NFTs collectively "cooled down", and big factories transferred digital fashion

Text | Zinc Finance, author | Pengyue Sun, Editor, | gale

ByteDance, continue to march into the virtual world.

According to Tech Planet News, Douyin has entered the digital fashion field and plans to launch a business called "pheagee". "Boiling Silence" will become a new digital fashion community, involving virtual clothing, virtual people, virtual social networking, etc., and vibrate with Douyin e-commerce, PICO and other businesses.

(Source: Sky Eye Check)

According to Tianyancha, the main company behind "pheagee" is Shanghai Boiling Silence Technology Co., Ltd., which was established on January 14, 2022, wholly owned by ByteDance, and its legal person is Ren Lifeng, head of "PICO" of ByteVR business. The business scope includes Internet information services, second-class value-added telecommunications services, radio and television program production and operation, network culture management, publication retail and so on.

A new choice of virtual worlds

Digital fashion and digital collections (NFTs) are both metaverse segments, but are very different in nature. The scientific name of NFTs is called "non-homogeneous tokens", that is, each NFT is different and unique. NFTs, whether they are trendy or collectible, have unique codes, and once purchased, you are the only one in the world who owns it.

Digital fashion is more like clothing in the digital world, and like the fashion shoes in reality, it has the liquidity of goods. To put it simply, it is like a QQ show in the early days of the Internet, which can be mixed and matched in the virtual world.

Both NFTs and digital fashion have a common feature, which is that the clothes you spend money on can't be worn in reality.

Compared with high-tech cutting-edge technologies such as VR/AR/XR, the trend of digital fashion has swept the fashion industry. At present, more and more digital fashion has entered our world, up to the top luxury brands, such as LV, Gucci, down to sports brands, such as Nike, Li Ning, are launching various digital fashions, making this demon wind more and more intense.

From bags and T-shirts to shoes, traditional apparel brands are around the digital realm, redesigning fashion wear, combined with the collection culture of Generation Z, to create online products for sale and display, leading the new trend of wearing.

I have to say that it is becoming more and more like the QQ show.

(Source: DRESSX)

At present, the development of virtual scenes in the meta-universe has been based on virtual people and virtual idols, and when users are more and more aesthetically tired of virtual people and virtual idols, big factories have begun to focus on digital fashion.

According to Tech Planet, "Boiling Silence" is an online fashion creative platform for fashion designers, which is still in the early stages of exploration. Everything is unknown about what form "Boiling Silence" will be commercialized in the future, and whether it can interact with the virtual idols "Liu Yexi" and "Li Weike" of Douyin.

However, ByteDance attaches great importance to "boiling silence" and digital fashion, and at the moment of continuous layoffs, ByteDance has increased the recruitment of digital fashion product managers, clearly requiring responsible for digital wear scene exploration and function iteration, and realizing the solutions and tools for virtual try-on, including but not limited to App-side try-on effects, picture virtual fittings, etc.

Byte is not the only one that is interested in digital fashion. At present, Internet companies such as Tencent, Huawei, and Xiaohongshu are actively laying out digital fashion business.

QQ Show Super Evolution

In 2022, QQ is already 23 years old.

Tencent QQ team also prepared a birthday gift for this penguin: Super QQ Show.

The so-called "Super QQ Show" is the original 2D version of the QQ Show, which was upgraded to a 3D version through the Unreal Engine 4 driver, in addition to the same support for the purchase of clothing functions, but also supports AI face pinching and DIY expressions to complete new interactive functions.

Get virtual clothes, backgrounds, faces, makeup, etc., and create your own "avatar" through different combinations and combinations...

Wait, this sounds familiar, isn't this extremely similar to virtual fashion, almost exactly the same?

(Source: Super QQ Show)

Avatar is the premise of virtual social networking, and it is also the basic disk of digital fashion. Through a more refined and detailed virtual image, the virtual social network has a more sense of substitution, and the mapping with the real world is completed, so that the user's self-expression is more knowable and perceptible.

In the super QQ show, it is not only a simple face pinch and a dressup, Tencent carefully weaves various virtual social scenes for users. Launched the "little nest" function to create your own exclusive space.

If the super QQ show is a 3D version of the QQ show, then the "little nest" is the 3D version of the QQ space.

This space can be completely DIY by the user himself, the user can shop through different furniture stores, arbitrarily match the furniture placement, drag, layout, house expansion and other operations. Then you can create a variety of interactive scenarios by adding friends and inviting them to listen to music in their cabin.

Using the logic of digital fashion to reshape the QQ show, through the construction of virtual scenes, open the virtual social play, which is already the prototype of metaverse social networking. In addition, QQ Show, as a product of the ancient early Internet period, has a very high user use group, and a large number of netizens have applied for the super QQ show internal test qualification.

(Source: Little Red Book)

As a "senior fashion guide", Xiaohongshu naturally refuses to let go of the trend of digital fashion.

Little Red Book first created "R-SPACE" as a virtual scene for storing and displaying NFTs and digital fashion. Then, starting this year, Xiaohongshu has joined hands with a number of artists native to the platform to launch online virtual digital fashion activities in different forms and with different themes.

During the Spring Festival, Xiaohongshu R-SPACE launched the "Meta-Universe Temple Fair" activity, working with 22 original designers and artists to sell original digital collections with the theme of the Spring Festival; on February 14, the digital collection cabbage dog held on Valentine's Day was also loved by the majority of users; on April 18, Xiaohongshu and XINTIANDI Xintiandi launched a virtual fashion event, working with 9 well-known Chinese designer brands to launch 18 limited virtual fashion new products in Xiaohongshu R-SPACE.

Users can also experience the digital clothes designed by these trendy brands in the form of VR/AR in the R-SPACE function module of Xiaohongshu's personal homepage; Xiaohongshu provides additional exposure, encourages users to send notes to experience digital fashion, and shares with platform netizens, using this novel fashion dress to drive the social atmosphere in the community.

Not only that, Xiaohongshu launched the "Xiaohongshu Virtual Fashion Recruitment Plan" on April 15, inviting designers, artists and other creators who have a love, creativity and ideas for virtual fashion to settle in Xiaohongshu. The platform will invite the creators to jointly plan the theme activities of digital collections, help their original digital works to be sold, and give support to the flow of works to jointly enrich the virtual fashion content ecology.

Stylish, or practical?

Some people regard digital fashion and virtual clothing as the prototype of the meta-universe; others think that it is just a new type of leek cutting tool.

The most sought after fan base for digital fashion is in Europe and the United States. As a virtual product, it has an advantage that is difficult to surpass, that is, its environmental protection.

DressX, a digital fashion startup in Los Angeles, states, noted all of its digital fashion products: "This product does not include any physical fibers, water, carbon dioxide; it does not require shipment and delivery." It provides a blueprint for traditional fashion academies and optimizes art education in the 21st century. ”

DRESSX's Digital Fashion Sustainability 2021 Report shows that for every digital garment produced, carbon emissions can be reduced by 97% compared with the production of physical clothing, and 3300 liters of water can be saved (almost 3.5 years of water consumption per person).

This somehow represents the attitude of foreign consumers to digital fashion: environmental protection above all else.

But this is also the biggest slot point for opponents: it's all virtual, fake, and of course environmentally friendly.

(Source: Gucci)

Gucci, a well-known luxury brand, opened a Gucci Garden online store on the Roblox game platform, mainly selling digital fashion virtual goods. One of the Dionysus virtual goods sold for a "sky-high price" of $4115.

Equivalent to buying a QQ show bag accessories, you have to spend more than 27,000 yuan. After all, it was poverty that limited my imagination.

For designers, digital fashion and virtual clothing have helped them achieve "creative freedom", which is not limited by fabrics and can be created in the air; but for most ordinary people in the world, he only needs a normal, can wear, can be used daily ordinary clothes.

But in any case, digital fashion has become the next outlet and is being noticed by more and more capital. In the future, more and more virtual costumes will appear in front of us.