The Business of Fashion
Agenda-setting intelligence, analysis and advice for the global fashion community.
Agenda-setting intelligence, analysis and advice for the global fashion community.
Subscribe to the BoF Podcast here.
Over the last couple of years, the fashion industry couldn’t stop talking about the potential of NFTs, the metaverse, known in tech industry speak as web3. Now, the fervour around web3 has cooled and the speculators are long gone. But for those committed to the web3 space, the work continues, even as the discussion has shifted.
“People are pulling back, but people are investing,” said Brian Trunzo, metaverse lead at Polygon Labs. “If folks are still at the education stage, doing research either internally or through agencies, they may have cut budgets and pulled back a little bit, whereas folks who have beefed up and built out teams to execute against their web3 strategy, who have had that requisite education, they’re doubling down.”
This week on The BoF Podcast, we share a conversation from The BoF Professional Summit: An Inflection Point in Fashion Tech, where our technology correspondent Marc Bain speaks with three web3 experts — Brian Trunzo, Alice Delahunt, founder and CEO of Syky, and Milton Pedraza, the founder and CEO of consulting firm the Luxury Institute — to debate the future of web3 and fashion.
With the industry starting to use the technology for everything from campaign imagery to shopping assistants, it risks replicating biases based on race, body type, age and disability that it has spent years loudly claiming it wants to move past.
On Wednesday, Montanna became the first US state to ban the social video app TikTok.
Epic Games, creator of the video game megahit Fortnite, and the maker of Clo3D, a popular 3D fashion-design tool, are so aligned in their visions of digital fashion’s future that they bought shares in one another.
Founder Charaf Tajer compared AI to electronic music or sampling: It may be done on a computer, but it still takes talent, creativity and effort to produce good results.