,” which is projected to reach 113 billion US dollars by 2031, to help it accelerate its “unique market position” and personalised data-driven hair insights for retailers, salons, brands, and consumers.
🗣 Candace Mitchell, chief executive and founder of Myavana, said: "A person's hair is as unique to them as a fingerprint, and we've unlocked powerful, personalised insights with our AI platform. "Hair is the longest record of your body's health, providing as much as a decade of information about a person's health and needs. I'm grateful to our investors who see the long-term potential and share our mission."
🤝 Its real-time data analytics platform enables partners like Ulta and Amazon to drive purchases with its Hair RI solution. Myavana has also collaborated with the National Black-Owned Beauty Supply Association and Braintrust Founders Studio, facilitating distribution to over 1,000 retailers and salons.
IS IT TIME TO APPOINT A CHIEF AI OFFICER? NOT SO FAST SAY EXPERTS | [SINGULARITY]
Fortune
🤖 “Do You Really Need a Chief AI Officer?” is the title of an interesting new report in MIT Sloan Management Review that delves into this topic. The authors have experience in analyzing the potential value of CAIOs, and four have been chief digital officers across a variety of industries. Some of the pros of having a CAIO is to steer the AI focus and prioritization companywide, which can centralize management of AI risks, and reduce internal deficiencies.
💥 But there are cons as well. For example, adding the position of CAIO can create tension in the existing C-suite with the CIO, CTO, chief operating officer, or the chief digital or chief data officer, according to the report. Another obstacle: “CAIOs could be tempted to pursue AI for the sake of AI rather than in the service of business objectives,” the authors write. And the additional costs of adding a CAIO position may outweigh the benefits.
🗣 I asked a coauthor of the report, Michael Wade , a professor of strategy and digital at the International Institute for Management Development, how a company can effectively assess the need to create this C-suite role. There are a number of factors, like current AI competence, he said. However, there is one particularly important factor. “In organizations where AI can have a major impact on competitiveness, the scales may be tipped in favor of appointing a CAIO,” Wade said. For example, companies in the tech or financial services sectors, “where data management and insights are key sources of differentiation, may see significant benefits from coordinating AI initiatives centrally,” he said.
🤝 How does he think a CAIO could work in tandem with a CFO to implement AI strategy across the organization? Wade referred to the importance of not getting “caught up in the hype and jumping on AI for the sake of AI.” In terms of ROI expectations, the CAIO should be held to the same standards as other parts of the organization, he said. “CFOs can work with CAIOs to set financial goals for AI projects, and where necessary, hold them accountable,” Wade said.
💭 But Wade doesn’t think the CAIO role will eventually become a mainstay in the C-suite. When appointing a CAIO is advisable, the role should not become a permanent position, the authors state in the report. They advise for it to be a fixed-term appointment building a set of enterprise AI capabilities that will ultimately be handed over to the business or technology organizations.
SS25: COPENHAGEN FASHION WEEK BETWEEN CREATIVITY, INCLUSION AND COMMERCE | [FASHION SYSTEM]
FashionUnited
⚔ Berlin Fashion Week may be keen to become the next London of fashion – a place that fosters and produces young creative talent – but Copenhagen also wants to have its say, and rightly so.
🏹 Copenhagen Fashion Week has long since emerged from the shadow of the established Fashion Weeks and is also forging ahead with a role model function, as sustainability and the support of young talent are paramount in the Danish capital. But how does the Zalando-sponsored Fashion Week combine progressive action and commercial success?
🏆 It is thanks to one of these young talents that the increasingly important topics of accessibility and inclusivity were also addressed in Copenhagen this season. Irish designer Sinéad O’Dwyer, who has been supported by the British Fashion Council's NewGen initiative for the past three years, moved from London to the Danish capital after being named the winner of the Zalando Visionary Award. The award brought her 50,000 euros and a spot on the Copenhagen Fashion Week programme.
👗 On the catwalk, strappy dresses, bodysuits and cut-out silhouettes were presented, complemented by O'Dwyer's first foray into the denim world. The designer offered audio descriptions and fabric samples for each look to blind and visually impaired viewers. But the inclusion was not limited to the audience: blind activist Lucy Edwards walked the runway with her guide dog Miss Molly. It was the first time a blind model had such a performance at Copenhagen Fashion Week, setting a new benchmark for inclusion.
SOUNDCLOUD LAUNCHES ITS OWN MERCH STORE, WILL LET ARTISTS CREATE THEIR OWN DESIGNS | [METAPHYSICS]
TechCrunch
💥 Music streaming service SoundCloud has launched a merch marketplace called SoundCloud Store. The store will sell SoundCloud-themed items, but will also act as a service for artists to put out their own designs. The first edition of the store features designs from Wiz Khalifa, Denzel Curry, wolfacejoeyy, Bk The Rula, and Armani White. Plus, the company is working with select Next Pro artists — SoundCloud’s paid service for artists — to let them submit their own designs.
💹 SoundCloud said that once the artist submits a design, the company will create mock-ups for them, produce goods for them, and list the items on the SoundCloud store. What’s more, the company will handle fan engagement and social promotion for these merch. At this moment, the service does not take any fee from the artists while passing on 100% of the profits from sales.
🎵 Social platforms are keen to offer artists and creators ways to sell stuff and earn money. Both Spotify and Amazon Music offer artists to sell merchandise. While Spotify has tools that let artists host their merchandise catalog on their pages, Amazon Music has tied up with Bandsintown for similar services.
NFC-EMBEDDED CLOTHES IS THE NEW WAY OF GOING PHYGITAL | [METAPHYSICS]
Alexis Beck for Metaverse Fashion MAGAZINE
📉 We are currently witnessing an extremely challenging period for the traditional fashion system. In the context of a broader global financial crisis, Monday, August 5th, marked perhaps the worst day for the fashion industry since the COVID-19 pandemic and its associated restrictions. On this day, share prices of fashion giants plummeted by 2 to 5% across various brands. The world is entering a period of heightened financial instability, and the fashion industry, in its current form, is proving to be one of the most vulnerable. This ongoing crisis only exacerbates the decline in market capitalization that the fashion industry has been experiencing for over a year.
🎮 This challenging period is pushing traditional fashion towards a symbiosis with the thriving tech world, whose capitalization remains stable despite global challenges. Fashion brands have long been present in the digital landscape of Web2—it's difficult to imagine the industry without its presence on social media, influencers raising brand awareness, or online sales platforms. However, it is now time for brands to take another step forward and further merge with the evolving digital landscape
🎊 We’ve seen numerous brands, such as Coach and Vans, creating their own experiences in Roblox. We’ve also witnessed traditional fashion items making their appearance in Fortnite, as with Versace’s Mercury Sneaker or the 3-stripes brand creating in-game skins for Epic Games product. In both cases, physical fashion is digitizing their physical items and replicating them in the digital realm.
🦄 It seems there is another way for brands to go phygital—by directly embedding digital reality into physical clothes. This is the vision of fashion and tech symbiosis championed by PhygitalMining.
🤖 PhygitalMining is a platform that offers NFC-backed technology, allowing an NFC (near-field communication) chip to be instantly embedded into any physical item. Each item is also paired with an NFT (non-fungible token) that links the physical clothing with a digital asset, certifying its ownership. Instead of bringing physical items into the digital realm, PhygitalMining weaves the digital paradigm into the physical item
Brands supported by PhygitalMining’s NFC technology will make their global debut during Metaverse FASHION WEEK, taking place from November 20-24 worldwide and at San Francisco City Hall.
FASHION AI : CUTTING THROUGH THE FABRIC OF FALSITY | [SINGULARITY]
FashionUnited
🤖 Spanish fast fashion giant Mango released its new ‘Mango Teen’ advertising campaign last month to much fanfare. At first glance, the advert – featuring a model wearing a colourful cropped top, posed against a desert backdrop – is similar to a plethora of other summer campaigns aimed at teenage girls. But upon closer scrutiny, something else becomes clear – none of it is real.
🦄 Mango’s campaign was created entirely with generative AI in a collaboration between its “design, art and styling, dataset and artificial intelligence (AI) model training, and photography studio, among others,” according to its press release. But while the industry celebrates its groundbreaking innovation, a host of lawsuits, regulations and consumer frustrations threaten to slow AI in its tracks.
👚 That workers in the fashion industry are underpaid and mistreated is well documented, but the use of generative AI is compounding the problems. In 2023, Taiwanese-American model Shereen Wu discovered that a prominent fashion designer, Michael Costello, for whom she had modelled, had uploaded a digitally altered runway photo of her on his Instagram page. The issue? Wu had been altered to look white. To aggravate the situation, Wu had been reliant on the images from the fashion show to increase her exposure in the industry – she hadn’t even been paid by the designer. Now, she was completely unrecognisable.
💥 Fashion designers and artists are also struggling with the fallout from a shift to using generative AI in the industry. Lawsuits filed against fashion retail platform Shein highlight the frustrations of artists who claim that their work is being copied and reproduced by secret algorithms designed to scrape data. This, it is alleged, helps Shein to identify trends and reproduce copies of popular designs. While IP infringement claims are nothing new in the fashion industry, the use of AI to train algorithms and reproduce popular designs has added a complicated layer to an already problematic issue for designers.
💭 Because of the speed at which generative AI has developed, legal systems have struggled to keep up with IP questions and ethical conundrums that have arisen. Finally, however, we are seeing some traction, at least in Europe. The European Artificial Intelligence Act, which came into force on August 1, will require brands operating within the EU to clearly label AI generated content so that customers are aware that AI has been leveraged. The Act will also require the disclosure of training data used to develop AI systems, which will, in theory, discourage brands from using images and designs protected by copyright law without the owner’s consent.
THE WORST BRANDING BLUNDERS OF THE AI ERA—SO FAR | [SINGULARITY]
Fast Company
📢 Plenty of brands seem eager to signal their artificial intelligence chops these days—maybe too eager. Consider Toys “R” Us. It set out to grab attention at the recent Cannes Lions festival, and beyond, with a bold example of AI as a creative tool. And what it touted as the first brand video generated with AI certainly got a strong reaction. In short, many found it creepy and off-putting, as well as a slight to human ad creatives. Jeff Beer, Fast Company‘s senior staff editor covering advertising and branding, pronounced it an “abomination.”
🎞 In fact, the spot’s dreamy depiction of the chain’s origin story, made with OpenAI’s text-to-video tool, Sora, became just the latest example of a brand scrambling to embrace—and being seen to embrace—AI’s potential, and basically stepping on a rake. It should be (yet another) reminder of what brands have to lose in the rush to do something, anything, involving AI. Whatever the ambition, it ended up the most recent high-profile entry on the roster of the biggest brand mistakes of the AI era. So far.
🍔 But it certainly has a wide variety of company. Just a few weeks ago, McDonald’s pulled the plug on an experiment with AI handling drive-through orders. The system’s botched interpretations of certain orders—mistakenly accepting that customers had asked for hundreds of McNuggets or ice cream with bacon on it—went viral on social media. The burger giant announced it would “explore voice-ordering solutions more broadly,” essentially conceding that the technology’s not ready for prime time just yet. (McDonald’s wasn’t the only brand burned by the incident; the episode was also a bad look for IBM, McDonald’s tech partner on the effort.)
⚖ Earlier this year, a Canadian tribunal ruled that Air Canada would have to repay one of its customers who received erroneous information about its bereavement policy rules from the airline’s chatbot. Air Canada’s defense involved an argument that the chatbot was in effect a separate legal entity “responsible for its own actions.” The amount in dispute was around $600 (plus tribunal fees)—which just makes the brand-mistake cost seem even more ridiculous.
HOW SPORTSWEAR BRANDS ARE WINNING THE BATTLE FOR GEN Z'S LOYALTY | [FASHION SYSTEM]
Vogue Business
💡 A year packed with high-profile sporting events was always going to give sportswear a leg-up, and positioning yourself at the centre of multiple global spectacles is a fairly effective marketing technique. But beyond the summer of sport, there are some evergreen lessons that other sectors could learn from the brands dressing the world’s top athletes.
📊 A recent report from research firm Bernstein, based on a survey of 3,500 US consumers, found that only 32 per cent of Gen Zs care about brand when purchasing non-sportswear apparel or footwear. “But in sportswear, brands still matter,” says Aneesha Sherman, VP of US apparel at Bernstein. “We’ve done this survey every year since 2019, and this finding just keeps emerging more and more.”
🏅 Gen Z consumers from youth marketing agency Archrival’s Gen Z insight network say that loyalty to certain sportswear labels partly comes down to a perception of higher quality and durability. Case in point: Nike — which topped the charts for performance and quality among sportswear brands in Bernstein’s study — consistently outperforms its rivals in terms of annual sales. Last year, the company made more than double the revenue of its closest competitor ($51.5 billion versus Adidas’s $23 billion).
👨⚕️ Sportswear brands are also benefiting from Gen Z’s increased focus on health and wellness, and changing attitudes towards sport itself — a finding reflected in a new report from strategic foresight consultancy The Future Laboratory.
'FORTNITE' MAKES EPIC GAMES LAUNCHES ITS APP STORE ON IOS IN THE EU, WORLDWIDE ON ANDROID | [METAPHYSICS]
TechCrunch
💥 Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, announced on Friday that it has officially launched its rival iOS app store in the European Union. The Epic Games Store is also launching on Android worldwide. The app store is launching with games including Fortnite, Rocket League Sideswipe, and Fall Guys. The company says it’s working with developers to launch their games on the Epic Games Store in the future.
📱 Epic Games is also bringing its games to independent mobile store AltStore PAL, which announced yesterday that its app store would be available for free thanks to a grant from Epic Games. In the future, Epic Games plans to bring its games to Aptoide’s iOS store in the EU and ONE Store on Android, the company said.
🍏 Fortnite’s return to iOS comes over four years after Apple first removed the game from its App Store. Its return follows years of legal battles between the two companies, in addition to regulatory changes brought by EU’s Digital Markets Act, which is forcing Apple to open up to new rivals.
📢 “The tide is turning and the mobile ecosystem is finally opening up to competition,” said Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney in a statement. “We are grateful to the European Commission for making it possible to launch the Epic Games Store and offer our games to iOS users in the European Union. Now European iOS users and all Android users can access our store and games, as they’ve always been able to do on open platforms like PC and Mac. The fight is far from over, but this is tangible progress for developers and consumers who can begin to benefit from competition and choice.”
Weekly news and stories covering everything from the Fashion System, Investment, and AI to WEB3 and Crypto that truly matter in Metaverse Fashion.