Fashion obsession with NFT grows as new markets emerge

The emergence of the fashion-focused NFT market shows how fast fashion is getting hooked with NFT. While the price of NFT has wobbly because of their height, down 60% from February to April, a strong ecosystem of fashion-focused platforms can help keep the NFT-fashion trend alive.

Janine Yioh, fund manager for digital real estate developer Republic Realm, has been working to create a virtual equivalent for the sale of virtual products. On June 29, the company launched Metajuku, which is billed as the world’s first virtual mall. Modeled after the Harajuku shopping district in Japan, Metajuku is a virtual space where customers can enter storefronts, browse virtual NFT products, and make purchases. Products start at $30 a piece, depending on the brand and product, but most stocks are well over $100, Yioh said.

In many ways, it’s exactly like a typical real estate or retail setting, Yioh said. Is the owner and there are tenants, storefronts and rentals. But the fact that it’s virtual allows us to do cool things. In real life, marble is more expensive than granite, but in cyberspace, that is not true. Your shop can look just the way you want it.

Metajuku launched with several brands that only specialize in virtual mode, such as Tribute Brand and DressX. While no real brands were represented on Metajuku at launch, Yioh said the company is also working with several physical brands to procure their virtual products. Those brands tend to move slower approve adventurer partnerships in foreign territory, he said.

The Metajuku shopping center is located within an online virtual world, or metaverse, called Decentraland, where anyone can pay for a virtual plot of land and build whatever they want on it. These plans have become much more valuable over the past two months, rising in price from around $1,800 per plan in April to over $7,000 today.

IMVU, another metaverse, also launched the NFT fashion marketplace in May which has attracted fashion designers including Collina Stradas Hillary Taymour. At the end of May, it released on the platform a collection of virtual original pieces and virtual pieces based on existing physical products.

According to Lindsay Anne Aamodt, IMVU’s director of marketing, the pandemic has helped accelerate the growth of virtual fashion and helped propel NFT beyond the art fair world.“People who are forced to stay in and isolate for long periods of time make them more open to things like the metaverse,” says Aamodt. “I almost wish we had launched this last year, because it would have been even more powerful. Fashion has a place in cyberspace. This is perfect for the metaverse because one of the main things users want to do is customize their avatar.”

Although paying real-life money for virtual items might seem strange, Yioh pointed to $50 million Fortnite players overall spend a set of outfits for their playable characters in May. NFT sales on Decentraland have increased the metaverse from 1,500 daily users in January to more than 10,000 today.