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SHANGHAI - COVID-19 will help propel China's apparel market into the top spot globally, overtaking the U.S. in the next three years, according to a new forecast by the research firm Global Data.

While the pandemic has dragged on markets all around the world - COVID-19 will wipe off 15 percent, or $297 billion, from the global apparel market compared to last year - it is mature markets that will be hit hardest.

"We expect the developing APAC markets including China, India and South Korea to increase their position in the top 10 global apparel markets by 2023, as mature Western markets lose out," the firm said.

The U.S., as the world's largest currently, will account for 42 percent of all lost spend, which will contribute to more major chains filing for Chapter 11 over the next few months, Global Data said. APAC markets, on the other hand, are expected to be in a better position to counter the COVID-19 impact compared to their American and European counterparts driven by the growth in domestic demand.

"Though the recovery has already started across the APAC markets, apparel sales will take some time to rebound amid dampened consumer confidence, the slump in tourism, the threat of an impending global recession and high unemployment rates," said Vijay Bhupathiraju, retail analyst at GlobalData.

"Some of the lost sales will be compensated by the level of 'revenge buying' (sudden release of pent up demand from those willing and able to spend). Some brands across China for instance are seeing store sales return to 80 to 100 percent of pre-COVID-19 trading levels as the country relaxes lockdown measures."

In 2019, the top 10 markets were the U.S., China, Japan, Germany, India, Italy, U.K., Russia, France and South Korea.

By 2023, Global Data expects the order will shift to China, U.S., Japan, India, Germany, U.K., Italy, Russia, South Korea and France.

While this data attests to China's ascent in the medium-term, the country is not without its economic challenges. A separate Oliver Wyman survey last week said China's apparel market this year would see a $60 billion contraction from COVID-19.

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China to Overtake U.S. as World's Largest Apparel Market by 2023

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SHANGHAI - COVID-19 will help propel China's apparel market into the top spot globally, overtaking the U.S. in the next three years, according to a new forecast by the research firm Global Data.

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https://www.statista.com/topics/7494/apparel-industry-in-china/#dossierKeyfigures.

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China's industrial transition

Since 2015, China's apparel manufacturing industry has undergone a profound transition. The rising labor costs have shifted the sector towards a less labor-intensive and highly automated direction. Geographically, many apparel enterprises have relocated to lower-labor cost labor regions, such as Western and Middle China. Technologically, apparel enterprises upped their research and development spending. In 2019, more than 22,000 R&D projects were carried out in the textile and clothing sector in China. Nevertheless, during the industrial upgrade and structural transformation, an increasing number of apparel enterprises exited the market.
Apart from manufacturing, China's apparel export industry also faced significant challenges resulting from recent international trade disputes and increasing production costs. China's clothing export value and global share have continuously dropped in the past years. In the meantime, several rising apparel manufacturing counties in Southeast Asia started to threaten China's leading position. Furthermore, the coronavirus pandemic outbreak in 2020 battered China's clothing export industry and caused a year-on-year loss of more than eight percent.

The rise of the domestic market

Giving consideration to such factors, China's garment enterprises sought new opportunities from the domestic market. Owing to the growing disposable income, the average expenditure on clothes and shoes in China surged over the past two decades. Also, Chinese consumer's willingness to buy domestic brands increased substantially. According to a survey conducted in 2020, nearly 70 percent of Chinese consumers preferred domestic clothing brands to foreign ones.
Adding to the ever-increasing demand for fashion, the prevalence of online shopping also boosted China's apparel retailing sector. In 2019, more than one-third of the apparel sold in China was via online retail platforms. To improve consumers' online shopping experience, Chinese apparel retailers have invested in innovative technologies. In spring 2020, China's online retail leader Alibaba rolled out its first virtual dressing room. Consumers could virtually try on more than 600 pieces of luxury items. According to Statista's Digital Market Outlook on the apparel industry, by the end of 2023, around 58 percent of China's market revenue will be generated through online sales, well ahead of the global average of 24 percent.

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Since 2015, China's apparel manufacturing industry has undergone a profound transition. The rising labor costs have shifted the sector towards a less labor-intensive and highly automated direction. Geographically, many apparel enterprises have relocated to lower-labor cost labor regions, such as Western and Middle China. Technologically, apparel enterprises upped their research and development spending.

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Rapid economic reforms and proper GDP growth in China has affected the regional development of Chinese provinces. This study aims to estimate the degree of economic and environmental disparities within Chinese provinces for developing policy recommendations of regional transformation. The reduced log-linear specification of endogenous growth model is used for the estimation of convergence rates within Chinese provinces. The empirical results prove that an increase of 1% in GDP per capita basic year reduces the economic growth rate by 0.1% in the reference year. Thus, the ratio of the average per capita income in the wealthiest group to poorest provinces accounted for the factor 9.6 in 1995 and factor 4.1 in the year 2015, which means a reduction of disproportionate development. Environmental convergence trends were also found and less polluted provinces eventually increase emissions at higher rates than the initially polluted ones. With the pass of time, all provinces do move to the same steady state in environmental parameters. The speed of the economic and environmental convergence in China provinces is rather slow, and the economic growth was achieved by great sacrifices of an environment, since all provinces are striving to the same steady state in terms of pollution increase. The industrialized regions due to the presence of significant financial resources should pay more attention to the protection of the environment using all the available economic potential. At the same time, both initially poor provinces and rich have to develop more profoundly agriculture, tourism, recreation, and other environmentally friendly industries to improve economic performance.

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наукові журнали

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наукометричні бази

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фахові видання

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захист дисертації

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защита диссертации

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scientific and scholarly journal publishing

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Economic and environmental convergence of transformation economy: the case of China

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Rapid economic reforms and proper GDP growth in China has affected the regional development of Chinese provinces. This study aims to estimate the degree of economic and environmental disparities within Chinese provinces for developing policy recommendations of regional transformation. The...

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A view of the DressX X Printemps pop-up in Paris
Photo Courtesy of DressX

A little over a year ago, a Kate Moss NFT led the charge of the fashion industry to embark on the world of non-fungible tokens as the latest marketing endeavor. It's been a whirlwind year of brands such as Gucci, Burberry, Balenciaga and Dolce and Gabbana all jumping on the NFT bandwagon. How the next phase of this new medium plays out is beginning to surface, with several partnerships this past month signaling how every player in the industry wants to get in on the action.
Digital Goes Brick and Mortar
NFTs live in the digital world in places like the Metaverse. But that doesn't stop in real-life physical stores welcoming their sale in person. Selfridges in London just debuted a project with French Maison Paco Rabanne. The tony retailer has taken the founder's 1966 innovative, somewhat radical concept of the "12 Unwearable Dresses" into today's version of a futuristic tool, reviving the 12 styles as NFTs. The dresses, shown recently at Decentraland fashion week, will be available online and with a physical presence inside the shop. A screen within an immersive space highlight Op Art works from Victor Vasarely and physical pieces of the Spring 2022 collection will be available for customers to view the 12 dresses. Customers can pay via a crypto wallet or a credit card and a custodial wallet can be used that contains a layer-2 blockchain framework.

Paco Rabanne reimagines the founder's 12 Unwearable dresses as NFTs.
Photo Courtesy of Paco Rabanne

French department store Printemps opened its doors to host DressX, a virtual closet founded by Daria Shapovalova and Natalia Modenova in 2020 that creates digital garments, NFTs and AR looks that generate zero waste, no carbon footprints, or chemicals during production. The digital platform is dipping its toes into the physical world with a 'phygital' pop-up. The activation, in-store until May 18 th, includes five digital pieces in the signature Printemps green, allowing a real-time dressing experience showcased on a human-sized interactive screen. Guests can try on and record videos of themselves wearing the computer-generated garb choosing from the unique collection or an archive of AR outfits. Getting folks to try virtual clothing on in a physical setting may also serve to get skeptics over the hump in exploring this new technology.

DressX has been announcing new partnerships almost bi-weekly beyond the Printemps pop-up. They recently collaborated with American Eagle for three digital jean styles to mark 'Earth Month' from April 25th to May 2 nd. Each pair has its unique water pattern, such as cascading waterfalls, that demonstrate the possibility of digital clothing. Earlier in the month, the platform partnered with the popular Gen Z social game Roblox for a Metaverse-wearable collection. DressX also teamed up with Italian cross-reality curator Xbinary to give a new life to a selection of sculptural 'artwear' pieces by American artist Kris Ruhs from the archives of Fondazione Sozzani. Initially presented DressXXbinary Genesis Jewelry NFT drop during a DressX event at 10 Corso Como during Milan Fashion Week.

NFTs can be more than treasured pieces of digital art. Some of them have jobs, such as those dubbed "utility NFTs." Enter ORIGYN, a Swiss foundation "dedicated to identifying, authenticating, and unlocking the powers of ownership for objects of value." In layman's speak, the platform, which boasts funding from Paris Hilton and Bill Ackman, uses utility NFTs containing blockchain technology to trace the product's genesis and trace previous ownership-considering the popularity of the second-hand luxury watch market, their recently announced partnership with WatchBox, a collectible luxury timepiece marketplace. The partnership will allow buyers even more peace of mind that their purchase items are legitimate.
NFT FUND ME

A collage of the images taken by Fred Siegel of Octogenarian members of the MPTF Country home ... [+]
Photos by Fred Siegel for Ac Magazine

Others use NFTs to assist in fundraising efforts. In the winter issue of Ac Magazine, photographer Fred Siegel captured 14 Motion Picture & Television Fund (MPTF) Octogenarian residents such asLee Meriwether, Corrine Conley, Johnny Gunn, Maggie Abbot, Anthony Lawrence, Toni Smith Lawrence, Alan Sloan, Sally Sloan, Kay Weissman, Susan Germaine, Susan Nathe, Toni Sawyer, Wini Hammondandin a heartwarming and playful accessories shoot. The former entertainment industry models were styled with pieces from brands such as Shinola, Ted Baker, Marchon, and Collection 18, including Kurt Geiger London, who sponsored the shoot.The images will be available as collectible digital artwork NFTs on the Black Snow platform. Money raised Proceeds will fund the many services MPTF provides to working and retired members of the Southern California entertainment community

"We embraced the shoot idea when we discovered that MPTF was celebrating its 100th Anniversary, and this was a perfect time to celebrate non-traditional models," said AC President Karen Giberson. "At the same time, we were watching the NFT market evolve and thought there could be an innovative way to use the Ac Magazine images to raise money to support the 100th Anniversary of MPTF, bringing the NFT collection project to life."
A TEACHING MOMENT
As the technology is new, others in the industry recognize the need to inform traditional creatives. To help forge a path for American designers curious and new to the technology form, the CFDA has joined forces with 5Crypto, a global web3, cryptocurrency, NFT, metaverse and blockchain marketing practice; The Sandbox metaverse, and Polygon Studios, a service supporting developers building decentralized apps on their platform by providing Web2 and Web3 teams with a suite of services such as developer support, partnership, strategy, go-to-market, and technical integrations, to guide American fashion into this new frontier, creating a web3 blueprint for the industry.

"This is a remarkable opportunity for the CFDA to guide the American fashion industry into the future of commerce and creativity," says Steven Kolb, CEO of the CFDA. "Our mission is to position our members as leaders in the global innovation of fashion and retail via digitally-led strategies to support growth and expansion. With the support of The Sandbox and Polygon Studios, the CFDA is poised to educate and empower business leaders for generations to come."

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Fashion Retailers And Luxury Amp Up NFT Activations After Adopting The Technology Last Year

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A little over a year ago, a Kate Moss NFT led the charge of the fashion industry to embark on the world of non-fungible tokens as the latest marketing endeavor. It's been a whirlwind year of brands such as Gucci, Burberry, Balenciaga and Dolce and Gabbana all jumping on the NFT bandwagon.

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Abstract
The phenomenon of "digital fashion" has been lately addressed in media as the next significant step in the fashion industry. The increasing use of the 3D-software in fashion design processes is part of a wider "fashion 4.0" digitalization process. This article frames the phenomenon of digital fashion and presents an in-depth case study research on two pioneering companies in this area, Atacac and The Fabricant. How and why are they building their fashion design practice on digital 3D-design? How are these companies redefining the fashion design culture and the fashion designer? Drawing from sociology of professions, this article proposes that digital fashion is an emerging subfield within the field of fashion design, differentiating itself from the professional conventions and building new strategies of jurisdiction and legitimation. Driven by sociotechnical affordances and elevation of professional pride through ethical, conceptual, artistic and skill differentiation, digital fashion designer becomes also a digital artisan. In the increasingly virtual, or "phygital" space and a networked synergetic community of digital fashion, the professional, authorial, bodily and material boundaries of designers become fluid, transforming the traditional figure of fashion designer.

Introduction

Digitalization has led cultural industries such as film, music and media, toward increasing dematerialization. Digital visualization has evolved because of the needs of the film and gaming industries, providing new possibilities also to the fashion industry that, by its nature, relies heavily on imagery dissemination (Black ; Rocamora ; Makryniotis ). Yet, fashion is fundamentally an embodied practice (Raebild ; Entwistle ). The contemporary virtual dimensions of fashion are arguably remediated and refashioned, with new digitized practices relationally coexisting with the traditional and material ones (Crewe ). Late developments in the area of garment-specific 3D-software have given possibilities to digitalize the traditional fashion design processes and virtualize the fashion imagery, products and spaces (Arribas and Alfaro ). Ethical, economical and creative controversies of the fashion industry have shoved new designer generations to search for alternative ways of providing clothing and fashion experiences that waste less resources, turning to experimentation with service models, production methods and technologies (Black ; Särmäkari and Vänskä ). Some of such designers rely on 3D-technology that enables not only digital prototyping and sampling but also digital-only fashion collections. Among practitioners, consultants and fashion media, these practices are called "digital fashion" (e.g. Milne ).

A Dutch fashion startup, The Fabricant, came under the spotlight in May 2019 after they auctioned a digital-only Iridescence-dress in Ethereal Summit-blockchain event (New York), for cryptocurrency worth $9500 (Renwick ). As The Fabricant's website shows, this was covered largely by media, from Vogue to Cosmopolitan and BBC, bringing "digital fashion" into the mainstream awareness. The dress was tailored on a photographed body of its owner and journalists were asking whether a dress needs to exist in real life. In their study on Habbo Hotel-online game, Lehdonvirta, Wilska, and Johnson (, 1075) found that even nonrealistic digital apparel is treated as commodities rather than media surfaces. Therefore, people are willing to pay for artificially scarce virtual goods as "lack of trendy sneakers at school could be compensated with virtual dragons and record players" (Lehdonvirta, Wilska, and Johnson , 1075). Digital "skins" in games have long been familiar to players. Late examples of collaborations between fashion brands and games show that digital fashion might become an integral part of fashion design practice and business (Yotka ; Makryniotis ). Recently, digital garments started to interest the major fashion companies also beyond gaming. For example, Tommy Hilfiger is planning to virtualize their design processes and showrooms entirely by 2022 (Milne ; McDowell ).

Research on digital 3D-fashion design calls for more empirical case studies in the area (e.g. Arribas and Alfaro ). The purpose of this article is to frame the phenomenon of "digital fashion" from the perspective of sociology of occupations through an in-depth case study investigation of two pioneering companies-Atacac and The Fabricant. Consisting from primary and secondary research material, this article sheds light on digital(-only) fashion as another layer of fashion design practice, professionalism, authorship, materiality, business and culture. This article contributes to the discussion on the implications of digitalization on the field of fashion design in the context of the "fourth industrial revolution," or fashion 4.0, characterized by fusion of smart technologies that are blurring boundaries between the digital and the physical (Bertola and Teunissen ). How and why the presented case studies are building their fashion design practice on digital fashion 4.0 processes? How are these cases redefining the fashion design culture and the professional role of the fashion designer? First, the theoretical foundations of this research are introduced and the field of digital fashion contextualized. Second, the methods are presented and followed by analysis of the cases.

Professional fashion designer and fashion 4.0

This article approaches fashion design as an occupation and an embodied practice, reflecting the traditional figure of fashion designer against the digitalized ontology of fashion 4.0. The figure of fashion designer refers to an object of sociological investigation, located in a particular sociotechnical discourse and environment (Volonté ).

Traditional figure of fashion designer

The foundations of fashion designership were laid over 150 years ago by arguably the first fashion designer, C.F. Worth. However, the figure of fashion designer has since then become highly fragmented and complex due to the technological, societal and cultural changes of the globalized world (Kawamura ; Volonté , 400).

Traditionally, an "artist" status of fashion designer is a professional legitimation strategy and stratification element (Steele ; Kawamura ; Crane ; Särmäkari ). This is linked to the Modern concept of art being above craft, and to the Romantic notion of authorship, emerged during industrialization when the work and the artifact were separated (Shiner ; Woodmansee ). Dematerialization, conceptualization and intellectualization of fashion have been evolving since WWII, contrasting the increasing dominance of mass-produced fashion and legitimizing fashion design as a valorized cultural practice (Van de Peer ; Clark ; Crane ; McRobbie ). However, design processes are intimately associated with designers' hands-on activities, such as sketching, draping, handling materials and fitting (Raebild ). These require a combination of technical and esthetic skills together with temporal sensitivity, creativity, as well as cultural and commercial understanding, juggling between newness and continuity (Bye and Sohn ; Vangkilde ). Thus, the professional fashion design practice stands on the embodied tacit knowledge of the designer as a fleshy human body in action-an assemblage of sensuous, emotional and physical encounters between humans and nonhumans, such as textiles, garments, brands, society and technology (Entwistle ; Raebild ; Petreca ; Vangkilde , 186; D. Atkinson , 149).

The balance between the culture of wearability and the culture of image-making depends on the market level and the educational, productional and cultural specificities of certain locations (Renfrew and Renfrew , 78; McRobbie ; Volonté ). The field-specific value system transforms over time because of the constant struggle between different actors and institutions, negotiating the professional boundaries and legitimacy (Bourdieu , 138; Van de Peer , 446; Volonté , 401). I argue that the contextual embodied knowledge of fashion designer is the professional jurisdiction-the link between their occupation and the work itself (Abbott ). Designers' authorial, intermediary and institutional recognition construct fashion designers' socio-professional legitimation in the field of fashion and among other design fields (Bourdieu ; McRobbie ; Kawamura ). The figure of fashion designer is treated in this article as a situated blend of jurisdiction and legitimation.

Fashion 4.0

The figure of fashion designer is essentially affected by technological environments as "fashion itself can be considered as a history of technology" (Quinn , 3). Fashion practice was paradigmatically shaped by the First, Second, Third, and now, the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Bertola and Teunissen ). "Fashion 4.0" stands for the new technological and organizational paradigm linked to the loose concept of Industry 4.0 that operates in cyber-physical space and develops toward smart products, production and networks, automation, optimization, flexibility, as well as sustainability-oriented, datafied and customer-driven processes (Bertola and Teunissen ). Hermann, Pentek, and Otto () argue that Industry 4.0 is characterized by six design principles- interoperability, virtualization, decentralization, modularity, service orientation and real-time capability.

Fashion 4.0 can be placed in the larger context of postindustrial network society where experiences are favored over products, and people are less tied to time and places (Castells ). Hunt's () utopian Manifesto for Postindustrial Design states that the heavy mechanical mass production is becoming extinct, together with authoritative, centrally positioned designers. Propelled by distributed intelligence, computer-aided-design (CAD) and ecological realities, postindustrial design relies on the flexibility and evolving nature of code (Hunt ). Accordingly, the dynamics within the otherwise conservative fashion industry are slowly liberating from time, place, actor and constellation constraints (Black ). Digital platforms and social media have boosted fashion dissemination, immediacy and accessibility, distributing fashion authority to diverse assemblage of participants, blurring boundaries between production and consumption, professionals and amateurs, physical and virtual, material and intangible, as well as object and image (Crewe , 129-130; P. Atkinson ).

Until recently, the niche area of "techno fashion" has been dominated by physical garment and material applications, such as smart clothing and digital garment fabrication (Quinn ; Braddock Clarke and Harris ). The overlapping streams of design-related fashion 4.0 technology focus arguably on (1) new service models, including mass-customization and customized digital production on-demand (e.g. Mattila ); (2) smart garments, textiles and IoT systems (e.g. Farren and Hutchison ); (3) utilization of AI (e.g. Luce ); and (4) digital fashion where 3D-technology is used in design processes, product development, visualization, distribution and marketing (e.g. Black ). This article focuses on the fourth area and the ways it shapes fashion designership.

Digital fashion-merging the physical and the virtual

Recently, virtual 3D-fashion, or so-called "digital fashion", has caught wide media attention, accelerated by the global COVID-19 situation that forced companies to digitize their processes and user experiences (McDowell ). Digital 3D-models can be displayed before the products are manufactured, as the car industry has been doing for decades. In this way, the production processes require less labor, material, logistical and time investment, which might also generate novel and arguably more sustainable business models (Black ; Volino, Cordier, and Magnenat-Thalmann , 597; Sun, Li, and Wang ; Mattila ). Proponents of digital- only fashion believe that the dematerialized fashion is a way for self-expression and a long-awaited answer to the overproduction and generic offerings of the fashion industry (Milne ).

Virtual representations and 3D-design are nothing new in visual effect field, industrial design, architecture, animation and game design, yet, a rather late addition to the fashion designers' two-dimensional digital toolset (Bye and Sohn , 200; Sun et al. , 1042). The key is the 3D-technology itself, which until recently has served mainly hard surfaced objects, designers with engineering mindsets and patternmakers (Volino et al. , 597; Sun et al. ; Mattila , 1-2; Sun and Zhao , 369). Lately, computation speed and algorithmic methods have enabled better soft material simulation techniques, real-time garment animation, interactive design systems as well as hyper-realistic digital 3D draping, resulting in increasingly popular virtual draping software developed with and for fashion designers (Volino et al. , 593-594; Mattila , 1; Arribas and Alfaro ; Makryniotis , 101-102; Jhanji ). Software such as Browzewear and CLO3D, simulate the behavior of the garment on a moving avatar, merging patternmaking, imagery production and fashion design (Spahiu et al. ; Mattila ; Makryniotis ; Black ). The term "digital fashion" is used by the media and practitioners to refer to a processual tool for virtual product development and visualization; marketing or educational tool for online stores and virtual museums; and digital-only end-product for virtual use. 3D-file as a container of all the garment and material data that can be used in various platforms.

Digital 3D fashion design has been studied in academia mainly from design research perspective looking into new processual, operational, technical and economic aspects (e.g. Volino et al. ; Bye and Sohn ; Arribas and Alfaro ). Before the late phenomenon of digital fashion, Jane Harris has experimented with the 3D computer graphic imaging (CGI) in fashion and textile design, seeing it substantially informed by the tacit knowledge, analogue craft skills and vocabulary of designers (Harris ; Braddock Clarke and Harris ). Several scholars have explored the possibilities of digital 3D-fashion for sustainability and inclusivity, for example, localization of garment production (Mattila ), design for disabilities (Kaiser et al. ), realistic 3D-design for on-demand model (Black ) and zero-waste design (McQuillan ). Digital 3D-fashion design is also addressed in research on producing virtual fashion experiences, such as tactility of digital textiles (Petreca ), virtual fitting (e.g. Baytar and Ashdown ) and design for social games (Makryniotis ).

The earliest commercial examples of digital fashion are arguably Atacac (2016-), Neuro Studio (2016?), Carlings's digital-only collection (2017-), The Fabricant (2018-) and DIGI-GXL-community of freelancing womxn, intersex, trans and non-binary designers (2018-). The gaming world has embraced digital apparel considerably earlier. Makryniotis () argues that in-game-purchase-based online gaming (e.g. Fortnite) has bridged the gap between character and fashion design. In styling games, such as Drest, any companies can show, test, collect data, optimize and sell their products. Virtual reality (VR) spaces, such as Second Life and Sansar, are marketplaces for amateur designs and brand stores of digital-only clothing. In games and VR, the avatars range from hyper-realistic to surreal. Because the VR representations of bodies, gender, sexuality and beauty ideals are typically narrow and conservative, the key figures behind the ethos of digital fashion, such as Cattytay-a digital designer, influencer, founder of DIGI-GXL and co-founder of The Institute of Digital Fashion-advocate for diversity, inclusivity and queering practices to ensure the space in the "metaverse" (three-dimensional virtual space) for the voices that are underrepresented and marginalized in the traditional fashion world and, especially, digital culture.

Many new brands, such as Tribute Brand (2020-), started to tailor digital-only 3D-garments on photographed bodies as "phygital" AR-experiences that blur the distinction between the "real" and the "simulated", mixing physical and digital worlds (Gaggioli , 774). During 2020-2021, digital fashion has mainstreamed, numbers of digital fashion designers increased and stores have appeared. Zooming into the actual digital fashion design practices is essential to understand transformations in the figure of fashion designer.

Methods

This article investigates two pioneering cases of digital fashion, Atacac and The Fabricant. A qualitative case study strategy helps to understand the "how" and "why" behind the unexplored complexity of two contemporary practices in real-world settings and to construct new knowledge through personal interpretation of the data (Yin , 2-4; Stake , 37). I approached the companies via e-mail, introducing myself as a researcher with fashion design background and explaining the goals of the research project. I also met the founder and designer of Atacac in a 3D-fashion seminar that I assisted in organizing at Aalto University in 2018. I heard about The Fabricant during my fieldwork at Atacac studio in Gothenburg (Sweden). The Fabricant was mentioned as Atacac's closest "partner in crime." I contacted the already hyped company later in 2019 and, luckily, was welcomed to visit their studio in Amsterdam (The Netherlands) later the same year.

This empirical study focuses predominantly on their reflections about and content of their actual work (Abbott , 19). The primary ethnographic research material was collected through semi-structured interviews, conversations and observation. I personally experienced the field (Moon , 67) and spent 3 days at Atacac (March 6-8, 2019), and 2 days at The Fabricant (November 19-20, 2019). I took notes and photographs during their work, meetings, discussions and workshops to capture the aspects that cannot be expressed explicitly and verbally (Atkinson and Hammersley ). I later turned fieldnotes, taken by hand and on computer, into reports as Word-files. I interviewed 7 out of 8 Atacac workers and 4 out of 5 The Fabricant workers, focusing on certain themes and topics. I sound-recorded and transcribed the interviews, the length of which varied from 15 min to 3 h. Additionally, I collected, compiled in text files and analyzed a vast amount of case-related media articles, talks, videos, podcasts, websites, reports and social media content of the companies. I applied a reflexive thematic analysis method to generate themes using my creativity, subjectivity and reflexivity as a resource for positioned, context-bound and situated meaning-making (Braun and Clarke ). After exploring the cases in their physical locations and everyday activities, and an immersive familiarization with the data, I executed an organic and iterative coding process in dialogue with evolving themes and theoretical assumptions (Braun and Clarke ). I utilized Atlas.ti-software in the coding stage.

Cases: Atacac and The Fabricant

Atacac

Atacac is a small Swedish fashion company, founded in 2016 by a fashion designer-researcher Rickard Lindqvist and a digital creative Jimmy Herdberg. At the time of my fieldwork, the company consisted of nine people. One intern, Tom Robertson, was concentrating on the communication and garment representation side whereas another intern, Wilma Kuipers, was working on the Sharewear platform and patterns, focusing on the processual dimensions of digital fashion design. Cristian Alvarez Mergas, having fashion design background and tech-savviness, digitized the physical fabrics and performed other technical tasks. The project manager, Anna Lebar, made sure that everything works; the patternmaker, Amandine Roudaut, prepared the patterns for production; and two micro-factory tailors, with origins from Syria, made the garments.

Rickard's design and research work are deeply rooted in his original background as a tailor and patternmaker. Atacac is committed to serve the physical human body building on the kinetic garment construction theory which Rickard developed during his PhD research. The theory proposes an alternative pattern-cutting paradigm based on balance directions, key biomechanical and a particular draping method that challenge the "static matrix of a non-moving body" and the "fundamental relationship between dress, garment construction, and the body, working from the body outward" (Lindqvist , 348). When Rickard and Jimmy tested CLO3D-software, they saw immediately business and artistic possibilities in its utilization in relation to Lindqvist's theory. Combining virtual and physical worlds, Rickard starts designing with CLO3D from the pattern. Atacac also created a reverse process where sales happen predominantly before the production, and the garments are presented virtually before sampling. The preordered garments are produced mostly on-demand in their in-house micro-factory. Atacac uses a flight ticket logic in pricing: the earlier the garment is purchased, the less it costs, thus, the inventory is the most expensive and remains minimal. This also allows microtrend forecasting, informing designers which products should be evolved further. Rickard highlights the importance of physical prototyping and fittings, materiality, and preservation of the physical garment construction craft. However, Atacac has expanded their action space in VR and the gaming world. Inspired by the wealthy e-sports studio from the neighborhood, Lindqvist anticipated that in the future, the fashion businesses could make profit from e-clothes instead of perfumes and designer bags and that digital fashion can be closer to imaginative and unique haute couture ( Figures 1 and 2).

The Fabricant

According to their webpage, The Fabricant is positioned at the intersection between fashion and technology, being the first "Digital Fashion House" that makes digital-only clothing, "wastes nothing but data and exploits nothing but imagination." They talk about a new order of human existence, enabled and normalized by technologies, such as social media and games. The Fabricant wants to revolutionize the mindset of the fashion world and the idea of fashion as a material practice and reduce the environmental impact by eliminating the manufacturing. The startup comprised 5 people at the time of my fieldwork in November 2019 (and almost six-times this amount in September 2021!). The Fabricant was founded at the beginning of 2018 by Kerry Murphy, a filmmaker and visual effect specialist who has worked also in advertising. Shortly after, The Fabricant's co-founder and creative director Amber Jae Slooten joined the company. Amber was the first fashion design student to produce an entirely digital-only graduation collection at AMFI (Amsterdam Fashion Institute) where she later taught digital 3D fashion design, inspiring new designers (such as Atacac's interns). The Fabricant's creative producer, Marlous Custers, plays an essential role in company operations and creative processes as she manages the practical side of everyone's work as well as the large network of clients and freelancers. Another co-founder, Andrea Hoppenbrouwer, has solid corporate experience and is responsible for commercial direction. Bram Siebers was a newly hired 3D product expert with technical fashion production background. Their blog content and a range of slogans are generated by a freelance writer Mickey Larosse. The later increase of their workforce shows that the company has grown very fast since 2019.

The design process at The Fabricant starts from the concept or brief of a client, and a storyboard. The garment design process begins from draping on an avatar or, in case of a client project, from visualization based on provided tech-packs, flat drawings and photos or examination of physical garments. The digital garment, the story and the digital experience are the end-products, merging fashion design and animated film. The Fabricant wishes to start selling increasingly their own designs and create a digital-only fashion industry. For The Fabricant, digital fashion is a space for dreaming, free from the constraints of the physical reality and providing anyone "the entire fashion industry on their hard drive" (Larosse ). The Fabricant is developing a fashion platform called Leela that they hope to be their main business in the future. The beta version was tested during 2020 and is intended for sharing, showing and selling both their own designs and digital garments of other companies. The users will have their personal avatars that can wear the garments in the platform ( Figures 3 and 4).

Findings

The phenomenon of digital fashion occurs in the context of fashion 4.0, and although the practices operate on the fringes of the industry and take distance from the industrial manufacturing, they arguably entail the aforementioned six design principles of Industry 4.0-interoperability, virtualization, decentralization, real-time capability, service orientation and modularity (Hermann et al. ; Bertola and Teunissen ). The analysis of the research material resulted in three main themes and several subthemes that concern fashion designership. To answer how the case studies are building their fashion design practice on digital 3D-design, a theme of sociotechnical affordances (cf. Davis and Chouinard ) unfolds the technology, processes and end-products of digital fashion practice. The why behind such practices are recognized in the theme called elevation of professional pride which regards several differentiation strategies and disruption of the status quo. Finally, the question on how these companies are redefining the fashion design culture and the fashion designer, a theme of fluid boundaries of fashion culture and fashion designer 4.0 examines the findings through the six principles of Industry 4.0 and outlines further characteristics identified in the practice of digital fashion.

Sociotechnical affordances

This theme unravels the internal and external professional disturbances (Abbott , 215) such as software, workflows, operational models, new skills, and the evolving tacit knowledge, as well as the dimensions of digital 3D-fashion stretching from the function of being a tool to create physical garments to a virtual fashion culture of digital-only end-products for humans, avatars or cyborgs.

Technology

After testing other similar software, both fashion designers of Atacac and The Fabricant chose CLO3D due to its intuitive interface, appealing visual representation, interoperability with other software and compatibility with their skills. In fact, the software inspired Atacac to start their business:

When we came across this 3D solution with this software [...] we realized that now [in 2016] the digital 3D tools are advanced on such a level that it's possible to do a lot of those experimentations [kinetic garment theory and draping] digitally to a large part, which was not possible when I started the research project six years earlier. (Rickard)

The Fabricant's Amber has a traditional fashion school background that taught how to cut, design, sew and drape: "I was always in my room with piles of fabrics and pen and pattern paper and sewing outfits for my design classes." Amber had her first encounter with a 3D-software (Lectra) during her studies at AMFI, when she realized the potential of digital 3D-tools. Amber took a semester off from school to explore 3D-programs, ending up with CLO3D which could be seen to entail the sociotechnical affordances, that take the existing fashion designer skillset and operational ecosystem into account, pushing and encouraging its users toward new actions, workflows, product-types and ultimately, culture of work (Davis and Chouinard ). Generally, affordance refers to a" range of functions and constraints that an object provides for, and places upon, structurally situated subjects" (Davis and Chouinard , 241). The social acceptance of CLO3D among peers and accessibility for fashion designers without earlier 3D-modeling competence nudges the designers to learn digital fashion design. Both cases found that the visual quality of the digital garments also increases the appeal of digital garments from the perspective of the audience. Furthermore, the development of efficient and affordable hardware has enabled such 3D-software to be accessible to amateurs, laypeople and students. As Bram from The Fabricant recalled: "[...] I saw how good the product looks like in digital, and then I quit my job, started freelancing and studied CLO for like one year now and, uh, yeah, and I'm here." While it is relatively easy to learn CLO, true mastery requires extensive practice. As all the case designers pointed out, physical training and knowledge in garment construction help to adopt digital workflow and create hyper-realistic digital garments. Concurrently, the software educates the less experienced users how a garment is constructed, and different materials behave.

In addition to CLO3D, both companies use a range of other software, such as Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, and (free) open-source 3D-rendering software Blender. Atacac also uses an inexpensive Chinese software Bok for pattern development and grading. The Fabricant does not invest in pattern-development. Instead they use film-specific software such as Cinema 4 D, Houdini and After Effects. The primary hardware that both cases use are computers. Additionally, Atacac's micro-factory is equipped with a rather traditional machinery, purchased from closing down Swedish tailors. The only digital production hardware in their plans is an automatic CNC cutting machine.

Processes

Digital fashion transforms the fashion design process for both physical and virtual practices. In physical practices, it enables instant preorder data in a Design/Sell/Make-model, contrasting the traditional Design/Make/Sell-model where designers are guessing and dictating the future demand (Black , 113-132). Digital fabrics, patterns and assets hypothetically reduce the physical traffic between the supplier and the designer. Designers can visualize their work, fit on digital models (of any size and shape) and make decisions immediately, without waiting for samples. Abandoning the traditional bulk-based business model requires a flexible infrastructure and modular production system in order to provide affordable customized on-demand garments-and stay in business. Atacac relies on 3D-technology and in-house micro-factory to shorten lead times from typical 6-18 months to three weeks. Atacac describes their model as "design-present-sell-produce" including the essential element of fashion as not only a commodity but also a visual culture ("present"). For The Fabricant the "producing" part is virtual as they craft highly detailed digital-only garments and animated fashion experiences. The Fabricant wants to bring their design process from six weeks to five days by automating workflows from the creation of digital bodies and motion libraries to rendering and environment simulation.

The design processes, defined by contexts, collaborators, outcome and professional backgrounds, are seemingly more pattern-driven when the garments are meant to become physical, and more image-driven as a visualization method or in cases when the garments remain digital-only. At Atacac, the 3D-file of a garment takes two directions from Rickard's table: pattern (Amandine) and image development (Jimmy's team). While digital prototyping saves time and money, Rickard still finds important to fit the prototypes physically, entailing materiality, haptic handling and thinking through designer's own body (Raebild ; D. Atkinson , 149). Designers of The Fabricant translate their material and embodied knowledge into digital-only form (cf. Harris , 24; Santos, Montagna, and Neto ). Amber showed me on the computer how she starts the process of "sculpting on the body." She chose a light silk chiffon that falls lightly on the avatar's body. The simulation made me feel the goosebumps from chiffon falling on the body. Seemingly, the element of motion makes the digital garment behavior relatable. As in traditional fashion design, digital fashion designers design something new but also something familiar (cf. Raebild ). The Fabricant wants to question bodily constraints whereas Atacac places the fleshy body at the center of their design process. Both companies emphasize that 3D-design affords a quick and intuitive experimentation:

I always work with concepts, so it's always like concepts that underlie the feeling that I have, and this feeling is translated into images. Then those images translated into kind of the feeling that I need for designing. [...] Then I just throw it on the doll and start working and sometimes it ends up being completely different from what I intended. But I like that as well because it's so free. And I save like 10 different versions of the same thing. Just to be able to go back to the original. And the thing is: in digital, when you cut, you can always click control-z. [...] It's super playful. Well, you also have to say no sometimes just to stop because it's also never finished. (Amber)

Amber's design process resembles the traditional draping, but without piles of fabrics, prototypes, failed toile tests and nights spent on sewing. The fabric library of CLO3D contains a large selection of materials that can be twisted with own scanned textures and prints. Atacac enriches this library with chosen physical fabrics that they digitize using CLO3D Fabric Kit.

End-products

Digital garments are more than just designs - they are artifacts in digital form. The garments can be palimpsests: multilayered objects that different creators can build on. Both Atacac and The Fabricant share their digital garment files and invite everyone to modify the designs. However, designers of these two companies have rather different tasks: Atacac's end-goal are both physical and virtual garments whereas The Fabricant aims at digital-only garments. For Atacac, virtual garments are representing mainly the physical garments while The Fabricant's designs simulate the reality with "small links" to physical clothes such as labels, yet, taking distance from and pushing the boundaries of the reality, creating surreal experiences. The Fabricant's end-products are also stories, concepts and short animated movies.

Before The Fabricant, Amber designed an installation showing her future vision of fashion where people wear simple everyday outfits whereas the expression layer is projected on the body as a hologram. Amber's idea was to literally divide the protection and expression functions of clothing (cf. Kawamura ). Digital-only fashion tackles the expression function, already virtualized by the social media. The Fabricant suggests that virtual clothes could satisfy the needs for sartorial self-expression, echoing Baudrillard's (, 8) concept of postmodern "society of simulation" where cultural modes of representation simulate reality in media, cyberspace, and virtual reality, and identities are constructed by the appropriation of images instead of tangible objects. Atacac has similar views and finds virtual worlds as new creative spaces for professional and nonprofessional fashion designers to create imaginative rather than everyday outfits.

Elevation of professional pride

The controversial status quo of the fashion industry in combination with the appreciation toward fashion as a culture and craft inspired both cases to reposition fashion design practice within the interdependent system of professions (Abbott , 86). The founders had experienced overall frustration in their respective fields earlier. For example, before The Fabricant, Amber did not want to work in the fashion industry because she was afraid to be drawn by the flow. Instead, she supported herself partly by restaurant work and, in this way, maintained her artistic integrity (cf. McRobbie ). Atacac and The Fabricant could be seen as "architects of digital fashion" (Wilcox ), building the whole culture, visual language, rules and operational models from scratch, which is an advantage and a challenge at the same time. Uncertainty is tackled through learning from each other and collaborators. Failure is accepted as part of their startup-minded activity.

A second leading theme demonstrating the reasons behind the digital fashion practices is related to professionalization. Even though the cases contest exclusivity and protection of professional jurisdiction, they do explicitly and implicitly pursue elevation of professional pride through ethical, artistic, intellectual and skill differentiation in the field of fashion.

Ethical differentiation

Although this article does not evaluate ethical responsibility of digital fashion, my study shows that both cases consider digital fashion as a more sustainable and inclusive approach to fashion practice and use ethical differentiation from the traditional fashion industry as a professional legitimation strategy. The Fabricant eliminates all the physical production, whereas Atacac minimizes the material, logistic and overall production impact. Both companies want to transform the prevalent fashion field through talks, consulting and serving as an example.

Besides environmental aspects, Atacac and The Fabricant accentuate the social freedom that the virtual sartorial world might offer. For Amber, digital fashion is an "open space for people to be themselves" and she wants to design for bodies outside the limits of beauty and size standards, gender norms, ability, wealth and dressing conventions. Despite the aspirations of the cases and other digital fashion influencers, including Cattytay, digital fashion is not entirely liberated from the pressures on "fashioned bodies to conform and perform to socially defined standards" (D. Atkinson , 159; Boler ). The virtual fashion imagery tends to mirror the narrow norms and ideals of the physical reality. Therefore, it is yet to achieve the state of an "open space" for everyone.

Another form of inclusivity that Atacac and The Fabricant wish to tackle is the one of skills. Traditional fashion education is exclusive and often expensive. The cases highlight accessibility of digital fashion design practice to anyone with a laptop, internet connection and 3D-software license. They share willingly their knowledge among the online communities. Nonetheless, such inclusivity has its limits as well: digital devices, licenses and their adoption require financial resources, suitable infrastructure, time to learn and play with the software, and, presumably, digital nativeness. Furthermore, as both cases show, the physical tacit knowledge of a traditional fashion designer and patternmaker, combined with the skills of a digital designer and visual effects specialist, contribute to the digital craftsmanship and storytelling abilities. Such tacit knowledge is acquired through education or hobbies.

The cases find 3D-fashion design also as a pathway to improve the position of professional fashion designers. Technologizing and expanding fashion design profession might offer a thicker paycheck than the traditional fashion field that carries a high risk of self-exploitation, and where the socio-economic privilege reaches only a fraction of designers (McRobbie ). The cases pursue sustainability of work and togetherness on many levels. As Kerry reflects: "I want to wake up every single morning and look forward to coming here, to meet all the people that are my colleagues as well as friends." At Atacac, leisure activities and families were integral part of daily conversations; long hours were not encouraged; and niceness was a default.

Artistic and intellectual differentiation

The driving force behind both cases is frustration toward the conservative fashion world: the outdated processes, authoritative designership, conventional fashion spaces and static physicality of the object. Such thoughts resemble the foundations of conceptual fashion and open-source philosophy (cf. Clark ; Särmäkari and Vänskä ). Conceptual art arose from the disappointment toward human civilization by questioning the principles of artmaking, the artist, the predominance of the visual, the galleries, commodification, as well as the permanent art object, resulting in new temporal and performative art forms (Clark , 67-68). Later, conceptual fashion designers contested the foundations of the fashion culture in a similar way (Clark , 74). A narrativization and intellectualization of fashion worlds (Van de Peer ) continues in digital fashion settings where even film-style storylines become part of fashion designer's work. Furthermore, digital fashion may be paralleled with the post-digital art discourse that debates on the human existence, embodiment and authorship in the networked digital age, yet, focuses on specific media and materialities in the screen-dominated data-world (Paul ; Kholeif ).

The Fabricant draws concepts from the societal questions and zeitgeist in a critical manner and talks about designing fashion experiences, not just artifacts. Likewise, Atacac subverts the fundamentals of fashion-making: as Rickard said, their primary motivation is to find "more intelligent ways of doing." Possibly due to Rickard's academic background, they pursue a fashion practice where new work is "standing on the shoulders of giants" and works are open for use if the original author is referenced. For The Fabricant, doing fashion is a form of research - as Amber describes their conceptual process, "[...] it's kind of a mood-board, but it's also a research paper." Furthermore, Amber found experimenting with non-textile materials, non-human bodies, AI-generated design process, and surreal environments more rewarding than working with physical realm.

Intellectualization and artification of fashion practice have a similar legitimation role as abstract academic knowledge that traces the foundations of professional work to major cultural values (Abbott , 54; Crane ). For both cases, the excessive and exclusive fashion culture no longer fits the reality 21st century, therefore, differentiation happens through the concept, process, and creativity.

Skill differentiation

While fashion artists-designers even hide their sewing skills (McRobbie ), digital fashion valorizes the technical and patternmaking skills. Digital fashion designer is also a maker. Atacac builds on their patternmaking mastery, whereas The Fabricant highlights that they are a digital fashion house, practicing digital craftsmanship far from the "gamey" esthetics. Both companies are based on a union between professionals with fashion design and digital skills, yet, the tasks are rather divided, and the fashion designers are primarily responsible for the garments. Fashion designers are thus taking over the jurisdiction of garment 3D-design processes and visualization, vacating a number of jurisdictions central in fashion designers' work: the time-consuming 2D-drawings, instructions, and sampling.

In addition to technical, digital and fashion skills, digital fashion practices require advanced organizational and communication skills due to the fragmented teamwork and global collaboration. Therefore, the role of producer/product manager is central in managing workflows, collaborations, communication with clients and freelancers, recruitment, budgeting and scheduling. Communication skills are equally important for the digital fashion designer: e.g. Amber briefs and communicates daily with globally located 3D-designers, environment designers, sound designers and other freelancers, recruited on the basis of their special skills and particular project needs. In comparison to the traditional fashion design, the nature of teamwork expands dramatically and calls for the empathic skill to "read people" worldwide.

Fluid boundaries of fashion culture and fashion designer 4.0

The most frequent code that appeared during the analysis of the research material was "open-source philosophy" which refers to a mindset and design approach stemming from digital culture that cherishes transparency, co-design, modifiability of products, rapid and DIY on-demand making as well as overall togetherness (Särmäkari and Vänskä , 2420). I argue that such mindset is mainstreaming and results in fluid boundaries of fashion culture and fashion designer 4.0, which are not limited to the social, processual and professional boundaries but also material and bodily boundaries. In the six principles of industry 4.0 (Hermann et al. ), I find the elements of open-source philosophy and the fluidity between the physical and the virtual worlds, products and processes, as well as slowness and immediacy tied to evolving professional jurisdiction. Interoperability is important between different software as well as different professionals, nonprofessionals and cultures. Virtualization transmits the designer to phygitality and digital craftsmanship, turning the designer-artist into a digital artisan, designer-maker and designer-communicator. Virtualization of garments quantifies the artifact and datafies the human body, behavior and action space. Open-source philosophy, community-based legitimation and using extensive networks as well as blockchain technology comprise the decentralization elements. Real-time capability appears in the immediacy of visualization, testing, sampling and selling as well as in quick reaction data and short lead times. Service orientation underlies the prioritization of processes over products, and services as source of revenue. Modularity is essential in customization, co-creation, and overall flexibility of processes.

Fluid professional and authorial boundaries

Abbott argues that the clarity with which professional borders are defined toward other professions (or other players in the field) may affect the jurisdictions' vulnerability (Abbott , 56). In digital fashion, the designer's role is fluid and deeply contextual. The assemblages of the professional backgrounds, hobbies, experiences and technologies form what these two companies are and how they work.

[...] I used to play hours and hours of Sims, just dressing the dolls. Because I love the fact that I could, you know, download things and hack the software to create like green skin or things like that. (Amber)

Both companies combine own product development with service orientation Atacac and The Fabricant finance their artistic work with revenue from varying client projects, consulting and, in case of Atacac, micro-manufacturing income. The cases work in networks of small businesses, freelancers and big companies within and beyond the fashion world. Interdisciplinary collaboration happens also locally among studio members and with neighbors. The relationship between digital fashion designers and patternmakers or manufacturing is more intimate, even symbiotic (Sun and Zhao , 368-369).

Professional and authorial boundaries are contested by the open-source attitude of both cases who find the secrecy of the fashion industry irrational because it is easy to copy a garment. By sharing their designs and files they want to ensure decent copies, modifications and customer engagement. As Jimmy reflects: "[...] if someone downloads our pattern and makes their own garment, they are spending so much time with our brand, learn everything about how it's done, then they post it in the social media, talk about it, share links to us. The value of that is so much more than selling a piece." In contrast to the specialized and unattainable technologies of earlier industrial phases, the contemporary technologies might reduce dependence on professional design and production (P. Atkinson ). Customers have also indirect impact on designs by clicking and preordering garments. Data-driven product evolution happens iteratively and rather effortlessly because the file can be opened and modified. Frequent "drops" generate instant feedback and enable bold testing. Furthermore, the evolution of the product can be tokenized, traced and authenticated with blockchain technology, making digital garments collectible, unique artifacts (cf. Crane ) that are called non-fungible tokens (NFTs) (Hernandez, Vogelsteller, and Sieler ). Hence, the design and artifact are converged, while authorship can be prescribed to all the designer-makers of the artifact.

The digital-only design process potentially turns the experience of the fashion design increasingly into what Hayles () calls "technogenesis" where humans think through, with and alongside digital media. When the products, wearers and environments are partly or entirely virtual, the garments are mediatized to work in virtual spaces (Rocamora ). Furthermore, Douglas Atkinson (, 152) argues that contemporary fashion designers are estranged from the craft and manufacturing processes, therefore, digital 3D-design might be their only way to mediate design "in a world of limited resources but great computational power." In technogenesis, digital fashion designers design also for fluid identities, or cyborgs that are dynamic, co-evolving, heterogeneous and historically situated assemblages of humans and non-humans, the real and the virtual bodies, established through relational encounters and forming phygital, digital-material existence (Haraway ; Gaggioli ; Pink, Lingard, and Harley ; Makryniotis ). In digital-only fashion, instead of manipulating Instagram-bodies or pursuing muscular corsets (Steele , 143), bodies do not have physical constraints, though, it is difficult to escape the social fabric of body stereotypes (Boler ). Always intrigued with the possibility to shift identities, Amber thinks that the "virtual layer of expression" and "thought couture" extend the spirit, body, dress and embodiment (or disembodiment as a new digital Cartesianism?, Boler ) of humans who can wear durable slow fashion in the physical lives. In such situation, the gap between the artist-designer and the designer of functional everyday commodities might grow wider. If the tasks and the jurisdiction become significantly different, will this create two separate occupations, and if so, with what kind of other occupations would these fields merge?

Legitimation of digital fashion by communities and the fashion world

Digital fashion reveals the social meanings that we give to objects, artifacts, spaces and garments. Even though non-tokenized digital garment might be copypastable, the context counts: who the garment is bought from, what it represents, and on which platform it is sold, given, won or worn. White t-shirt by Balenciaga has different meaning than the one by Target: the process, designer or brand myth makes the t-shirt desirable (Kawamura ; Crane ). Instead of only the professional fashion world, digital fashion practices rely on and are largely legitimized by their globally dispersed communities, grown by sharing files and knowledge. According to Atacac's Jimmy, the function of a brand turns from a specialized provider of products into a community and a design method because "[...] almost anyone can produce anything, there is an online service somewhere where you can order whatever you want." Both companies believe that community is the key to building the future revenue, however, the dominant fashion world has also gradually granted acceptance, as the digital fashion practices are suddenly appearing in the trend reports, fashion media and are approached by major fashion companies and institutions. For The Fabricant, the success came as a surprise because the initial reception of the fashion world was suspicious-sometimes even hostile-yet curious. They were told that fashion will never be digital because of the lack of tactility. At the beginning the founders found confidence from each other and fellow digital fashion practitioners. Today, they feel that the leap of faith was worthwhile, and digital fashion is better understood because of the media coverage, gaming world and social media filters. Both case studies firmly believe that digital fashion designer will be a career for many. They might be hired by fashion houses or games, or might start a fashion brand selling virtual garments and, sometimes, physical collections. However, Rickard compares the emerging fashion practice to the digitalized music industry in which it is easy to enter but difficult to stand out.

Conclusions

This article analyzed two cases studies, Atacac and The Fabricant, to shed light on how the fashion subfield of digital 3D fashion design shapes the figure of fashion designers. Both companies rely on open-source philosophy and decentralized community-based legitimation, typical for the digital age. Both differentiate themselves from the traditional fashion world through their discourse, working culture, processes and outcome. They add technological expertise, dynamic collaborative interoperability to the traditional fashion designer skillset, filling the vacant jurisdiction of fashion design as a digital culture and craft where designer becomes a digital artisan with artistic independence. As Abbott (, 3) argues, "[p]rofessions develop when jurisdictions become vacant, which may happen because they are newly created or because an earlier tenant has left them altogether or lost its firm grip on them." Technological disturbances and general shifts in culturally accepted values can shake the system of professions dramatically (Abbott , 57). I argue that the socio-technical affordances and the value shift toward flatter, open, fluid and interactive network structures in precarious fashion 4.0 are expanding, liquifying and multiplying the professional figure of fashion designer.

The cases differ from each other in terms of their relationship to physical dimension, professional assemblages and end-products. According to The Fabricant, digital-only fashion has encountered criticism mostly regarding the lack of emotional and embodied attachment that designers and wearers have with physical garments: " the tactile experience of running your fingers over a satin dress" (Semic ). To what extent digital-only clothing could become affective enough to induce large-scale consumption? Increasing digital competencies in fashion design education might decrease the haptic, material and embodied knowledge of fashion designers (D. Atkinson , 149-150). How the technological mediation of materials would change the relationships to and the knowledge of the material? Does digital fashion enforce fantasies about disembodiment and predominance of the mind? (Boler ). Does cyberworld continue to maintain, reproduce and even fortify the old social and body stereotypes instead of shattering and queering them-something that fashion has always done to some extent? (Vänskä ). Many questions ought to be answered in the face of mainstreamization of digital fashion.

Late hype around the blockchain-authenticated digital collectibles NFTs has raised interest toward digital fashion among the biggest players, who rely on evidence-based reasons to transform their operational models. Simultaneously, there is an increasing number of freelancing professional and amateur digital fashion designers. The non-tokenized digital garments are still copypastable which, in case of companies and designers that do not have as open-source attitude as the presented cases, poses questions regarding intellectual property rights. Further research is needed in various academic fields to study digital fashion phenomenon empirically on a larger scale, both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Acknowledgment

Many thanks to Atacac and The Fabricant for letting me into their studios, giving their time, and sharing their thoughts. I am grateful to Aalto University, Finnish Cultural Foundation, Fulbright Finland Foundation, and Parsons School of Design for enabling this research as well as to Prof. Annamari Vänskä and our research group, Prof. Hazel Clark, and the peer-reviewers for their invaluable guidance, support and constructive feedback.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.tformat

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Natalia Särmäkari
Natalia Särmäkari is a Doctoral Candidate at Aalto University, Finland. Särmäkari's professional background is in fashion design and her research interests concern fashion studies and design research, authorship and professionalism of fashion designers as well as the digitalization and datafication of the field of fashion design. Särmäkari is a member of the research project Intimacy, work and design of the consortium Intimacy in data-driven culture (IDA), funded by the Strategic Research Council at the Academy of Finland. natalia.sarmakari@aalto.fi

1 Virtual outfit or appearance of a character or player's avatar in a video game. Skins are either bought or won, and they typically communicate the status of the character/player. For free online games, such as Fortnite, skins are the main revenue (see Makryniotis ).

2 The Institute of Digital Fashion (IoDF), https://institute-digital.fashion, was founded by Cattytay and a fashion consultant Leanne-Elliot Young in late 2020. They created a manifesto, https://indd.adobe.com/view/3991a46d-a089-4278-a11e-64f1710d7cc2, that promotes the ethos of digital fashion. IoDF collaborates with the top fashion schools, institutions and companies worldwide.

3 For example, a multi-brand retailer Dress-X sells digital-only designer clothing, https://dress-x.com/

4 Sharewear is Atacac's "transparency project" that shares garment 3D-files and patterns online for free.

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Digital 3D Fashion Designers: Cases of Atacac and The Fabricant

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Abstract The phenomenon of "digital fashion" has been lately addressed in media as the next significant step in the fashion industry. The increasing use of the 3D-software in fashion design processes is part of a wider "fashion 4.0" digitalization process.

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BEIJING, China - On the southern Chinese island of Hainan, a duty-free shopping paradise, mainland tourists keen to splurge will often patiently line up for an hour or more to enter a Gucci, Tiffany or other luxury brand store.

"I'm mentally working on a shopping list," says Zeng Rong, 34, a Beijing-based auditor who is looking forward to her upcoming Hainan trip. "I'd like to buy a Bottega Veneta bag as well as a coat and a down jacket from Moncler before the weather gets cold."

With the coronavirus pandemic having sent most of the world's luxury spending into a tailspin and China the only major economy expected to show growth this year, high-end brands now depend more than ever on Chinese consumers like Zeng for sales.

Their spending largesse, which extends across China's biggest cities, is spurring luxury brands to double down on the Chinese market - embracing e-commerce and pushing ahead with store openings whereas in most other countries such plans have been postponed or scaled down.

Lavish events are also back. Louis Vuitton menswear designer Virgil Abloh held a Spring/Summer fashion show before a live audience in Shanghai last month. Prada hosted private viewings of its new collection last week - also in Shanghai, the country's fashion capital which has begun to replace Hong Kong as the favoured shopping haven for domestic tourists.

Driven by well-heeled consumers forsaking their usual overseas trips to places like Milan and Paris as well as pent-up demand that built during lockdown, spending in China on luxury goods has surged.

Prada has said the group's China sales jumped 60 percent in June and 66 percent in July, while LVMH noted that in some weeks since March when the country came out of lockdown, Louis Vuitton and Dior have seen China sales more than double.

"Mainland China has become the place where all the purchase power is trapped," said Mauro Maggioni, Asia Pacific CEO at Italian luxury sneaker and apparel brand Golden Goose which has 21 stores in mainland China. It also opened stores on China's top e-commerce sites last month and plans a new shop in Hainan soon.

As luxury spending in China reaches new heights for some brands, the Chinese are set to account for around half of all global spending on high-end brands in 2020, up from 37 percent last year, according to McKinsey & Company.

That said, industry executives say it will not be enough to make up for the near absence of Chinese tourists abroad, who have been responsible for two-thirds of Chinese luxury spending. Total global luxury spending is expected to plunge as much as 35 percent from last year's $300 billion, according to consultancy Bain.

China is, however, the place to be. Store numbers for top luxury brands there rose 4 percent in the first half of 2020, while those for cosmetics brands jumped 8 percent, according to a report by property consultancy Savills.

"I can see the continuous potential of the Chinese market," Michele Norsa, executive deputy chairman at Italy's Ferragamo , told an earnings briefing this month. The luxury shoe and accessories maker is reviewing its store network with a view to closing some in Europe and opening more in China.

Helping stoke domestic demand, the Chinese government has long sought to bring some of the money splashed abroad by its citizens overseas back home.

It cut import tariffs in 2018, enabling luxury brands to reduce their China prices, while this year in Hainan, it has expanded the amount of duty-free shopping allowed to 100,000 yuan ($14,650) from 30,000 yuan as well as the types and number of products allowed.

Also, unlike many other countries where luxury spending tends to be the domain of older generations, China skews younger with many luxury consumers between 25 to 35 - often the only child of the family and armed with money from indulgent parents.

Younger Chinese shoppers also prefer e-commerce and the world's poshest brands have started wading into online sales in China, putting aside concerns about the potential for counterfeiters to take away their sales and the loss of the luxury shopping experience over the internet.

Services like livestreaming now give luxury brands the ability to more directly connect to shoppers, said Golden Goose's Maggioni, adding that with online stores his brand could now reach shoppers in up to 100 Chinese cities.

Alibaba's Tmall marketplace has seen 50 brands including Giorgio Armani and Alexander Wang open stores on its three-year old luxury platform this year and another 20 are expected to join by the end of the year, bringing the number to 220.

Getting brands to join is not hard, Luna Wang, head of the division said at a Tmall Luxury event last month, noting the far greater market penetration that comes with an online presence.

"When the brands see the figures, they speed up," she said.
By Sophie Yu, Silvia Aloisi and Brenda Goh with additional reporting by Carlos Garcia; editor: Edwina Gibbs.

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Luxury Brands Bank on a Raring China Market

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BEIJING, China - On the southern Chinese island of Hainan, a duty-free shopping paradise, mainland tourists keen to splurge will often patiently line up for an hour or more to enter a Gucci, Tiffany or other luxury brand store.

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Department of Civil Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310058, China

College of Economics, University of Guizhou, Guiyang 550025, China

School of Marxism, Dongbei University of Finance & Economics, Dalian 116025, China

School of International Trade Dongbei, University of Finance & Economics, Dalian 116025, China

Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.

Academic Editor: Tan Yigitcanlar

Looking back at China's poverty reduction in the 21st century, two factors have been crucial: urbanization and trade liberalization, which began around the same time [ 1]. In October 2000, the Chinese government put forward in its proposal on the Tenth Five-Year Plan the following statement: "With the improvement of agricultural productivity and the acceleration of industrialization, the conditions for China to promote urbanization have become mature, and we should lose no opportunity to implement the urbanization strategy". China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) on 11 December 2001, becoming the 143rd full member in the same period. Thanks to this opportunity, China's foreign trade process has been gradually accelerated. Trade liberalization has spawned China's economic growth, and economic growth is an essential way for a country to solve poverty [ 2]. Therefore, this paper will be based on an empirical analysis of the relationship between urbanization, foreign trade and poverty reduction, as well as the synergy of urbanization and foreign trade in poverty reduction.

A policy of opening to the outside world and urbanization are currently the two major engines of China's economic development. The "One Belt, One Road" initiative and new urbanization have injected new vitality into China's economic development [ 3]. Since the 1990s, China has vigorously promoted the economic development of poverty-stricken areas through large-scale implementation of the policy of opening up and urbanization, and the effect of poverty reduction has been prominent. International experience shows that opening to the outside world and urbanization can play a synergistic role in poverty reduction [ 4]. China has not yet conducted enough research on this, but it must be emphasized in the next step of formulating relevant policies on foreign trade, foreign investment, and urban development. Therefore, it is important to study the poverty reduction effects of opening up and urbanization, and give play to the mutual synergy between the two in poverty reduction, and construct a "two-wheel drive" poverty reduction strategy led by opening up and urbanization, which will serve the Chinese government and others. The national government's poverty reduction work provides a reference path.

There have been many studies on the effects of foreign trade and urbanization on poverty reduction [ 5]. However, due to differences in statistical calibers and measurement methods, there is no unified conclusion on the role of urbanization and foreign trade in poverty reduction. Existing studies mainly focus on the relationship between foreign trade and urbanization, the relationship between urbanization and poverty reduction, and the relationship between foreign trade and poverty reduction. These three factors are rarely included in a comprehensive analysis under a unified framework. Therefore, this paper focuses on the impact of the synergy between foreign trade and urbanization on poverty reduction. We reviewed Panudulkitti on the relationship between urbanization and poverty reduction under a closed economy [ 6], and expanded it innovatively by establishing a cross-synergy model of foreign trade between trade urbanization and poverty reduction under the open economy, respectively, using regional data of 27 Chinese provinces for 18 years, etc. Based on the empirical results, and drawing on successful overseas experiences, we propose the rational development of urbanization, the improvement of trade openness and the coordinated development of foreign trade urbanization, and find the domestic empirical evidence on the relationship between urbanization and poverty reduction in an open economy. We expect to achieve better poverty reduction with the synergy of foreign trade and urbanization, and provide empirical evidence for the implementation of poverty reduction strategies in other countries internationally.

Poverty includes both absolute poverty, where it is difficult to maintain minimum subsistence needs, and relative poverty [ 7], where per capita welfare is below the average level [ 8]. With economic and social development, the connotation of poverty is also changing, not only referring to the income problem, but also involving education, health, public services, equity and justice, personal dignity and other complex social issues [ 9]. According to the causes of poverty, these issues can be subdivided into income poverty, capacity poverty, resource poverty, cultural poverty, institutional poverty, intergenerational transfer poverty, etc. [ 10].

The international community has always been very concerned about poverty reduction. In the early days, countries generally adopted the financial aid approach to poverty reduction [ 11], but this tends to make people in poverty become welfare-dependent, which is not conducive to long-term poverty reduction [ 12]. Therefore, attention has turned to economic development to reduce poverty [ 13, 14], increasingly focusing on the education, health and public services for people in poverty [ 15], focusing also on issues such as capacity poverty, poverty vulnerability, equity and justice, subjective feelings and participation rights [ 16].

The economic theory of poverty reduction follows the logic of "poverty reduction-income growth-income disparity" [ 17]. On this basis, our paper will examine the poverty states of the study subjects in three dimensions: poverty disparity, income level and disparity, the numbers of under-insurance and protection expenditure, and measure the effect of poverty reduction.

2.1. The Impact of Urbanization on Poverty Reduction

Judging from the existing literature on the relationship between urbanization and poverty reduction, most studies point out that urbanization has a positive impact on poverty reduction. Awan and Shahbaz (2010) found that urbanization positively affects poverty reduction, which is particularly obvious in rural areas [ 18]. As the urbanization rate rises, the poverty rate will decrease. Cali and Menon (2012) studied the relevant data of India from 1983 to 1999 and found that urbanization can achieve poverty reduction in rural areas through economic linkages between urban and rural areas [ 19]. The literature review illuminates the following:

2.1.1. The Main Ways to Reduce Poverty through Urbanization

First, urbanization reduces poverty through economic growth [ 20, 21]. Lewis (1954) [ 22] pointed out that economic growth can improve employment and income distribution brought about by urbanization, thereby reducing poverty. Industrial restructuring, industrial transfer, industrial agglomeration [ 23], and agricultural modernization brought about by urbanization have strongly promoted economic development [ 24]. Second, urbanization reduces poverty by affecting income levels [ 25]. Ahluwalia et al., (2008) showed that urbanization leads to a shift of rural labor to cities, which reduces the supply of rural labor while increasing labor productivity, leading to an increase in the income of rural residents and thus reducing poverty [ 26]. Third, urbanization achieves poverty reduction through its impact on employment. Mckenzie and Sasin (2007) found that the demand for products brought about by urbanization will promote enterprise development, increase labor demand for enterprises, and create more employment opportunities for the poor [ 27]. Fourth, urbanization achieves poverty reduction through population mobility. Christiaensen and Todo (2014) pointed out through an empirical study of cross-country data in developing countries from 1980 to 2004 that when rural poor people migrate to middle-level cities and towns compared to large cities [ 28], the poverty reduction effect is more effective. Fifth, infrastructure development [ 29] and public service [ 30] improvements during urbanization contribute to poverty reduction. Jayasuriya (2002) and Gordon et al., (2003) empirically examined the effects of urbanization on education [ 31, 32]., health care, and services, and pointed out the indirect effects of urbanization on poverty reduction by improving education, health care, and services.

2.1.2. An Inverted U-Shaped Relationship between the Urbanization Rate and the Incidence of Poverty

Martinez-Vazquez et al., (2009) showed an inverted U-shaped relationship between the urbanization rate [ 33], and poverty incidence, i.e., urbanization has a positive effect on poverty reduction in the early stages of urbanization, whereas the effect of urbanization on poverty reduction decreases in the later stages [ 34]. This finding was empirically confirmed using cross-country data. It was also found that the positive effect of urbanization on poverty reduction occurs only in some countries [ 35].

2.2. The Impact of Foreign Trade on Urbanization

Moomaw and Shatter (1996) pointed out that foreign trade can directly or indirectly promote the development of urbanization through various channels, such as economic growth, industrial structure transformation, and capital accumulation [ 36]. Huff and Angeles (2011) pointed out that economic globalization and the strengthening of free trade have profoundly affected the urbanization patterns and processes in countries around the world [ 37], especially in Southeast Asia, many large-scale urban centers have been formed in trade-facilitated areas such as borders and the globalization index has become an essential factor influencing the urbanization of various countries [ 38]. However, many scholars have put forward different views, pointing out that foreign trade also has a negative effect on urbanization. Taking Mexico as an example, under the conditions of an open economy, the production links of enterprises may be transferred overseas, which is not conducive to the agglomeration of labor and capital and the development of urbanization [ 39]. Pengfei Ni and others pointed out that an unreasonable export structure and a low value-added export-oriented strategy will lead to the simultaneous existence of trade surplus and lagging urbanization development [ 40].

2.3. The Impact of Foreign Trade and Urbanization on Poverty Reduction

There are few studies that examine foreign trade, urbanization, and poverty reduction together. Daniel (2004) pointed out that foreign trade and urbanization have a mutual influence on poverty reduction [ 41]. Chunxiang and Zhaolong (2014) used Granger causality test methods to find a long-term equilibrium relationship between foreign trade, urbanization, and the gap between rich and poor, but did not explain the mutual influence mechanism [ 42]. Yongqiang and Hemao (2012) used the dual economic model to analyze the mechanism of export structure, urbanization, and the gap between urban and rural rich and poor [ 43]. Qilin (2011) pointed out that the demand for high-skilled labor brought about by foreign trade will exacerbate the gap between urban and rural rich and poor, while the development of urbanization will promote the transfer of surplus rural labor to employment and reduce poverty [ 44].

To sum up, in the context of opening up, there is a lack of systematic research on the relationship between foreign trade, urbanization, and poverty reduction. In addition, few studies have further examined the interactive effects of foreign trade, urbanization and poverty reduction. This article contains our research from this aspect.

3.2. Variables

3.2.1. Dependent Variables

In order to fully reflect the effect of poverty reduction, the explanatory variables measured the effect of poverty reduction from both urban and rural subjects, as well as from different dimensions such as poverty gap, income level and gap, number of minimum subsistence allowance and minimum guarantee expenditure.

The poverty gap was measured by three indicators: poverty incidence, "Headcount"; poverty depth, "Poverty gap"; and poverty intensity, "Fgt2". The incidence of poverty reflects the size of the population in poverty-that is, the proportion of the number of people whose income is below the poverty line. The depth of poverty is the average gap between the per capita income of the poor and the poverty line, and the intensity of poverty indicates the equilibrium degree of income distribution within the poor; these two indicators reflect the average poverty level and income distribution of the poor.

To measure the poverty gap between cities and rural areas in each province in China, we had to first determine the poverty line. For the rural income data of 17 provinces from 2000 to 2017, we used the per capita net income of farmers of 2300 yuan (2010 constant price), announced by the Central Poverty Alleviation and Development Work Conference in 2011, as the national rural poverty line, and we used the rural consumer price index to establish the rural poverty line of China from 2000 to 2017. Regarding the income data of urban residents in 19 provinces from 2000 to 2017, considering that the rural poverty line announced by the Central Poverty Alleviation and Development Work Conference in 2011 is too low for urban residents, it will seriously underestimate the urban poverty situation. The average subsistence allowance for cities in the central, western, and northeastern regions is the base, and the urban poverty line from 2000 to 2017 is obtained by using the consumer price index of China. We used the POVCAL software provided by the World Bank website to estimate the incidence, depth, and intensity of poverty in urban and rural areas of each province.

2.

Per capita disposable income level and urban-rural gap

To measure income level, three indicators were used: urban per capita disposable income, rural per capita disposable income, and multiples of the urban rural income gap, which are recorded as Reveurban, Rural and Timeurra, respectively. Increasing income levels is one of the most important ways to reduce poverty. The core measure of poverty reduction is still to increase the per capita disposable income of urban and rural areas. We selected data from 27 provinces from 2000 to 2017 for analysis. In order to reduce the impact of heteroscedasticity, we took the natural logarithm of the two variables of urban per capita disposable income and rural per capita disposable income. In addition to raising income levels, reducing income inequality is also an essential part of poverty reduction. To narrow the income gap is mainly to narrow the income gap between urban and rural areas. The selected data were analyzed by calculating the multiple personal disposable income gap between urban and rural areas.

3.

Population of basic subsistence allowance and basic living allowance expenditures

Two indicators were used to measure the proportion of urban residents with basic living allowance to the total population and the proportion of rural residents with basic living allowance to the total population, recorded as "Headurban" and "Headrural", respectively. The Department of Finance of the Ministry of Civil Affairs has announced the number of urban and rural subsistence allowances and the number of rural subsistence allowance in each province since 2007. Urban and rural subsistence allowance households are typical representatives of urban poverty and rural poverty. Therefore, the number of urban and rural subsistence allowances can represent the corresponding urban and rural poverty conditions. We used the number of urban and rural residents to represent urban poverty and rural poverty, respectively. Given the data collection situation, 27 provinces from 2007 to 2016 were selected for analysis.

In addition, two indicators, the proportion of urban minimum living security expenditure to GDP and the proportion of rural minimum living security expenditure to GDP, were used to measure the living security expenditure, and the poverty level was measured from the perspective of the amount of benefits provided to the low-income earners, denoted as "Exraurban" and "Exrarural", respectively. The Department of Finance of the Ministry of Civil Affairs of China has announced the expenditures for urban minimum living security and rural minimum living security in various provinces since 2007. The minimum living security expenditures reflect the relief and support provided by the Chinese government to the poor, and therefore also reflect the poverty situation of the corresponding urban and rural areas from fiscal expenditure. Given the data collection situation, the 2007-2016 data of 27 provinces in China were selected for analysis.

In addition to the data released by the Department of Finance of the Ministry of Civil Affairs of China, other data come from the "China Statistical Yearbook", provincial statistical yearbooks, and the National Bureau of Statistics website.

3.2.2. Independent Variables

The ratio of urban population to total population was used to measure the level of urbanization. We calculated the ratio of the permanent urban population to the total population at the end of the year and recorded it as "Urbanratio" in the model.

Two indicators, the proportion of exports to GDP and the proportion of imports to GDP, were used to measure the level of foreign trade, and denoted as "Expraio" and "Impratio", respectively.

Three indicators, namely per capita GDP, total length of railway and road transport routes, and the proportion of financial industry added value in GDP, reflect the level of regional economic development, local infrastructure, and financial development, respectively, as control variables. Among them, per capita GDP is expressed as "Pgdp"; the total length of railway and road transportation lines is expressed as Line; and the financial scale is expressed as the proportion of the added value of the financial industry in GDP, recorded as "Finaratio". To reduce the effect of heteroskedasticity, the natural logarithm was taken for the two control variables of GDP per capita and total length of rail and road transport routes. To avoid endogeneity problems, the values of the explanatory variables were taken with a one-period lag, by prefixing L1 to the variable names.

3.3. Descriptive Statistics

The descriptive statistics of each variable are shown in Table 1. Among them are the following: "Headcount" represents the incidence of poverty; "Povertygap" represents the depth of poverty, taking the logarithmic value; "Fgt2" represents the poverty intensity; we added -U to indicate the urban indicator and -R to indicate the rural indicator; and "Urbanratio" indicates the proportion of the urban population to the total population. "Lnpgdp" is the logarithm of GDP per capita. "Line" is the logarithm of the total mileage of railways and highways. "Finaratio" is the proportion of the added value of the financial industry in GDP. "Expratio" is the proportion of exports to GDP. "Impratio" is the proportion of imports to GDP. "Reveurban" is the urban per capita disposable income. "Reverural" is the rural per capita disposable income. "Timeurra" is the multiple of urban-rural income gap.

4.1. Model Regression Results Based on Poverty Gap

In this section, we regress the incidence of rural poverty "headcount", depth of poverty "povertygap", and poverty intensity "fgt2" in each province. Limited by the availability of data, this section includes the income data of rural residents in 17 provinces from 2000 to 2017.

4.1.1. Regression Results of Exports, Urbanization on Poverty Gap

First, we get the basic estimation results. In order to further examine the interaction between exports and urbanization on the poverty gap, we introduce the cross term of import and export and the level of urbanization. In order to avoid endogenous problems, we choose the one-period lagging value of the explanatory variable as the instrumental variable of this variable for analysis. The results show in Table 2.

Table 2 shows the poverty gap; for the urban poverty gap, the coefficients of urbanization on the three poverty gap indicators in towns and cities are negative, regardless of whether the cross-sectional terms are considered. The coefficients on poverty incidence and poverty depth are significant at the 1% significant level, indicating that urbanization significantly reduces the level of poverty in towns and cities. The coefficients of the square of urbanization are all positive, and in most cases they are significant at least at the 10% significance level. This has further verified the inverted U-shaped feature of the poverty reduction effect of the level of urbanization. The two control variables of per capita GDP and the total length of railway and road transport routes also played a role in reducing the urban poverty gap. The export coefficient performance is not stable enough, and the significance level is not high. The coefficients of the cross-terms of exports and urbanization are all negative, which is consistent with the conclusion of the theoretical model, but the level of significance is not high. This suggests that there is much room for improvement in China's ability to leverage the interaction between exports and urbanization to reduce poverty.

For the rural poverty gap index, the coefficients of urbanization on the two poverty gap indicators, namely the incidence of poverty and the intensity of poverty, are all negative. Moreover, the coefficients of the square of urbanization are all positive, and the coefficient of the incidence of poverty is significant at 1%. The poverty intensity coefficient is significant at the 5% significance level, indicating that urbanization has significantly reduced the rural poverty level, and further verified the inverted U-shaped characteristics of the poverty reduction effect of the urbanization level. Per capita GDP has not played a positive role in reducing the poverty gap in rural areas, while the total length of railway and road transport routes has played a significant role in reducing poverty, which fully validates the common assumption that better road infrastructure leads to better income in rural areas. The export coefficient is positive, but not significant. This shows that the direct impact of China's foreign exports on rural poverty reduction is limited, and there is still much room for improvement. The coefficients of urbanization and urbanization squared are consistent with the previous basic situation without considering the cross-term, showing an inverted U-shaped characteristic. Due to the addition of the cross-term, the coefficients of exports themselves become significant. The export coefficients are negative, indicating that after considering the interaction between exports and urbanization, the exports themselves have played a significant role in reducing poverty. However, the cross-term coefficients of exports and urbanization are negative; some are not significant, indicating that exports and urbanization have not yet fully played an interactive role in rural poverty reduction, and that there is substantial room for improvement.

4.1.2. Regression Results of Imports, Urbanization on Poverty Gap

Similar to the previous export analysis, we first obtained the basic estimation results. In order to further examine the interaction between imports and urbanization on the poverty gap, the cross-term of imports and urbanization levels is introduced. The specific results are shown in Table 3.

For the urban poverty gap, it can be seen from Table 3 that the inverted U-shaped characteristics of the poverty reduction effect of urbanization are consistent with the previous analysis. The two control variables of GDP per capita and the total length of railway and road transportation routes also had a positive effect on reducing the urban poverty gap. Before the cross-term was added, the coefficient of imports was negative. After the cross-term was added, the coefficient of the imports became positive, the performance was not stable enough, and the significance level was generally not high. The coefficients of the cross-terms of imports and urbanization are all negative, which is consistent with the conclusion of the theoretical model, but the level of significance is also not high. This shows that China also has a lot of room for improvement in the utilization of the interaction of imports and urbanization in poverty reduction.

For the rural poverty gap: the coefficients of urbanization on poverty incidence and poverty intensity are both negative; the coefficients of urbanization squared are both positive; the coefficients of poverty incidence are significant at the 1% significant level; and poverty intensity is at the 5% significant level. The latter indicates that urbanization significantly reduces the rural poverty level, further verifying the inverse U-shaped effect of urbanization level on poverty reduction, that is, the inverse U-shaped characteristic of the poverty reduction effect of urbanization level. GDP per capita does not contribute positively to the reduction of rural poverty gap, while the total length of rail and road transport routes plays a significant role in poverty reduction, which fully verifies the saying that "to get rich, we must first build roads" in rural areas. The coefficients of imports are positive and negative, and insignificant. This indicates that the direct impact of China's foreign trade on rural poverty reduction is limited, and there is still much room for improvement. The coefficients of urbanization and urbanization squared are in line with the previous one without the crossover term, showing an inverted U-shaped characteristic. The coefficient of imports per se becomes significant due to the inclusion of the cross term, and the coefficient of imports is positive, indicating that after considering the interaction of foreign trade and urbanization, exports per se and imports per se do not play a more significant role in poverty reduction. The coefficients of the cross term between imports and urbanization are positive and negative, some significant and some insignificant, indicating that the interaction between imports and urbanization in rural poverty reduction has not been fully exploited, and there is much room for improvement.

4.2. Model Regression Results Based on Income Levels and Urban-Rural Income Gap

In order to examine the impact of foreign trade and urbanization on urban per capita income, rural per capita income, and the urban-rural income gap, the first two indicators reflect the absolute income level, and the latter reflects relative income changes. The improvement of the absolute income level of urban and rural areas and the improvement of the dual economic structure of urban and rural areas are important aspects of poverty alleviation in China.

4.2.1. Regression Results of Exports, Urbanization on Income Level and Urban-Rural Income Gap

First, we obtained the basic estimation results. To further examine the interaction effect of exports and urbanization on the poverty gap, a cross term of exports and urbanization level was introduced. Considering that the interaction plays out with a lagged effect, one-period lagged values were added. The specific results are shown in Table 4.

It can be seen from Table 4 that the coefficients of urbanization on urban per capita disposable income and rural per capita disposable income are 0.030 and 0.044, respectively, and they are significant at the 1% significance level, indicating that urbanization has simultaneously increased urban and rural per capita income levels, and the effect on rural areas is more potent than that in urban areas. The squares of urbanization coefficients are −0.0003 and −0.0005, respectively, which are significant at or close to 1%. This also verifies the inverted U-shaped characteristics of the poverty reduction effect of the urbanization level, that is, with the increase in the urbanization level in the initial stage, the poverty reduction effect continues to appear. However, if the level of urbanization exceeds a specific limit, further urbanization will bring new urban and rural poverty problems. The coefficients of exports are 0.146 and 0.148, both of which are significant at the 1% significance level, indicating that exports have also played a role in increasing urban and rural incomes, and the coefficients are higher than those of urbanization. Per capita GDP, the total length of railway and road transport routes, and the added value of the financial industry accounted for the weight of GDP. These three control variables also played a positive role in increasing urban and rural incomes, and they were significant at the 1% level. They respectively reflect the vital role of regional economic growth, fiscal expenditure, and financial development to increase the income of urban and rural residents.

When the cross-term between exports and urbanization level was introduced, the coefficients of urbanization and urbanization squared changed little compared to the basic regression results, which again verifies the inverted U-shaped characteristics of the poverty reduction effect of urbanization level. The export coefficients are 1.256 and 2.397, respectively which are significantly higher than 0.146 and 0.148 when the cross-term is not considered and are significant at the 1% significance level. The coefficients of the lagging one-period value of the cross-term of exports and urbanization are 0.020 and 0.023, respectively, and are significant at the 1% significance level, indicating that exports and urbanization have played a synergistic effect, and urbanization with a sufficient export level is the foundation for poverty reduction. The income-increasing effect is more obvious, which is consistent with the conclusion of theoretical analysis.

In terms of urban income gap, the coefficient of urbanization on the urban-rural income gap is around −0.113 and significant at the 1% level, indicating that although urbanization raises both urban and rural per capita income levels, the effect on rural areas is stronger than that on urban areas, thus contributing to the reduction of the urban-rural income gap. The square of urbanization coefficient is 0.002, which is also significant at the 1% significance level, indicating that the impact of urbanization level on reducing the urban-rural income gap also has an inverted U-shaped characteristic.

When the cross term of exports and urbanization level is introduced, the coefficient of exports itself is as high as −9.924, and significant at the 1% level. The intersection of exports and urbanization does not show a significant positive impact on reducing the urban-rural income gap. On the whole, after separating the interaction between exports and urbanization, exports themselves have played an obvious positive role in reducing the urban-rural income gap. The key issue we face in the future is how to exploit the interactive role of exports and urbanization in reducing the urban-rural income gap.

4.2.2. Regression Results of Imports, Urbanization on Income Level and Urban-Rural Income Gap

The regressions of imports and urbanization on urban disposable income per capita as well as rural disposable income and income disparity yield the basic estimation results in Table 5.

As can be seen in Table 5, the coefficients of urbanization on urban and rural per capita disposable income are 0.028 and 0.042, respectively, and are significant at the 1% significant level, which is basically consistent with the previous regression results for exports, indicating that urbanization raises both urban and rural per capita income levels, and has a stronger effect on rural than urban. The coefficients of urbanization squared are −0.0003 and −0.0005, which are also consistent with the regression results of exports, and are also significant at or near the 1% level of significance. This verifies the inverted U-shaped characteristic of the poverty reduction effect of urbanization level. The coefficients of imports are 0.305 and 0.270, respectively, both significant at the 1% level of significance, indicating that imports play an equal role in raising urban and rural incomes, and the coefficients are higher than those of urbanization. The three control variables of GDP per capita, total length of rail and road transport routes, and value added of the financial sector as a share of GDP also all play a positive role in contributing to the increase of urban and rural incomes.

In order to further examine the interaction between imports and urbanization to increase the per capita disposable income of urban and rural areas, the intersection of imports and urbanization levels was introduced. Considering that there is a lag effect in the interaction, the one-period lag value of the cross-term was added to the regression. The coefficients of urbanization and urbanization squared change very little relative to the basic regression results after the introduction of the cross-sectional term between imports and urbanization level, which again confirms the inverted U-shape of the poverty reduction effect of urbanization level. The coefficients of imports are −1.758 and −2.125, respectively. The signs and expectations have changed. They are also different from 0.305 and 0.270 in the basic case without considering the cross-term, and they have also become insignificant. The lagging second-phase coefficients of the cross-term of imports and urbanization are 0.025 and 0.025, respectively, and are significant at a significance level of 5% or close to 5%, indicating that imports and urbanization have a strong interaction. The poverty reduction effect is more significant, which is consistent with the conclusion of the theoretical model. After comprehensively considering the introduction of the cross-term, the impact of imports itself becomes insignificant, while the impact of the cross-term is significant, indicating that the impact of imports on the per capita disposable income of urban and rural residents is mainly realized through the interaction with urbanization.

From the perspective of urban-rural income gap, the coefficient of urbanization's impact on the urban-rural income gap is around −0.113, and is significant at a significance level of 1%, indicating that although urbanization has increased both urban and rural per capita income levels, the effect on rural areas is stronger than that on cities and towns, so it is conducive to reducing the urban-rural income gap. The coefficient of urbanization squared is 0.002, which is also significant at the 1% significance level, indicating that the impact of urbanization level on reducing the urban-rural income gap also has an inverted U-shaped characteristic. The two variables of GDP per capita and the total length of railway and road transportation routes do not reflect the characteristics of reducing the income gap between urban and rural areas, indicating that pure local economic growth and national infrastructure construction do not reflect the effect of changing the dual economic structure of urban and rural areas. The proportion of industry added value to GDP has a strong effect on reducing the urban-rural income gap, and it is significant at a significance level of 1%.

From the perspective of foreign trade, the effect of imports on narrowing the urban-rural income gap is in the opposite direction and insignificant. The insignificant impact of imports on reducing the gap between urban and rural areas also shows from another side that the government should pay attention to how to guide foreign trade to better increase rural per capita income when formulating foreign trade policies, thereby reducing the income gap between urban and rural areas and achieving common prosperity.

Relative to the basic regression results, the coefficients of urbanization and urbanization squared have little change, which again verifies the inverted U-shaped characteristics of the poverty reduction effect of urbanization. The two variables of per capita GDP and the total length of railway and road transportation lines also did not reflect the characteristics of reducing the income gap between urban and rural areas, and the proportion of the added value of the financial industry in GDP still showed a strong effect on reducing the income gap between urban and rural areas.

In terms of imports, with or without the addition of the cross-sectional term and with or without considering the interaction between imports and urbanization, the effect of imports per se and the interaction between imports and urbanization on narrowing the urban-rural income gap is not significant.

Overall, when formulating foreign trade policies, the government should pay attention to how to guide foreign trade to better interact with urbanization and thus narrow the urban-rural income gap.

4.3. Analysis Based on the Population of Basic Subsistence Allowance and the Basic Living Allowance Expenditures

In order to fully reflect the effect of poverty reduction in urban and rural areas, the population of basic subsistence allowances in urban and rural areas as well as the basic living allowance expenditures from 2007 to 2016 in 27 provinces were selected as the explained variables for analysis. Considering the continuity of foreign trade, this section further introduces the previous period value of the explanatory variable as one of the explanatory variables for dynamic panel analysis.

4.3.1. Regression Results of Exports and Urbanization on the Population of Basic Subsistence Allowance and the Basic Living Allowance Expenditures

Here we used the systematic GMM estimation method for empirical analysis. The explanatory variable contains the first-order lag of the explained variable, and at most, three lags of the explanatory variable were used as instrumental variables. The regression results are shown in Table 6.

It can be seen from Table 6 that urbanization has a promoting effect on the decrease in the proportion of the urban population with the basic living subsistence allowance and the proportion of the rural population with the basic subsistence allowance, both of which are significant at the level of 1%. The coefficient of the square term of the urbanization level is positive, indicating that the effect of urbanization on poverty reduction has an inverted U-shaped characteristic, which is the same as the previous statistical analysis conclusion. The export coefficient is negative in most cases, indicating that exports have shown a strong role in reducing urban and rural subsistence allowances and basic living allowance expenditures. After adding the interactive item of export and urbanization level, it can be seen from Table 6 that urbanization has reduced the proportion of the urban and rural subsistence allowances and the basic allowance expenditures, both of which are significant at the level of 1%. The coefficient of the square term of the urbanization level is positive, indicating that the effect of urbanization on reducing urban and rural poverty has an inverted U-shaped characteristic, which is the same as the previous statistical analysis conclusion. In most cases, the export coefficient is negative, indicating that exports have shown a strong effect on reducing the urban and rural subsistence allowances and basic allowance expenditures. The lagging value of the cross-term between exports and urbanization has a significant impact on the reduction of urban and rural basic subsistence allowances, but the impact on the basic living allowance expenditure is not obvious.

4.3.2. Regression Results of Imports and Urbanization on the Population of Basic Subsistence Allowance and Basic Living Allowance Expenditures

The regression results are shown in Table 7.

As can be seen from Table 7, the inverted U-shaped characteristics of poverty reduction in urbanization are consistent with the previous analysis. The coefficient of imports has a negative impact on the expenditures for urban and rural basic living allowances, and is significant at the level of 1%, indicating that imports show a strong effect of reducing the urban and rural minimum basic living allowance expenditures. After adding the interaction item between import and urbanization level, the inverted U-shaped characteristics of poverty reduction in urbanization are consistent with the previous analysis. Imports have a positive coefficient for the urban and rural basic subsistence allowances, and a negative coefficient for the basic living allowance expenditure, which is significant at the 5% level, indicating that imports show a strong effect on reducing the expenditures for urban and rural minimum basic living allowances. The lag value of the cross-term of imports and urbanization has a significant impact on the reduction of the urban population of subsistence and the basic living allowance. expenditure.

4.4. Regression Results Considering Regional Heterogeneity

The "Headcount" variable of the incidence of rural poverty was selected as the poverty indicator, and the analysis was divided into three groups: eastern, central and western. In order to save space, export and import were put into a model for analysis. At the same time, in order to more fully demonstrate the role of opening to the outside world, while considering exports and imports, the use of foreign capital was also added.

4.4.1. Basic Regression Results of Foreign Trade and Urbanization on Rural Poverty Gaps in Various Regions

The basic results are shown in Table 8. It can be seen from Table 8 that the urbanization of rural areas in eastern, central, and western China has obvious U-shaped characteristics of poverty reduction. In addition, the per capita income level in the western region has shown a strong effect on reducing poverty in rural areas, while the total length of railway and road transport lines in the eastern, central and western regions has played a significant role in reducing poverty in rural areas. The phrase "build roads first" applies to all regions of the country. Exports from the eastern and western regions have shown a strong effect on reducing poverty in rural areas, and imports in the central region have also shown a strong effect on reducing poverty.

4.4.2. Regression Results of the Effects of Interaction of Foreign Trade and Urbanization in Different Regions on Rural Poverty Reduction

After adding the cross-term of export and urbanization level, the cross-term of imports and urbanization level, and the cross-term of foreign capital utilization and urbanization level into the model, we arrived at the regression results shown in Table 9. It can be seen from Table 9 that poverty reduction through urbanization still has a strong inverted U-shaped characteristic. The per capita income level and the total length of railway and road transport routes have all played a significant role in reducing poverty. Exports from the eastern, central and western regions all show strong poverty reduction effects. Imports and urbanization have shown a strong interaction in poverty reduction, while the interaction between exports and urbanization in poverty reduction has not yet been fully realized.

4.4.3. Summary

On the whole, the U-shaped characteristics of urbanization and poverty reduction in rural areas in China are obvious. The per capita income level and the total length of railway and road transport routes have all played a significant role in reducing poverty. Exports from the eastern, central, and western regions all show a strong effect on reducing poverty in rural areas. Imports and urbanization show a strong interaction in rural poverty reduction, while exports and urbanization have insignificant interactions in rural poverty reduction.

The empirical analysis results based on China's interprovincial panel data show that urbanization has increased both urban and rural per capita income levels, and its effect on rural areas has been stronger than that on urban areas, thus reducing the urban-rural income gap. Moreover, the analysis results show that urbanization has significantly reduced urban and rural poverty and the proportion of urban and rural subsistence allowances. The poverty reduction effect of urbanization has an inverted U-shaped characteristic. Per capita GDP has not played a positive role in reducing the poverty gap in rural areas, while the total length of railway and road transport routes has played a significant role in reducing poverty; this fully validates the common saying that better road infrastructure leads to better income in rural areas.

Foreign trade has promoted the increase in per capita income in urban and rural areas, and its impact on rural areas is more obvious than on urban areas. Therefore, it is conducive to reducing the income gap between urban and rural areas. The impact of foreign trade on urban poverty reduction is unstable, and some of its impacts are even in the negative direction. Exports have significantly reduced rural poverty, and foreign trade has shown a strong positive effect on reducing the proportion of the urban and rural subsistence allowances and the minimum social security expenditures.

Foreign trade and urbanization have produced a strong synergistic effect in boosting income growth. Moreover, exports and urbanization have a significant interaction effect on the reduction of urban and rural subsistence allowances, and imports and urbanization have a significant effect on the reduction of urban and rural subsistence allowances. The reduction in social security expenditures has significant interactions with indicators, but exports, imports, and urbanization do not reflect significant synergy in reducing the urban-rural income gap or urban and rural poverty. These indicators also show that China is playing a role in foreign trade and that there is still much room for improvement in terms of the interaction between foreign trade and urbanization to jointly promote poverty reduction.

Overall, China's provincial data show that the inverted U-shaped characteristics of the poverty reduction effect of urbanization indicate that moderate urbanization is still the main poverty reduction path for some poor areas in China. However, some developed areas should also control excessive expansion of the scale of cities and towns, and consider rural revitalization. Moreover, foreign trade itself has a certain effect on poverty reduction. An interaction between foreign trade and urbanization on poverty reduction has emerged, but it has not yet been fully utilized. This reminds us how to better exercise the interactive role of foreign trade and urbanization in poverty reduction. This also reminds us from one side, how to better play the interactive role of foreign trade and urbanization in poverty reduction and promote the transformation of foreign trade from labor-intensive to knowledge-intensive or technology-intensive, thereby improving the quality of foreign trade. While other countries can learn from China on narrowing the income gap between urban and rural areas and helping to fight poverty, these are still issues that the Chinese government should focus on when formulating relevant policies in the future.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Impact of Foreign Trade and Urbanization on Poverty Reduction: Empirical Evidence from China

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Poverty eradication is a worldwide development challenge, and China’s poverty reduction experience, evident in its sustainable development strategy, is receiving increasing attention. China has achieved high economic growth and success in poverty reduction over the past 40 years, since its reform and opening up.

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Open Access Feature Paper Article

Academic Editors: Paraskevi Raftopoulou, Akrivi Katifori, Angeliki Antoniou and Areti Damala

Received: 1 September 2021 / Revised: 14 October 2021 / Accepted: 19 October 2021 / Published: 24 October 2021

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) make it technically possible for digital assets to be owned and traded, introducing the concept of scarcity in the digital realm for the first time. Resulting from this technical development, this paper asks the question, do they provide an opportunity for fundraising for galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM), by selling ownership of digital copies of their collections? Although NFTs in their current format were first invented in 2017 as a means for game players to trade virtual goods, they reached the mainstream in 2021, when the auction house Christie's held their first-ever sale exclusively for an NFT of a digital image, that was eventually sold for a record 69 million USD. The potential of NFTs to generate significant revenue for artists and museums by selling effectively a cryptographically signed copy of a digital image (similar to real-world limited editions, which are signed and numbered copies of a given artwork), has sparked the interest of the financially deprived museum and heritage sector with world-renowned institutions such as the Uffizi Gallery and the Hermitage Museum, having already employed NFTs in order to raise funds. Concerns surrounding the environmental impact of blockchain technology and the rise of malicious projects, exploiting previously digitised heritage content made available through OpenGLAM licensing, have attracted criticism over the speculative use of the technology. In this paper, we present the current state of affairs in relation to NFTs and the cultural heritage sector, identifying challenges, whilst highlighting opportunities that they create for revenue generation, in order to help address the ever-increasing financial challenges of galleries and museums. View Full-Text

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Valeonti, F.; Bikakis, A.; Terras, M.; Speed, C.; Hudson-Smith, A.; Chalkias, K. Crypto Collectibles, Museum Funding and OpenGLAM: Challenges, Opportunities and the Potential of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 9931. https://doi.org/10.3390/app11219931

AMA Style

Valeonti F, Bikakis A, Terras M, Speed C, Hudson-Smith A, Chalkias K. Crypto Collectibles, Museum Funding and OpenGLAM: Challenges, Opportunities and the Potential of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). Applied Sciences. 2021; 11(21):9931. https://doi.org/10.3390/app11219931

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Valeonti, Foteini, Antonis Bikakis, Melissa Terras, Chris Speed, Andrew Hudson-Smith, and Konstantinos Chalkias. 2021. "Crypto Collectibles, Museum Funding and OpenGLAM: Challenges, Opportunities and the Potential of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs)" Applied Sciences 11, no. 21: 9931. https://doi.org/10.3390/app11219931

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Crypto Collectibles, Museum Funding and OpenGLAM: Challenges, Opportunities and the Potential of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) make it technically possible for digital assets to be owned and traded, introducing the concept of scarcity in the digital realm for the first time. Resulting from this technical development, this paper asks the question, do they provide an opportunity for fundraising for galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM), by selling ownership of digital copies of their collections?

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School of Fashion, Ryerson University, Toronto, ON M5B 2K3, Canada

School of Information Studies, McGill University, Montreal, QC H3A 1X1, Canada

Manchester Fashion Institute, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester M15 6BG, UK

Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.

Received: 6 April 2020 / Revised: 1 May 2020 / Accepted: 5 May 2020 / Published: 7 May 2020

Sustainability has received widespread attention in both academia and industry, but there is still a paucity of research investigating the relationships between gender, consumer innovativeness, and clothing, as well as how they may influence sustainable practices. The overarching objective of this study is to investigate clothing expenditure, product cues (intrinsic, extrinsic and sustainable), gender (men and women) and consumer innovativeness (fashion innovators and non-innovators) in China, in order to find out how these factors may influence consumers' choices. To address the research objective, 10 intrinsic cues, three extrinsic cues, and seven sustainable cues were used to investigate apparel consumers' choices and preferences. A self-administered online survey consisted of eight items on sustainable commitment and behaviour, six items of fashion innovativeness adapted from the Domain-Specific Innovativeness scale, 20 items concerning product cues, and numerous demographic and behaviour-related questions. In total, 1819 usable data were collected in China, including 614 males and 1196 females. The results revealed that four out of eleven hypotheses were supported, another four were partially supported, while the remainders were not. For example, both female consumers and fashion innovators relied more on style and colour to evaluate an apparel product than fashion non-innovators and male consumers. However, men tended to rely more on the brand name and country of origin to guide their product selection and purchases than women. In terms of the influence of sustainable cues, Chinese consumers are more concerned about the social/ethical cues than environmental cues. Interestingly, women were more concerned about "no animal skin use" in evaluating apparel products than men. All in all, the results of this study can provide valuable information and meaningful insight for fashion designers, product developers, and marketers to develop effective communication strategies to guide potential customers in understanding a plethora of apparel values, including functionality, aesthetics, finances, altruism, and sustainability. View Full-Text

Rahman, O.; Fung, B.C.M.; Chen, Z. Young Chinese Consumers' Choice between Product-Related and Sustainable Cues-The Effects of Gender Differences and Consumer Innovativeness. Sustainability 2020, 12, 3818. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12093818

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Rahman O, Fung BCM, Chen Z. Young Chinese Consumers' Choice between Product-Related and Sustainable Cues-The Effects of Gender Differences and Consumer Innovativeness. Sustainability. 2020; 12(9):3818. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12093818

Chicago/Turabian Style

Rahman, Osmud, Benjamin C.M. Fung, and Zhimin Chen. 2020. "Young Chinese Consumers' Choice between Product-Related and Sustainable Cues-The Effects of Gender Differences and Consumer Innovativeness" Sustainability 12, no. 9: 3818. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12093818

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Young Chinese Consumers' Choice between Product-Related and Sustainable Cues-The Effects of Gender Differences and Consumer Innovativeness

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Sustainability has received widespread attention in both academia and industry, but there is still a paucity of research investigating the relationships between gender, consumer innovativeness, and clothing, as well as how they may influence sustainable practices.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Abstract
In order to advance our knowledge about consumers' shopping behaviour and preferences in two emerging markets (China and India), the current study was undertaken to investigate (1) apparel consumers' shopping behaviour; (2) the effect of consumer innovativeness, and (3) the salient impact of apparel evaluative cues. An online self-administered survey consisted of shopping behavioural questions, the Domain Specific Innovativeness (DSI) scale, 12 apparel cues, and demographic questions were used for this study. In total, 266 and 236 usable data were collected from Chinese and Indian female participants respectively. The findings indicated that Chinese and Indian fashion innovators tended to spend more money on new clothes than non-innovators. Chinese fashion innovators spent significantly more time shopping online than did Indian innovators. In terms of the importance of evaluative cues, fashion innovators and non-innovators in both countries considered fit to be the most important cue; style, colour, and comfort played a relatively important role in clothing evaluation as well, but ease of care and durability were cited as relatively less important among many other cues. The two least important cues were brand name and country of origin.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A cross-national study of young female consumer behaviour, innovativeness and apparel evaluation: China and India

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Abstract In order to advance our knowledge about consumers' shopping behaviour and preferences in two emerging markets (China and India), the current study was undertaken to investigate (1) apparel consumers' shopping behaviour; (2) the effect of consumer innovativeness, and (3) the salient impact of apparel evaluative cues.

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Abstract China is the world's largest user of industrial robots. In 2016, sales of industrial robots in China reached 87,000 units, accounting for around 30 percent of the global market. To put this number in perspective, robot sales in all of Europe and the Americas in 2016 reached 97,300 units (according to data from the International Federation of Robotics). Between 2005 and 2016, the operational stock of industrial robots in China increased at an annual average rate of 38 percent. In this paper, we describe the adoption of robots by China's manufacturers using both aggregate industry-level and firm-level data, and we provide possible explanations from both the supply and demand sides for why robot use has risen so quickly in China. A key contribution of this paper is that we have collected some of the world's first data on firms' robot adoption behaviors with our China Employer-Employee Survey (CEES), which contains the first firm-level data that is representative of the entire Chinese manufacturing sector.

Citation
Cheng, Hong, Ruixue Jia, Dandan Li, and Hongbin Li. 2019. "The Rise of Robots in China." Journal of Economic Perspectives, DOI: 10.1257/jep.33.2.71

Additional Materials

JEL Classification

D24 Production; Cost; Capital; Capital, Total Factor, and Multifactor Productivity; Capacity

J24 Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity

L23 Organization of Production

M11 Production Management

O14 Industrialization; Manufacturing and Service Industries; Choice of Technology

P23 Socialist Systems and Transitional Economies: Factor and Product Markets; Industry Studies; Population

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
human capital; skills; occupational choice; labor productivity

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
industrialization; manufacturing and service industries; choice of technology

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
socialist systems and transitional economies: factor and product markets; industry studies; population

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Rise of Robots in China by Hong Cheng, Ruixue Jia, Dandan Li and Hongbin Li. Published in volume 33, issue 2, pages 71-88 of Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2019, Abstract: China is the world's largest user of industrial robots. In 2016, sales of industrial robots in China reached 87,00...

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The aim of digitalising the fashion industry was to streamline the design, production and business of physical products for the real world and to achieve sustainability with the help of different digital tools. However, with the recent emergence of the metaverse, the parallel world in virtual reality, a new horizon of digital fashion has been opened. In general, the innovations in digital fashion can be clustered into the following four themes - (1) Digital design and e-prototyping, (2) Digital business and promotion, (3) Digital human and metaverse, and (4) Digital apparel and smart e-technology ( Figure 1).

Digital fashion innovations for the real world and metaverse

This special issue presents eight research articles and two reviews covering the first two themes of digital fashion innovations - (1) Digital design and e-prototyping and (2) Digital business and promotion.

Computer-aided design (CAD) is among the first few digital elements entered into the fashion industry and education. There are many CAD systems for two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) design development that are being used in the industry today (Sayem, Kennon, & Clarke, 2010). Traditionally, the face-to-face teaching approach has been most effective for teaching these CAD software packages in academic set-ups. However, the COVID-19 pandemic forced us to move to a virtual mode of teaching across the world for the most of 2020 and 2021. Likewise, the tutors of fashion CAD had to adopt the new normal quickly and deliver the practical teaching elements of CAD over the online platforms, such as Zoom, MS Teams and Google Meet, etc. Lee ( 2021) looked into the effectiveness of online fashion CAD teaching in South Korea during the pandemic. They compared the grades and results of two groups of fashion CAD students: one group was taught 2D CAD systems offline in 2019, and the other group was taught the same systems online in 2020. Their finding is promising, and it shows that higher scores and grades were achieved by the online-taught students than the offline-taught cohorts. Although we do not have readily available similar studies from other countries to compare the finding, Lee's ( 2021) study will give some confidence to the employers and educators about the knowledge and skills gained by students taught remotely during the pandemic.

Pattern cutting is the first technical step in the apparel manufacturing process that starts materialising a design into a real wearable product in a set of technical drawings. In a mass production scenario, the pattern pieces of multiple sizes of same style of a garment are arranged into a rectangular area, known as a marker, matching the dimension of the cutting table and fabric width. The pattern cutting process, including marker making, is one of the most labour-intensive and least efficient processes in terms of waste generation within the fashion design and development cycle and is responsible for an average of fifteen percent fabric wastage (Ramkalaon and Sayem 2020). ElShishtawy, Sinha, and Bennell ( 2021) reviewed the works done on computational methods for the cutting problem and zero-waste design thinking. They highlighted the application of the CAD technique by Ramkalaon and Sayem ( 2020) and Weng and Kuo ( 2011) for zero-waste marker generation and stressed the importance of collaboration between the fields of cutting and packing (C&P) operational research and zero-waste fashion design (ZWFD). Being the first to cover the C&P and ZWFD research, the review article by ElShishtawy et al. ( 2021) provokes new research thinking among the academics and researchers in fashion and computer disciplines.

The term 'cyborg', a portmanteau of cybernetic and organism, was first coined by Clynes and Kline ( 1960) to refer to an organism with enhanced capabilities through the integration of any artificial component or technology. Later, Haraway ( 1985) established the depiction of technology-dependent humanity as an existing version of a cyborg in her 'Cyborg Manifesto'. The article by Särmäkari and Vänskä ( 2021) hosted in this special issue identified tomorrow's fashion designers as cyborgs and it proposed a concept of 'cyborg designer 4.0', which refers to a physical and digital craftsperson, through the analysis from two case studies - one on generative clothing design involving machine learning and another on artificial intelligent (AI)-aided fashion sketching. They nicely echoed the footsteps of the blockchain technology, especially non-fungible tokens (NFTs), approaching towards the deisgn and development of digital-only garments as tradable assets, and provided an excellent food for thought for educators and industry leaders to figure out the construct of tomorrow's fashion designers.

Three-dimensional (3D) printing technology is a direct approach to converting a digital entity into a physical entity efficiently. Although this 'digi-physi' approach has been around for a fair amount of time, it has been more successful in designing and prototyping fashion accessories than in producing drape-able garments (Dip et al., 2020). Rolling ( 2021) looked into the designers' perceptions of this technology and identified the efficient and inefficient CAD systems for designing 3D printed fashion accessories. Her work will simultaneously benefit the educators in devising teaching strategies within the design curriculum and the software companies to make their systems more designer-friendly.

Social media platforms (SMPs) have become an integral part of today's e-commerce and can drive product innovation for manufacturing and retailing business. Fashion companies worldwide are trying their best to the maximised usage of SMPs, and Alalawneh, Alkhatib, and Abu Abbass ( 2021) studied the levels of SMP usage and innovation performance of Jordanian small- and medium-scale fashion companies. Their study identified the remaining gaps in using SMPs to maximise innovation performance and provoked the discussion of further improvement. This study will act as an appropriate reference for designing similar studies in the context of different geographic locations and economies. Sumarliah, Usmanova, Mousa, and Indriya ( 2021) discovered how the forced transition to online shopping during the COVID-19 pandemic created opportunities for online fashion businesses by making consumers more and more used to online buying. Although the study focused on Indonesian consumers, there is a scope for generalising the findings to similar economies with similar social settings.

Chatbots have become a part of our digital life. We often come across them on online shopping platforms. Landim et al. ( 2021) presented a comprehensive map of chatbot design approaches for fashion e-commerce applications through an interdisciplinary review and provided research direction from computational and non-computational perspectives. The article will be of interest to academics and researchers of fashion business and e-commerce App developers.

The work of Tupikovskaja-Omovie and Tyler ( 2021) revealed the potential application of eye-tracking devices in understanding fashion consumer behaviour on smartphones to develop appropriate m-commerce (mobile commerce) platforms. As smartphones have become part and parcel of our daily life and a reliable alternative for desktop and laptop computer devices for online shopping thanks to the advent of secure payment gateways for m-commerce, their work will be regarded as a remarkable one in the field of digital fashion business and promotion.

The works by Heim and Hopper ( 2022) and Chakraborty, Moore, and Parrillo-Chapman ( 2021) are spread over the first two themes of digital fashion - (1) Digital design and e-prototyping and (2) Digital business and promotion. Heim and Hopper ( 2022) revealed the lack of evidence in blockchain technology for facilitating a circular economy in fashion and the absence of an affordable or open access platform to materialise a universally digitally connected fashion supply chain. Chakraborty et al. ( 2021) presented a deep learning approach to train machines in automatic print fault detection for real-life deployment in the textile printing industry. This work paves the way for connecting textile manufacturing with the digital fashion supply chain network envisaged by Okabe, Imaoka, Tomih, and Niway ( 1992). This will thus facilitate the digitalisation of the full cycle of fashion product development, but the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in textile process control will remain an area of further research and development in the coming years.

Although this special issue does not include any paper on the digital fashion themes - digital apparel and smart e-technology and digital human metaverse, the readers will still find in this a lot of foods for thought and an overview of the contemporary innovations in digital fashion.

I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to my co-editors and all authors for their hard work and patience during the journey of successfully bringing this unique special issue to light, starting from the peak of the pandemic.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

References

Alalawneh, A.A.F. , Alkhatib, S.F. , & Abu Abbass, M.H. (2021). Social media usage and innovation performance: The case of fashion SMEs in Jordan. International Journal of Fashion Design, Technology and Education. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/17543266.2021.2011963

Chakraborty, S. , Moore, M. , & Parrillo-Chapman, L. (2021). Automatic defect detection for fabric printing using a deep convolutional neural network. International Journal of Fashion Design, Technology and Education. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/17543266.2021.1925355

Clynes, E.M. , & Kline, S.N. (1960). Cyborgs and space. Astronautics, 26-27. http://web.mit.edu/digitalapollo/Documents/Chapter1/cyborgs.pdf[Google Scholar]

Dip, T.M. , Emu, A.S. , Nafiz, M.N.H. , Kundu, P. , Rakhi, H.R. , Sayam, A. , ... Sayem, A.S.M. (2020). 3D printing technology for textiles and fashion. Textile Progress, 52(4), 167-260. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/00405167.2021.1978223

ElShishtawy, N. , Sinha, P. , & Bennell, J.A. (2021). A comparative review of zero-waste fashion design thinking and operational research on cutting and packing optimisation. International Journal of Fashion Design, Technology and Education. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/17543266.2021.1990416

Haraway, D. (1985). Manifesto for cyborgs: Science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s. Socialist Review, 80, 65-108.[Google Scholar]

Heim, H. , & Hopper, C. (2022). Dress code: The digital transformation of the circular fashion supply chain. International Journal of Fashion Design, Technology and Education. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/17543266.2021.2013956

Landim, A.R.D.B. , Pereira, A.M. , Vieira, T. , de B. Costa, E. , Moura, J.A.B. , Wanick, V. , & Bazaki, E. (2021). Chatbot design approaches for fashion E-commerce: An interdisciplinary review. International Journal of Fashion Design, Technology and Education. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/17543266.2021.1990417

Lee, Y.K. (2021). Fashion CAD education during the COVID-19 pandemic in South Korea: Comparison of online and offline learning achievements. International Journal of Fashion Design, Technology and Education. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/17543266.2021.2017005

Okabe, H. , Imaoka, H. , Tomih, T. , & Niway, H. (1992). Three-dimensional apparel CAD system. Computer Graphics, 26(2), 105-110. doi:https://doi.org/10.1145/142920.134019

Ramkalaon, S. , & Sayem, A. S. M. (2020). Zero-Waste Pattern Cutting (ZWPC) to tackle over Sixty billion square metres of Fabric Wastage during Mass Production of Apparel. Journal of the Textile Institute, 112(5). https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10. 1080/00405000.2020.1779636

Rolling, V. (2021). Wearable accessory designers' perceptions using 3D printing technology. International Journal of Fashion Design, Technology and Education. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/17543266.2021.1938700

Särmäkari, N. , & Vänskä, A. (2021). 'Just hit a button!' - Fashion 4.0 designers as cyborgs, experimenting and designing with generative algorithms. International Journal of Fashion Design, Technology and Education. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/17543266.2021.1991005

Sayem, A.S.M. , Kennon, R. , & Clarke, N. (2010). 3D CAD systems for the clothing industry'. International Journal of Fashion Design, Technology and Education, 3(2), 45-53. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/17543261003689888

Sumarliah, E. , Usmanova, K. , Mousa, K. , & Indriya, I. (2021). E-commerce in the fashion business: The roles of the COVID-19 situational factors, hedonic and utilitarian motives on consumers' intention to purchase online. International Journal of Fashion Design, Technology and Education. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/17543266.2021.1958926

Tupikovskaja-Omovie, Z. , & Tyler, D.J. (2021). Experienced versus inexperienced mobile users: Eye tracking fashion consumers' shopping behaviour on smartphones. International Journal of Fashion Design, Technology and Education. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/17543266.2021.1980614

Weng, W.-C. , & Kuo, H.-C. (2011). Irregular stock cutting system based on AutoCAD. , Advances in Engineering Software, 42(9), 634-643.[Crossref], [Google Scholar] [Web of Science ®]

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Digital fashion innovations for the real world and metaverse

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The aim of digitalising the fashion industry was to streamline the design, production and business of physical products for the real world and to achieve sustainability with the help of different digital tools. However, with the recent emergence of the metaverse, the parallel world in virtual reality, a new horizon of digital fashion has been opened.

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The first ever Metaverse Fashion Week runs from March 24th 2022 featuring luxury brands, household names and digital-native designers.

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On this week's episode of the Welcome to the Metaverse podcast, I chat to Dan Fill - President of Dark Slope, who are a virtual production and metaverse company, and are reimagining entertainment for this new immersive future that we’re heading towards.

They’re a combination of a games studio, television studio and virtual production house, which means they are right at the forefront of what content is going to look like in the next 5 to 10 years.

They’ve even created a new category of hyper-reality TV, using game engines, VR and haptic feedback suits to produce an ever changing Ninja Warrior style sports entertainment show - where you are essentially competing inside almost a live video game - it’s very cool and really opened my mind to what is possible and what is coming.

Dan did a brilliant job of explaining what entertainment content of the future looks like, be prepared to have your mind blown and thank you to Dan for coming on the show!

If you’re brand new to this podcast, I would encourage you to jump back to episode 2 just to get an introduction to this whole space, we talk in depth about NFTs in this episode so you might find it useful to have some foundational knowledge first.

My twitter has moved, click to view here or https://www.twitter.com/luke_franks

=======================

This podcast is sponsored by the awesome Everyrealm (previously Republic Realm) who are a leader in metaverse innovation, investment, and NFTs. They are among the largest owners of digital real estate NFTs in Decentraland, The Sandbox and Axie Infinity to name just a few.

They’re also the creators of the Fantasy Islands metaverse NFT project, the ultra-luxury metaverse destination and community in The Sandbox and beyond.

They also recently announced their upcoming immersive ASMR experience in the metaverse, called Soundlands, which you can be the first to sign up to before it launches in full by heading to asmrsoundlands.com

You can find out more about what they are up to at everyrealm.com, join their substack newsletter with updates about the wider metaverse here realmroundup.substack.com and follow on twitter https://www.twitter.com/everyrealm and discord here discord.gg/ntSaG8b9sW

=======================

Dark Slope's Links

Twitter : https://twitter.com/darkslopexr

Website : https://darkslope.com/

Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/darkslopexr/

=======================

Everyrealm's Links

Twitter : https://www.twitter.com/everyrealm

Discord : discord.gg/ntSaG8b9sW

Soundlands : asmrsoundlands.com

Substack : realmroundup.substack.com

Website https://www.everyrealm.com

=======================

My links

Twitter : https://twitter.com/luke_franks

Email : [email protected]

Consultancy : www.wagmi-agency.com

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NFTs are revolutionising digital ownership and value on the internet. We've seen the impact in the art world, with new digital IP's and now with music too. On this episode of the Welcome to the Metaverse podcast, I chat to Blockchain Brett - Managing Partner at Palm Tree Crew Crypto and OG collector in the space who's worked with major artists including Kygo and Ryan Tedder.

We discuss if music has been undervalued on the internet, NFTs enabling artists to actually sell their art and potentially not be tied to a label or income from a streaming service, whether actually the whole copyright model might change and the major impact that music NFTs are set to have over the next few months. We also talk about some exciting metaverse first projects too. This was a fascinating chat and really opened my mind to what is possible. Thank you Brett for coming on!!

If you’re brand new to this podcast, I would encourage you to jump back to episode 2 just to get an introduction to this whole space, we talk in depth about NFTs in this episode so you might find it useful to have some foundational knowledge first.

My twitter has moved, click to view here or https://www.twitter.com/luke_franks

=======================

This podcast is sponsored by the awesome Everyrealm (previously Republic Realm) who are a leader in metaverse innovation, investment, and NFTs. They are among the largest owners of digital real estate NFTs in Decentraland, The Sandbox and Axie Infinity to name just a few.

They’re also the creators of the Fantasy Islands metaverse NFT project, the ultra-luxury metaverse destination and community in The Sandbox and beyond.

They also recently announced their upcoming immersive ASMR experience in the metaverse, called Soundlands, which you can be the first to sign up to before it launches in full by heading to asmrsoundlands.com

You can find out more about what they are up to at everyrealm.com, join their substack newsletter with updates about the wider metaverse here realmroundup.substack.com and follow on twitter https://www.twitter.com/everyrealm and discord here discord.gg/ntSaG8b9sW

=======================

Blockchain Brett's Links

Twitter : https://twitter.com/web3brett

Palm Tree Crew Crypto Twitter : https://twitter.com/PalmTreeCrypto

Palm Tree Crew Crypto Website : palmtreecrypto.xyz

=======================

Everyrealm's Links

Twitter : https://www.twitter.com/everyrealm

Discord : discord.gg/ntSaG8b9sW

Soundlands : asmrsoundlands.com

Substack : realmroundup.substack.com

Website https://www.everyrealm.com

=======================

My links

Twitter : https://twitter.com/luke_franks

Email : [email protected]

Consultancy : www.wagmi-agency.com

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We've seen a volatile market market this week but is the end of the run or just the beginning of the new cycle? On this week's episode of the Welcome to the Metaverse podcast, we talk about the state of the current market, previous cycles, the unexpected data for NFTs and cover some metaverse news stories, which went under the radar this week - including Meta and their new mixed reality headset and the return of Google AR glasses.

My twitter has moved, click to view here or https://www.twitter.com/luke_franks

=======================

This podcast is sponsored by the awesome Everyrealm (previously Republic Realm) who are a leader in metaverse innovation, investment, and NFTs. They are among the largest owners of digital real estate NFTs in Decentraland, The Sandbox and Axie Infinity to name just a few.

They’re also the creators of the Fantasy Islands metaverse NFT project, the ultra-luxury metaverse destination and community in The Sandbox and beyond.

They also recently announced their upcoming immersive ASMR experience in the metaverse, called Soundlands, which you can be the first to sign up to before it launches in full by heading to asmrsoundlands.com

You can find out more about what they are up to at everyrealm.com, join their substack newsletter with updates about the wider metaverse here realmroundup.substack.com and follow on twitter https://www.twitter.com/everyrealm and discord here discord.gg/ntSaG8b9sW

=======================

Source links :

Unreal Engine Station video : https://twitter.com/Dexerto/status/1523695586540613632?s=20&t=Vn1NpJum8vEjMfnnzOUuUQ

Unreal Engine Matrix Demo : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WU0gvPcc3jQ

Epic Games & Nasa (ZDNET) : https://www.zdnet.com/article/nasa-and-epic-games-to-crowdsource-vr-tech-for-mars-exploration/

Google AR Glasses (The Verge) : https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/11/23067426/google-ar-glasses-live-translate-io

Mark Zuckerberg & Project Cambria (CNET) : https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/mark-zuckerberg-just-showed-how-metas-next-mixed-reality-vr-headset-will-work/

Instagram & NFTS (TechCrunch) : https://techcrunch.com/

EA Games & FIFA : https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-61383672

=======================

Everyrealm's Links

Twitter : https://www.twitter.com/everyrealm

Discord : discord.gg/ntSaG8b9sW

Soundlands : asmrsoundlands.com

Substack : realmroundup.substack.com

Website https://www.everyrealm.com

=======================

My links

Twitter : https://twitter.com/luke_franks

Email : [email protected]

Consultancy : www.wagmi-agency.com

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Artsy are the world's largest online art marketplace with over 1 million artworks by iconic and emerging artists from over 4000 galleries and major auction houses across the world. On this week's episode of the Welcome to the Metaverse podcast, I'm joined by Chief Revenue Officer Dustyn Kim and generative artist Mieke Marple to talk about how the traditional art world have been viewing NFTs, equality and closing the gender gap in the space, their recent benefit auction 'Artists Who Code' (which Mieke co-curated) and the future of art in the metaverse.

I absolutely think we will look back at this period right now as an amazing time to be learning about this space, what is happening and a time that is full of opportunity. We also have the chance to build this new space in the right way so I wanted to cover that important conversation here too!

My twitter has moved, click to view here or https://www.twitter.com/luke_franks

=======================

This podcast is sponsored by the awesome Everyrealm (previously Republic Realm) who are a leader in metaverse innovation, investment, and NFTs. They are among the largest owners of digital real estate NFTs in Decentraland, The Sandbox and Axie Infinity to name just a few.

They’re also the creators of the Fantasy Islands metaverse NFT project, the ultra-luxury metaverse destination and community in The Sandbox and beyond.

They also recently announced their upcoming immersive ASMR experience in the metaverse, called Soundlands, which you can be the first to sign up to before it launches in full by heading to asmrsoundlands.com

You can find out more about what they are up to at everyrealm.com, join their substack newsletter with updates about the wider metaverse here realmroundup.substack.com and follow on twitter https://www.twitter.com/everyrealm and discord here discord.gg/ntSaG8b9sW

=======================

Artsy links :

Website : https://www.artsy.net/

Twitter : https://twitter.com/artsy

Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/artsy

=======================

Mieke Marple :

Twitter : https://twitter.com/MiekeMarple

Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/miekemarple

Artists who Code Benefit Auction - (co-curated the Artists Who Code with Sinziana Velicescu of Vellum LA) - https://nft.artsy.net/auctions/artists-who-code/

LA NFT Meetup : nftuesdayla.com & https://twitter.com/NFTuesdayLA

=======================

Everyrealm's Links

Twitter : https://www.twitter.com/everyrealm

Discord : discord.gg/ntSaG8b9sW

Soundlands : asmrsoundlands.com

Substack : realmroundup.substack.com

Website https://www.everyrealm.com

=======================

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Oana Ruxandra is the Chief Digital Officer & Executive Vice President, Business Development at Warner Music Group. On this episode of the Welcome to the Metaverse podcast, we talk about how Warner Music have been one of the really early adopters and first movers in this space, embracing the metaverse, web 3.0 and the new opportunities that this shift will bring to artists and fans of music in all forms.

We cover their major partnership with The Sandbox as well as Genies and dive into how Oana and WMG are thinking about this whole space.

Oana was the perfect person for this episode. She painted the picture of how music and technology have always been intertwined throughout history and web 3.0 and the metaverse being the next iteration of this.

Hearing Oana talk about this stuff was invaluable, I found it fascinating and I know you will too, so thank you Oana for coming on.

Subscribe on the new Youtube channel to watch this conversation here

=======================

This podcast is sponsored by the awesome Everyrealm (previously Republic Realm) who are a leader in metaverse innovation, investment, and NFTs. They are among the largest owners of digital real estate NFTs in Decentraland, The Sandbox and Axie Infinity to name just a few.

They’re also the creators of the Fantasy Islands metaverse NFT project, the ultra-luxury metaverse destination and community in The Sandbox and beyond.

They also recently announced their upcoming immersive ASMR experience in the metaverse, called Soundlands, which you can be the first to sign up to before it launches in full by heading to asmrsoundlands.com

You can find out more about what they are up to at everyrealm.com, join their substack newsletter with updates about the wider metaverse here realmroundup.substack.com and follow on twitter https://www.twitter.com/everyrealm and discord here discord.gg/ntSaG8b9sW

=======================

Warner Music Groups's links :

Website : https://www.wmg.com/

Twitter : https://twitter.com/warnermusic

Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/warnermusic/

The Sandbox x WMG announcement : https://www.wmg.com/news/sandbox-partners-warner-music-group-create-music-themed-world-metaverse-36116

Genies x WMG announcement : https://www.wmg.com/news/warner-music-group-and-genies-sign-partnership-bring-wmgs-roster-artists-life-avatars-35396

=======================

My links :

Twitter : https://twitter.com/luke_franks

Email : [email protected]

Consultancy : www.wagmi-agency.com

=======================

Everyrealm's Links

Twitter : https://www.twitter.com/everyrealm

Discord : discord.gg/ntSaG8b9sW

Soundlands : asmrsoundlands.com

Substack : realmroundup.substack.com

Website https://www.everyrealm.com

=======================

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Teflon Sega is a virtual avatar artist who lives in the metaverse with a rapidly exploding fanbase. In this episode of the Welcome to the Metaverse podcast, I talk to him direct from his planet and we discuss the future of this new realm of metaverse first content. *This episode is available to watch inside the Spotify app*

Teflon is an anonymous character who is putting out some of the highest standard of content in this space bar none. He is both making music at the highest level and also short film content which is truely mindblowing. You can follow his adventures through space battling monsters, riding woolly mammoths, fighting dragons and performing his epic songs on his Youtube channel here

He also recently dropped his 'Defend the Metaverse' NFT collection with The Dematerialised which sold out immediately. I am convinced he is about to become one of the biggest artists in the world. Remember the name Teflon Sega.

Watch this conversation on new Youtube channel here

=======================

This podcast is sponsored by the awesome Everyrealm (previously Republic Realm) who are a leader in metaverse innovation, investment, and NFTs. They are among the largest owners of digital real estate NFTs in Decentraland, The Sandbox and Axie Infinity to name just a few.

They’re also the creators of the Fantasy Islands metaverse NFT project, the ultra-luxury metaverse destination and community in The Sandbox and beyond.

They also recently announced their upcoming immersive ASMR experience in the metaverse, called Soundlands, which you can be the first to sign up to before it launches in full by heading to asmrsoundlands.com

You can find out more about what they are up to at everyrealm.com, join their substack newsletter with updates about the wider metaverse here realmroundup.substack.com and follow on twitter https://www.twitter.com/everyrealm and discord here discord.gg/ntSaG8b9sW

=======================

Teflon Sega's links :

Discord : https://discord.com/invite/yhpvrmrU5x

Spotify : https://open.spotify.com/artist/0JFKmdLuTj0yZi9P05a85X

Youtube : https://www.youtube.com/c/TeflonSega

Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/teflonsega/

Twitter : https://twitter.com/teflonsega

Merch Store : https://teflonsega.myshopify.com/

Teflon & Xanadu Meta-saga : https://youtu.be/j-sL_Q0VK_Y

My links :

Twitter : https://twitter.com/luke_franks & https://twitter.com/metaverseluke

Email : [email protected]

Consultancy : www.wagmi-agency.com

=======================

Everyrealm's Links

Twitter : https://www.twitter.com/everyrealm

Discord : discord.gg/ntSaG8b9sW

Soundlands : asmrsoundlands.com

Substack : realmroundup.substack.com

Website https://www.everyrealm.com

=======================

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Where are we in the NFT & metaverse hype cycle and what are the opportunities to look out for over the next few months? On this episode of the Welcome to the Metaverse podcast I break down these themes looking at network effects and how adoption typically takes place on the internet. We also look at some broader NFT market stats and some recent metaverse news and opportunities too.

Thank you if you've recently left a rating or review and if you would like to that is much appreciated and a great way to support the show.

As always, do reach out https://www.twitter.com/metaverseluke or on email below to, it's always great to hear from you. Thank you for your continued support as we get closer to the brightest minds in web 3.0 and the wider metaverse.

=======================

This podcast is sponsored by the awesome Everyrealm (previously Republic Realm) who are a leader in metaverse innovation, investment, and NFTs. They are among the largest owners of digital real estate NFTs in Decentraland, The Sandbox and Axie Infinity to name just a few.

They’re also the creators of the Fantasy Islands metaverse NFT project, the ultra-luxury metaverse destination and community in The Sandbox and beyond.

They also recently announced their upcoming immersive ASMR experience in the metaverse, called Soundlands, which you can be the first to sign up to before it launches in full by heading to asmrsoundlands.com

You can find out more about what they are up to at everyrealm.com, join their substack newsletter with updates about the wider metaverse here realmroundup.substack.com and follow on twitter https://www.twitter.com/everyrealm and discord here discord.gg/ntSaG8b9sW

=======================

My links :

Twitter : https://twitter.com/metaverseluke

Email : [email protected]

Consultancy : www.wagmi-agency.com

=======================

Everyrealm's Links

Twitter : https://www.twitter.com/everyrealm

Discord : discord.gg/ntSaG8b9sW

Soundlands : asmrsoundlands.com

Substack : realmroundup.substack.com

Website https://www.everyrealm.com

=======================

Sources :

Social platforms, users to one billion : https://www.statista.com/statistics/1268115/fastest-social-networks-1-billion-mau/

NFT Holder Stats : https://nftgo.io/

Real Vision References : https://www.realvision.com

Facebook Creator Fee Story : https://www.cnet.com/personal-finance/metas-new-47-5-fee-on-metaverse-items-has-nft-twitter-pissed/

Epic Games x Lego Metaverse Partnership : https://news.bitcoin.com/epic-games-teams-up-with-lego-to-build-a-kids-metaverse/

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Adam Arrigo is the CEO & Founder of Wave - a revolutionary metaverse virtual entertainment platform that has already hosted shows with Justin Bieber, The Weeknd, John Legend, Teflon Sega and more.

On this episode of the Welcome to the Metaverse podcast, we chat all about how WAVE are breaking new ground, creating live, immersive experiences with artists as avatars. During these shows, fans can connect directly with them in real-time, adding a layer of interaction that I’ve never seen before.

If you'd like to watch a taster of what they are like, scroll through on the Justin Bieber show here or check out my tweet here

Adam is someone who has been working in the VR space for many years and has a realistic and invaluable insight into this space and how it is developing. His knowledge and advice in this episode is second to none, as well as being a lovely guy! Thank you Adam for coming on!

=======================

This podcast is sponsored by the awesome Everyrealm (previously Republic Realm) who are a leader in metaverse innovation, investment, and NFTs. They are among the largest owners of digital real estate NFTs in Decentraland, The Sandbox and Axie Infinity to name just a few.

They’re also the creators of the Fantasy Islands metaverse NFT project, the ultra-luxury metaverse destination and community in The Sandbox and beyond.

They also recently announced their upcoming immersive ASMR experience in the metaverse, called Soundlands, which you can be the first to sign up to before it launches in full by heading to asmrsoundlands.com

You can find out more about what they are up to at everyrealm.com, join their substack newsletter with updates about the wider metaverse here realmroundup.substack.com and follow on twitter https://www.twitter.com/everyrealm and discord here discord.gg/ntSaG8b9sW

=======================

My links :

Twitter : https://twitter.com/metaverseluke

Email : [email protected]

Consultancy : www.wagmi-agency.com

=======================

Everyrealm's Links

Twitter : https://www.twitter.com/everyrealm

Discord : discord.gg/ntSaG8b9sW

Soundlands : asmrsoundlands.com

Substack : realmroundup.substack.com

Website https://www.everyrealm.com

=======================

Wave's Links :

Website : https://wavexr.com/

Twitter : https://twitter.com/TheWaveXR

TikTok : https://www.tiktok.com/@thewavexr

Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/thewavexr/

=======================

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Dillon Rosenblatt is the Co-Founder (alongside Tom Brady) of Autograph - a platform that is bringing together some of the most legendary names across sport, entertainment, pop-culture, fashion and more to create unique digital collectibles.

On this episode of the Welcome to the Metaverse podcast, we chat all about the role of NFTs in sport, entertainment and fandom and how they can enable a richer experience for fans. We also talk about upcoming opportunities and Dillon teases some exciting announcements of what's to come from Autograph very soon.

Dillon and the Autograph team have managed to attract some of the biggest names in the world to their platform including : Brady, Wayne Gretzky, Naomi Osaka, Tiger Woods, Tony Hawk, Simone Biles, Usain Bolt, Derek Jeter, Robert Gronkowski, and Dale Earnhardt Jr. As well as major partnerships with DraftKings, Lionsgate and AEG. Earlier this year they raised $170 million from their series B funding round to bring web 3.0 to the masses.

We discuss how the platform came to be, what it's like working with the world's biggest stars, how NFTs are changing the sport/fan relationship like never before and what is coming next from this incredible company.

Dillon was an inspiration and super humble, it was a pleasure to have him on the show.

=======================

This podcast is sponsored by the awesome Everyrealm (previously Republic Realm) who are a leader in metaverse innovation, investment, and NFTs. They are among the largest owners of digital real estate NFTs in Decentraland, The Sandbox and Axie Infinity to name just a few.

They’re also the creators of the Fantasy Islands metaverse NFT project, the ultra-luxury metaverse destination and community in The Sandbox and beyond.

They also recently announced their upcoming immersive ASMR experience in the metaverse, called Soundlands, which you can be the first to sign up to before it launches in full by heading to asmrsoundlands.com

You can find out more about what they are up to at everyrealm.com, join their substack newsletter with updates about the wider metaverse here realmroundup.substack.com and follow on twitter https://www.twitter.com/everyrealm and discord here discord.gg/ntSaG8b9sW

=======================

Everyrealm's Links

Twitter : https://www.twitter.com/everyrealm

Discord : discord.gg/ntSaG8b9sW

Soundlands : asmrsoundlands.com

Substack : realmroundup.substack.com

Website https://www.everyrealm.com

=======================

Autograph's Links :

Website : https://autograph.io/

Twitter : https://mobile.twitter.com/Autograph

Discord : discord.gg/autograph

To purchase : marketplace.draftkings.com

=======================

My links :

Twitter : https://twitter.com/metaverseluke

Email : [email protected]

Consultancy : www.wagmi-agency.com

To join my NFT drops and metaverse newsletter, head to metaverseluke.substack.com

=======================

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On this episode of the Welcome to the Metaverse podcast, we get ready for Metaverse Fashion Week, happening on 24th-27th March in Decentraland. We have 3 awesome guests on the show - Gigi - Producer at Decentraland Foundation and Head of Metaverse Fashion Week, Punk8621 from PangeaDAO & Melanie from Parcel.

We discuss what you can expect from the first of it's kind event, what major brands will be present, how you can get involved and some surprises to look out for! One not to miss!

=======================

This podcast is sponsored by the awesome Everyrealm (previously Republic Realm) who are a leader in metaverse innovation, investment, and NFTs. They are among the largest owners of digital real estate NFTs in Decentraland, The Sandbox and Axie Infinity to name just a few.

They’re also the creators of the Fantasy Islands metaverse NFT project, the ultra-luxury metaverse destination and community in The Sandbox and beyond. They’ve also just launched their luxury digital wearables as part of the collection, designed by The Fabricant.

And recently they also dropped their collection of GFTs in partnership with Atari, one of the world’s most iconic brands - it’s a collection designed for gifting or of course you could keep your GFT for yourself.

You can find out more about what they are up to at everyrealm.com, join their substack newsletter with updates about the wider metaverse here realmroundup.substack.com and follow on twitter https://www.twitter.com/everyrealm and discord here discord.gg/ntSaG8b9sW

=======================

Everyrealm's Links

Twitter : https://www.twitter.com/everyrealm

Discord : discord.gg/ntSaG8b9sW

Substack : realmroundup.substack.com

Website https://www.everyrealm.com

=======================

Decentraland Links :

Website : https://decentraland.org/

Decentraland Blog : https://decentraland.org/blog/

Twitter : https://twitter.com/decentraland

Discord : https://discord.com/invite/ZhJ47Xm

=======================

PangeaDAO Links :

Website : https://www.pangeadao.org/

Twitter : https://twitter.com/PangeaDAO

Punk8621 Twitter : https://twitter.com/Punk8621

Discord : http://discord.gg/pangea

=======================

Parcel Links :

Website : https://parcel.so/

Twitter : https://twitter.com/ParcelNFT

Melanie Twitter : https://twitter.com/parablocks

Discord : discord.gg/7qUaAQf2Hs

=======================

My links :

Twitter : https://twitter.com/metaverseluke

Email : [email protected]

Consultancy : www.wagmi-agency.com

To join my NFT drops and metaverse newsletter, head to metaverseluke.substack.com

=======================

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On this episode of the Welcome to the Metaverse podcast, I chat to the creators behind the incredible deep fake of Tom Cruise, which went viral last year. We talk about how deep fakes are made and their role in the future of a hyperreal metaverse. Click here to check out the viral video.

The team behind its creation are a company called Metaphysic, who build AI models and software to automate hyperreal synthetic content creation at internet scale. They produce the world's most sophisticated and well-known AI-generated content that is indistinguishable from footage shot with a camera. In this episode I chat to the excellent Tom Graham, CEO and Co-founder of Metaphysic. This is one you don't want to miss!

=======================

This podcast is sponsored by the awesome Everyrealm (previously Republic Realm) who are a leader in metaverse innovation, investment, and NFTs. They are among the largest owners of digital real estate NFTs in Decentraland, The Sandbox and Axie Infinity to name just a few.

They’re also the creators of the Fantasy Islands metaverse NFT project, the ultra-luxury metaverse destination and community in The Sandbox and beyond. They’ve also just launched their luxury digital wearables as part of the collection, designed by The Fabricant.

And recently they also dropped their collection of GFTs in partnership with Atari, one of the world’s most iconic brands - it’s a collection designed for gifting or of course you could keep your GFT for yourself.

You can find out more about what they are up to at everyrealm.com, join their substack newsletter with updates about the wider metaverse here realmroundup.substack.com and follow on twitter https://www.twitter.com/everyrealm and discord here discord.gg/ntSaG8b9sW

=======================

Metaphysic Links :

Website : https://metaphysic.ai/

Contact : [email protected]

Twitter : https://twitter.com/Metaphysic_ai

Tom Graham (CEO and Co-Founder) :

[email protected]

https://twitter.com/tomgtgraham

https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomgtgraham/

Chris Ume (Co-Founder)

https://www.instagram.com/vfxchrisume/

DeepTomCruise on TikTok : https://www.tiktok.com/@deeptomcruise

=======================

My links :

Twitter : https://twitter.com/metaverseluke

Email : [email protected]

Consultancy : www.wagmi-agency.com

To join my weekly NFT drops and metaverse newsletter, head to metaverseluke.substack.com

=======================

Everyrealm's Links

Twitter : https://www.twitter.com/everyrealm

Discord : discord.gg/ntSaG8b9sW

Substack : realmroundup.substack.com

Website https://www.everyrealm.com

=======================

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On this episode of the Welcome to the Metaverse podcast, I chat to Nicholas Pringle - Senior Vice President, Executive Creative Director at R/GA London.

R/GA are a Global Innovation Brand who’ve won multiple awards and whose clients include Nike, Google, Reddit, Samsung, Verizon and more. In this episode we talk about the different ways to enter the metaverse as both an established brand or as a new, potentially metaverse-first brand as well.

There was really no-one better than Nick to talk about this stuff with, his advice is absolute gold and there’s some amazing value in this episode. I’ve got no doubt you’re gonna enjoy this one. Nick is awesome at explaining this world clearly and equally brilliant at thinking differently about this new frontier that is the metaverse  (as well as being just a very lovely guy, so thank you so much Nick for coming on!)

=======================

This podcast is sponsored by the awesome Everyrealm (previously Republic Realm) who are a leader in metaverse innovation, investment, and NFTs. They are among the largest owners of digital real estate NFTs in Decentraland, The Sandbox and Axie Infinity to name just a few.

They’re also the creators of the Fantasy Islands metaverse NFT project, the ultra-luxury metaverse destination and community in The Sandbox and beyond. They’ve also just launched their luxury digital wearables as part of the collection, designed by The Fabricant.

And recently they also dropped their collection of GFTs in partnership with Atari, one of the world’s most iconic brands - it’s a collection designed for gifting or of course you could keep your GFT for yourself.

You can find out more about what they are up to at everyrealm.com, join their substack newsletter with updates about the wider metaverse here realmroundup.substack.com and follow on twitter https://www.twitter.com/everyrealm and discord here discord.gg/ntSaG8b9sW

=======================

Nicholas Pringle / R/GA Links :

Website : https://www.rga.com/

Twitter : https://twitter.com/RGA

Nicholas Pringle Linkedin : https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholas-pringle-3955a431/

=======================

My links :

Twitter : https://twitter.com/metaverseluke

Email : [email protected]

Consultancy : www.wagmi-agency.com

To join my weekly NFT drops and metaverse newsletter, head to metaverseluke.substack.com

=======================

Everyrealm's Links

Twitter : https://www.twitter.com/everyrealm

Discord : discord.gg/ntSaG8b9sW

Substack : realmroundup.substack.com

Website https://www.everyrealm.com

=======================

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On this episode of the Welcome to the Metaverse podcast, I chat to Morten Grubak - Global Executive Creative Director of VICE / VIRTUE about their entry to the metaverse. They recently launched VICE HQ in Decentraland, a stunning piece of digital architecture and the hub of their future in web 3.0. Morten has an incredible insight into the vision for VICE in the metaverse and more broadly. We also talk about an amazing piece of research that VIRTUE (the creative agency by VICE) have put together called The Screenwear Paper (in partnership with The Dematerialised), all about interest and consumer behaviour around digital fashion.

Some absolute gold in this episode, thank you Morten for coming on. All links below

=======================

This podcast is sponsored by the awesome Everyrealm (previously Republic Realm) who are a leader in metaverse innovation, investment, and NFTs. They are among the largest owners of digital real estate NFTs in Decentraland, The Sandbox and Axie Infinity to name just a few.

They’re also the creators of the Fantasy Islands metaverse NFT project, the ultra-luxury metaverse destination and community in The Sandbox and beyond. They’ve also just launched their luxury digital wearables as part of the collection, designed by The Fabricant.

And recently they also dropped their collection of GFTs in partnership with Atari, one of the world’s most iconic brands - it’s a collection designed for gifting or of course you could keep your GFT for yourself.

You can find out more about what they are up to at everyrealm.com, join their substack newsletter with updates about the wider metaverse here realmroundup.substack.com and follow on twitter https://www.twitter.com/everyrealm and discord here discord.gg/ntSaG8b9sW

=======================

Morten Grubak Links :

Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/grubak/

VIRTUE : https://www.virtueworldwide.com/

VICE : https://www.vice.com/en

The Screenwear Paper : https://www.virtueworldwide.com/screenwear-report-digital-fashion

=======================

My links :

Twitter : https://twitter.com/metaverseluke

Email : [email protected]

Consultancy : www.wagmi-agency.com

To join my weekly NFT drops and metaverse newsletter, head to metaverseluke.substack.com

=======================

Everyrealm's Links

Twitter : https://www.twitter.com/everyrealm

Discord : discord.gg/ntSaG8b9sW

Substack : realmroundup.substack.com

Website https://www.everyrealm.com

=======================

In this episode we talk about :

- Vice Media Group and the award-winning work they do across multiple disciplines, news, film, music, entertainment and all about VIRTUE the creative agency powered by VICE, known for working with some of the biggest brands on the planet

- Vice's HQ in Decentraland, how it came about and the partnership with architectural powerhouse Bjarke Ingels Group

- Vice's vision for their HQ and hub in the metaverse

- As leaders of disruptive internet content, how are they viewing this move into web 3.0 and the metaverse?

- What the best type of content is to engage users and how user generated / collaborative content will be key

- The benefits of being reactive with a digital space vs. in the physical world

- How the nature of 3D and immersive experiences change how we connect with each other, learn and bring people together

- Where we are on the timeline of adoption for the metaverse

- The headline findings from The Screenwear Report - some amazing statistics suggesting digital fashion is not 'something for the future' but here now

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On this episode of the Welcome to the Metaverse podcast, we revisit the major virtual worlds both centralised and decentralised to see how they have developed, how many users are participating and what metaverse experiences will win. Will it be Roblox or Fortnite, Decentraland or The Sandbox, Somnium Space or Wilder World, or something totally new?

=======================

This podcast is sponsored by the awesome Everyrealm (previously Republic Realm) who are a leader in metaverse innovation, investment, and NFTs. They are among the largest owners of digital real estate NFTs in Decentraland, The Sandbox and Axie Infinity to name just a few.

They’re also the creators of the Fantasy Islands metaverse NFT project, the ultra-luxury metaverse destination and community in The Sandbox and beyond. They’ve also just launched their luxury digital wearables as part of the collection, designed by The Fabricant.

And this week they also dropped their collection of GFTs in partnership with Atari, one of the world’s most iconic brands - it’s a collection designed for gifting or of course you could keep your GFT for yourself.

You can find out more about what they are up to at everyrealm.com, join their substack newsletter with updates about the wider metaverse here realmroundup.substack.com and follow on twitter https://www.twitter.com/everyrealm and discord here discord.gg/ntSaG8b9sW

=======================

My links :

Twitter : https://twitter.com/metaverseluke

Email : [email protected]

Consultancy : www.wagmi-agency.com

To join my weekly NFT drops and metaverse newsletter, head to metaverseluke.substack.com

=======================

Everyrealm's Links

Twitter : https://www.twitter.com/everyrealm

Discord : discord.gg/ntSaG8b9sW

Substack : realmroundup.substack.com

Website https://www.everyrealm.com

=======================

Show links to follow shortly

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On this episode of the Welcome to the Metaverse podcast, I bring you the metaverse news that you need to know in under 15 minutes. The NFT and metaverse space moves at lightening speed and it's sometimes hard to keep up, so this episode will bring you up to speed with the major headlines quickly.

We cover Disney's latest developments and major hire in this space, Roblox hiring the first ever metaverse stylist, McDonalds building virtual restaurants, the NFT house you can live in and more.

=======================

This podcast is sponsored by the awesome Everyrealm (previously Republic Realm) who are a leader in metaverse innovation, investment, and NFTs. They are among the largest owners of digital real estate NFTs in Decentraland, The Sandbox and Axie Infinity to name just a few.

They’re also the creators of the Fantasy Islands metaverse NFT project, the ultra-luxury metaverse destination and community in The Sandbox and beyond. They’ve also just launched their luxury digital wearables as part of the collection, designed by The Fabricant.

And this week they also dropped their collection of GFTs in partnership with Atari, one of the world’s most iconic brands - it’s a collection designed for gifting or of course you could keep your GFT for yourself.

You can find out more about what they are up to at everyrealm.com, join their substack newsletter with updates about the wider metaverse here realmroundup.substack.com and follow on twitter https://www.twitter.com/everyrealm and discord here discord.gg/ntSaG8b9sW

=======================

My links :

Twitter : https://twitter.com/metaverseluke

Email : [email protected]

Consultancy : www.wagmi-agency.com

To join my weekly NFT drops and metaverse newsletter, head to metaverseluke.substack.com

=======================

Everyrealm's Links

Twitter : https://www.twitter.com/everyrealm

Discord : discord.gg/ntSaG8b9sW

Substack : realmroundup.substack.com

Website https://www.everyrealm.com

=======================

Links from this episode :

Disney article from The Verge : https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/15/22935445/disney-metaverse-strategy-plans-mike-white-memo

McDonalds are building virtual restaurants : https://coingeek.com/mcdonald-wants-to-join-metaverse-via-virtual-restaurant-selling-big-macs-and-nfts/

The first ever metaverse stylist : https://graziadaily.co.uk/fashion/news/fashion-metaverse-stylist/

The NFT house you can live in : https://luxurylaunches.com/real_estate/you-can-actually-buy-and-live-inside-the-worlds-first-real-life-nft-luxury-mansion-in-miami.php

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On this episode of the Welcome to the Metaverse podcast, I chat to undoubtedly one of the smartest minds in the space, Robby Yung CEO of Animoca Brands.

For anyone who doesn’t know, Animoca Brands are a major leader in this space with a very impressive portfolio across digital entertainment, blockchain and gaming - they develop and publish a wide slate of original games including The Sandbox, REVV Racing, Crazy Kings, the upcoming Bored Ape Yacht Club game and AAA title Phantom Galaxies alongside products with major IP’s including Formula One, Disney and WWE to name just a few.

They were also very early investors in the likes of Axie Infinity, OpenSea, Dapper Labs, Star Atlas and more and continue to invest in NFT-related companies and decentralised products that are contributing to building the open metaverse,

This is a monster episode, full of value both on where this whole space is heading and what Animoca are focussed on at the minute. I knew Robby was going to be awesome and it was great to have him on so thank you Robby!

=======================

This podcast is sponsored by the awesome Republic Realm who are a leader in metaverse innovation, investment, and NFTs. They are among the largest owners of digital real estate NFTs in Decentraland, The Sandbox and Axie Infinity to name just a few.

They’re also the creators of the Fantasy Islands metaverse NFT project, the ultra-luxury metaverse destination and community in The Sandbox and beyond. They’ve also just launched their luxury digital wearables as part of the collection, designed by The Fabricant.

And this week they also dropped their collection of GFTs in partnership with Atari, one of the world’s most iconic brands - it’s a collection designed for gifting or of course you could keep your GFT for yourself.

You can find out more about what they are up to at republicrealm.com, join their substack newsletter with updates about the wider metaverse here realmroundup.substack.com and follow on twitter https://www.twitter.com/joinrepublic_RE and discord here discord.gg/ntSaG8b9sW

=======================

As always nothing in podcast is financial or investment advice, always do your own research.

=======================

Animoca Brands links

Animoca Brands Twitter : https://twitter.com/animocabrands

Robby Yung's Twitter : https://twitter.com/viewfromhk

Animoca Brands Website : https://www.animocabrands.com/

Animoca Brands Blog : https://animocabrands.medium.com/

My links :

Twitter : https://twitter.com/metaverseluke

Agency : https://www.wagmi-agency.com

Email : [email protected]

To join my weekly NFT drops and metaverse newsletter, head to metaverseluke.substack.com

=======================

Republic Realm's Links

Twitter : https://www.twitter.com/joinrepublic_RE

Discord : discord.gg/ntSaG8b9sW

Substack : realmroundup.substack.com

Website https://www.republicrealm.com

=======================

In this episode we talk about :

- Who Animoca Brands are for newcomers and their vision/mission for the metaverse - bringing digital property rights to gamers

- Why NFTs using blockchain fix a major flaw with the current model of the internet and why that is important for everyone

- Why our current experience of the internet is on the surface good but is missing a whole layer of value - digital property rights

- Why blockchain and NFTs is far more than just owning individual digital items but having a stake in the broader network

- What exciting things are coming up for Animoca Brands and much more!

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On this episode of the Welcome to the Metaverse podcast, we explore the amazing world of DAOs aka Decentralised Autonomous Organisations with the awesome Danny Greene from MeebitsDAO.

DAOs are a way of collectively organising a group of people (and often funds) in an open, transparent and decentralised way, using blockchain technology. It sounds complicated but its a super interesting way to organise community around NFT projects but also any larger cause. All is explained simply in this episode!

Danny did an awesome job of explaining this area simply and the huge potential that DAOs are unlocking already.

Make sure you give Danny a follow at : https://twitter.com/dannygreene

=======================

This podcast is sponsored by the awesome Republic Realm who are a leader in metaverse innovation, investment, and NFTs. They are among the largest owners of digital real estate NFTs in Decentraland, The Sandbox and Axie Infinity to name just a few.

They’re also the creators of the Fantasy Islands metaverse NFT project, the ultra-luxury metaverse destination and community in The Sandbox and beyond. They’ve also just launched their luxury digital wearables as part of the collection, designed by The Fabricant.

And this week they also dropped their collection of GFTs in partnership with Atari, one of the world’s most iconic brands - it’s a collection designed for gifting or of course you could keep your GFT for yourself.

You can find out more about what they are up to at republicrealm.com, join their substack newsletter with updates about the wider metaverse here realmroundup.substack.com and follow on twitter https://www.twitter.com/joinrepublic_RE and discord here discord.gg/ntSaG8b9sW

=======================

As always nothing in podcast is financial or investment advice, always do your own research.

=======================

My links :

Twitter : https://twitter.com/metaverseluke

Email : [email protected]

To join my weekly NFT drops and metaverse newsletter, head to metaverseluke.substack.com

=======================

Republic Realm's Links

Twitter : https://www.twitter.com/joinrepublic_RE

Discord : discord.gg/ntSaG8b9sW

Substack : realmroundup.substack.com

Website https://www.republicrealm.com

=======================

MeebitsDAO links

MeebitsDAO Twitter : https://twitter.com/MeebitsDAO

Danny Greene's Twitter : https://twitter.com/dannygreene

MeebitsDAO Website : meebitsdao.world

MeebitsDAO Discord : https://discord.com/invite/zuJUaTjWBZ

=======================

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On this episode of the Welcome to the Metaverse podcast, we explore the fascinating world of play-to-earn gaming guilds with co-founder of Yield Guild Games - Gabby Dizon.

Blockchain has enabled thousands of people around the world to earn money from playing video games as the 'play-to-earn' movement begins to disrupt the biggest entertainment industry on the planet - in favour of the players. Yield Guild Games is an amazing, open collective of players, managers and scholars who share over $100 million of gaming assets and earn from playing in a decentralised way.

This chat with Gabby absolutely blew my mind and it was fascinating to hear about the incredible real world impact that blockchain gaming communities are making around the world, raising staggering amounts of money for communities in need. I loved this episode, thank you Gabby for coming on!

=======================

This podcast is sponsored by the awesome Republic Realm who are a leader in metaverse innovation, investment, and NFTs. They are among the largest owners of digital real estate NFTs in Decentraland, The Sandbox and Axie Infinity to name just a few.

They’re also the creators of the Fantasy Islands metaverse NFT project, the ultra-luxury metaverse destination and community in The Sandbox and beyond. They’ve also just launched their luxury digital wearables as part of the collection, designed by The Fabricant.

You can find out more about what they are up to at republicrealm.com, join their substack newsletter with updates about the wider metaverse here realmroundup.substack.com and follow on twitter https://www.twitter.com/joinrepublic_RE and discord here discord.gg/ntSaG8b9sW

=======================

As always nothing in podcast is financial or investment advice, always do your own research.

=======================

Republic Realm's Links

Twitter : https://www.twitter.com/joinrepublic_RE

Discord : discord.gg/ntSaG8b9sW

Substack : realmroundup.substack.com

Website https://www.republicrealm.com

=======================

Yield Guild Games' Links

YGG Twitter : https://twitter.com/YieldGuild

Gabby Dizon Twitter : https://twitter.com/gabusch

YGG Website : https://yieldguild.io/

YGG Discord : discord.gg/ygg

=======================

My links :

Twitter : https://twitter.com/metaverseluke

Email : [email protected]

To join my weekly NFT drops and metaverse newsletter, head to metaverseluke.substack.com

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On this episode of the Welcome to the Metaverse podcast, we explore the fascinating world of digital fashion with CEO & Founder of major digital fashion house The Fabricant - Kerry Murphy.

The Fabricant has worked with some of the biggest brands on the planet including Adidas, Puma, Tommy Hilfiger, the recent H&M digital fashion campaign with Maisie Williams and are soon to launch The Fabricant Studio. There was no better person to talk about what is happening in this space with than Kerry, he gave some invaluable insight into where this is all going and the future of the metaverse.

I left this episode genuinely buzzing for the future of this space, there is some absolute gold from Kerry in this chat.

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This podcast is sponsored by the awesome Republic Realm who are a leader in metaverse innovation, investment, and NFTs. They are among the largest owners of digital real estate NFTs in Decentraland, The Sandbox and Axie Infinity to name just a few.

They’re also the creators of the Fantasy Islands metaverse NFT project, the ultra-luxury metaverse destination and community in The Sandbox and beyond.

You can find out more about what they are up to at republicrealm.com, join their substack newsletter with updates about the wider metaverse here realmroundup.substack.com and follow on twitter https://www.twitter.com/joinrepublic_RE and discord here discord.gg/ntSaG8b9sW

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As always nothing in podcast is financial or investment advice, always do your own research.

=======================

Republic Realm's Links

Twitter : https://www.twitter.com/joinrepublic_RE

Discord : discord.gg/ntSaG8b9sW

Substack : realmroundup.substack.com

Website https://www.republicrealm.com

=======================

The Fabricant's Links

The Fabricant Twitter : https://twitter.com/the_fab_ric_ant

Kerry Murphy Twitter : https://twitter.com/k3rrymurphy

The Fabricant Website : https://www.thefabricant.com/

The Fabricant Studio Discord : https://discord.gg/krHys5rcdD

=======================

My links :

Twitter : https://twitter.com/metaverseluke

Email : [email protected]

To join my weekly NFT drops and metaverse newsletter, head to metaverseluke.substack.com

=======================

In this conversation we talk about :

- Kerry's journey, how he discovered digital fashion and realised it was about to be the next big wave

- Why fashion is more than just clothes to keep us warm, it's a way of showcasing our identity and story - why digital fashion achieves this in a much more interesting way

- How avatars are going to be crucial to how me experience the metaverse and digital fashion aligns with this

- Major other use cases for digital fashion including more immersive shopping experiences and counterfeit protection

- The current struggles of the fashion industry and how digital fashion can help solve them, along with some of the problems still to be solved that the metaverse will amplify

- Some of the campaigns that The Fabricant have worked on that Kerry is most proud of and why they are moving to creating their own future with The Fabricant Studio

- Mapping out the full lifecycle of a garment and production process for digital fashion

- What needs to happen for digital fashion to go fully mainstream

- The major opportunities ahead and how you can get involved

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On this episode of the Welcome to the Metaverse podcast, I bring you the metaverse news that you need to know in under 20 minutes. The NFT and metaverse space moves at lightening speed and it's sometimes hard to keep up, so this episode will bring you up to speed with the major headlines quickly.

We cover OpenSea (the dominant NFT trading platform that did almost $20 billion of volume last year) and their major new rival 'Looks Rare' plus the free airdrop to incentivise users to come across to their platform, Electronic DJ, producer and crypto OG Justin Blau taking on the music industry, Maisie Williams fronting a digital fashion line and more.

=======================

This podcast is sponsored by the awesome Republic Realm who are a leader in metaverse innovation, investment, and NFTs. They are among the largest owners of digital real estate NFTs in Decentraland, The Sandbox and Axie Infinity to name just a few.

They’re also the creators of the Fantasy Islands metaverse NFT project, the ultra-luxury metaverse destination and community in The Sandbox and beyond.

You can find out more about what they are up to at republicrealm.com, join their substack newsletter with updates about the wider metaverse here realmroundup.substack.com and follow on twitter https://www.twitter.com/joinrepublic_RE and discord here discord.gg/ntSaG8b9sW

=======================

My links :

Twitter : https://twitter.com/metaverseluke

Email : [email protected]

To join my weekly NFT drops and metaverse newsletter, head to metaverseluke.substack.com

=======================

Republic Realm's Links

Twitter : https://www.twitter.com/joinrepublic_RE

Discord : discord.gg/ntSaG8b9sW

Substack : realmroundup.substack.com

Website https://www.republicrealm.com

=======================

Links from this episode :

Looks Rare Platform : https://looksrare.org/

Justin Blau's Royal Platform : https://twitter.com/join_royal / https://royal.io/

Playstation's VR 2 Headset : https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/playstation-vr-2-release-date-price-news-and-rumors

H&M / Maisie Williams Digital Fashion : https://www.stylist.co.uk/fashion/hm-digital-fashion-collection-maisie-williams/609353

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On the Welcome to the Metaverse podcast, we talk about Crypto, NFTs, the Metaverse and everything inbetween. The internet changed our world once, blockchain is about to change it all over again. Every Wednesday we chat to the brightest minds in the virtual world to discover the most exciting, weird and game-changing projects that are coming out of this space.

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https://www.digitalinformationworld.com/2021/09/report-reveals-low-consumer-knowledge.html

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The internet has become more or less completely intertwined with most people's day to day lives. In fact, according to a recent report by WundermanThompson 76% of respondents said that they were in some way dependent on technology and the internet more than likely plays an outsize role in that respect. The numbers get even higher when you look at members of Gen Z, 79% of whom said that this was the case. And about 80% of Millennials acknowledged some degree of dependence on technology as well.

There is also the fact that the internet is starting to dictate the manner in which we interact with various companies and the like. Two thirds of consumers said that they prefer to interact with brands through a digital medium. As if that wasn't already enough, a massive 85% of respondents said that they felt like it would be essential for a brand to establish some kind of an online presence. What this indicates is that the internet is going to continue to get more and more influential especially when you take into account the level of dependence that people under the age of 40 tend to feel towards it.

With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that the future of the internet involves a little something called the Metaverse. This is a term that is thrown around a lot, but in spite of the fact that this is the case only about 38% of consumers know what it is. The Metaverse is essentially a conceptual future internet that would consist of a digital or virtual space, a virtual world of sorts, and we have already seen countless examples of this with all things having been considered and taken into account.

There are plenty of games such as Roblox that have created a metaverse wherein transactions can be conducted and people end up living entire lives and form relationships with one another to boot. What's more is that major corporations like Facebook are starting to get in on the action as well. Facebook has actually started talking about rebranding itself as a "Metaverse company", something that sort of ties in to the kind of experience that the social media platform is already providing except that it will take things a step further.

The creation of a metaverse could completely alter the manner in which business tends to be conducted online. More consumers should be educated about it since it does seem to be the future of how we interact with one another, and it might make the digital world even more valuable than the real world in a way that would be exciting for some and downright concerning for others.

Read next: More Than Half of US Adults Don't Know What Starlink Is, Here's Why That Doesn't Matter

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digital information world: report reveals low consumer knowledge about the metaverse

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The internet has become more or less completely intertwined with most people's day to day lives. In fact, according to a recent report by WundermanThompson 76% of respondents said that they were in some way dependent on technology and the internet more than likely plays an outsize role in that respect.

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https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/retail/our-insights/how-the-fashion-industry-can-get-into-a-metaverse-mindset

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How the fashion industry can get into a metaverse mindset

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The emergence of the metaverse offers incredible potential for fashion and luxury players. McKinsey explores how brands can tap into this new frontier.

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https://www.voguebusiness.com/technology/metaverse-fashion-week-the-hits-and-misses

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Metaverse Fashion Week: The hits and misses

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The most high-profile fashion event in the metaverse yet brought together mainstream brands and digital upstarts. Reviews were mixed.

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This story is part of a group of stories called

Uncovering and explaining how our digital world is changing - and changing us.

It's the next big breakthrough in technology. It's a joke. It's a marketing strategy. It's a techno-dystopian nightmare. It's the metaverse - defined most simply as a virtual world where people can socialize, work, and play - and Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg believes it is the future of the internet and of his trillion-dollar company.

Although "metaverse" became a buzzword after Facebook changed its company name to "Meta" last month, many people are still trying to understand what exactly the metaverse is and whether the futuristic technological concept is something they should take seriously.

Many critics and skeptics have mocked Zuckerberg's plan to change Facebook from a social media company to a metaverse company. Some critics say that by focusing on the metaverse and renaming itself while the company is reeling from a PR crisis, Facebook is distracting from the problems it creates or contributes to in the real world: issues like harming teens' mental health, facilitating the spread of disinformation, and fueling political polarization.

Even some of Facebook's own employees, according to internal company communications viewed by Recode, are concerned about the metaverse - as reflected by questions several employees asked ahead of a weekly staff Q&A on Facebook's internal communications platform, Workplace. One question, which was highly upvoted by employees, was, "How could we avoid a dystopian reality, where the metaverse is used as an 'opium for the masses?'" Another highly ranked question asked, "How will we meaningfully put safety, integrity, and responsibility first in the Metaverse? We barely are able to cover the real world today."

Other observers have noted that Facebook's metaverse idea isn't new - plenty of other companies, like Roblox, Nvidia, and Microsoft, have also been building out virtual worlds with virtual or augmented reality tech. And others point to how undeveloped the technology is - in the version of the metaverse that Facebook has built so far, the digital avatars it offers as stand-ins for our physical bodies are cartoonish, awkward, and often legless.

Even if these criticisms and questions stand, Facebook's investment in the metaverse is something we should take seriously. Mark Zuckerberg sees the metaverse as the "successor to the mobile internet," an invention that reshaped all our lives by allowing us to go online anywhere, and made it possible for Facebook's current business to exist. If the metaverse becomes everything Zuckerberg wants it to be, it could similarly shake up the world, shifting our existence from being rooted in the physical world to one in which our digital presence increasingly supplements our real one.

In response to concerns about the metaverse, Facebook, which recently renamed itself Meta, pointed to a statement from a September blog post by Facebook executives Andrew Bosworth and Nick Clegg that reads, in part, "Meta is not going to build, own, or run the metaverse on its own. We are starting conversations about our vision for the metaverse early, before some of the technologies even exist. ... We're discussing it now to help ensure that any terms of use, privacy controls or safety features are appropriate to the new technologies and effective in keeping people safe."

Facebook also said it's doesn't want to be the only one developing the metaverse. "This won't be the job of any one company alone. It will require collaboration across industry and with experts, governments and regulators to get it right," reads another line from the blog post.

The company is betting a lot on this concept succeeding. It's putting some of the brightest engineering minds in the world to work on this project, acquiring virtual reality and augmented reality companies, hiring over 10,000 people to work on it, and backing the initiative with tens of billions of dollars. And Zuckerberg, who ultimately has unilateral control over his company, seems genuinely excited about it.

While the timeline is still unclear, it's likely we're headed toward a future where we could all be using some yet-to-be-determined version of the metaverse to go online. And Facebook is determined to play a major role in building and shaping this new realm, meaning that even if Facebook doesn't single-handedly own the metaverse (as it has insisted it won't), it's still striving to wield control over it. That means Facebook may one day have even more influence over our daily lives.

Today, Facebook still has to operate under the parameters set by Apple and Google, which make and control the world's dominant smartphone operating systems. But in this new world that will likely rely on VR/AR headsets and digital sensors, Facebook is striving to create its own rules and operating platform.

So even if you're not itching to jump into the metaverse anytime soon, you should pay attention to it, and to how Facebook is investing in it.

So what is the metaverse, really?

On a philosophical level, the metaverse, as Zuckerberg and others have defined it, is a way for us to make our virtual lives more seamlessly integrated with our real ones.

It will be "like we're right there with people no matter how far apart we actually are, we'll be able to express ourselves in new joyful, completely immersive ways," said Zuckerberg in an October speech during which he demoed his vision of the metaverse.

The idea is to create a more immersive internet, in which we'll use tech like AR and VR to spend our time engaging in virtual spaces and experiences rather than the physical world. The term was first coined in Neal Stephenson's 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash, but now, Zuckerberg and many other tech executives want to make it a reality.

Matthew Ball, a technology investor who wrote a definitive series of essays about the metaverse, explained it to me in part like this:

"Right now the internet is primarily something that is 'push.' You are pushed information, you receive an email, you receive a notification, you then pull up your device to access that." The difference with the metaverse is that it's an "embodied engine" you are "already within, rather than reaching out," Ball said.

Practically, that means this world will disengage us from our physical realities: the office, the living room, the outdoors. We will instead plug into our headsets or otherwise be immersed in another environment.

Depending on how you see it, that could mean an improvement to your life; your surroundings or your physical appearance can be updated virtually. Or it can be read as a dystopian concept, as though the metaverse is for people who are escaping the grim circumstances of the real world (which is how it was envisioned in the novel Snow Crash).

For now, though, any conversation about the metaverse is largely hypothetical. Facebook will be the first to tell you that it's still in its infancy. Zuckerberg has said that it "does not fully exist" yet, and that we have just the "building blocks" - like Facebook's Oculus Quest 2 headset, which costs $299 and has significantly lowered the entry price point for VR devices. For comparison, an HP Reverb G2 Virtual Reality Headset currently costs $450, and the HTC Vive Cosmos goes for upward of $600.

But to take this hypothetical conversation to another level, I stepped into Facebook's metaverse using a loaned Oculus headset. The first time I tried it out, I was impressed. The graphics have come a long way since I last used a VR headset (just a few years ago), and that made my experience transporting. But in a reflection of how young the technology still is, I found it impractical to use for long stretches of time, especially outside of an entertainment or gaming capacity.

Before I got started in the metaverse, I shifted furniture around in my apartment so I could explore without bonking into corners. After I put on the Oculus VR goggles, I moved on to the most important step: setting up my digital avatar.

Facebook gave me options to customize my avatar with features like skin tone, clothes, makeup, eyebrows, and even facial wrinkles. After spending 20 minutes tweaking my avatar to look more like me, I settled on a cartoon version of me that looked close enough. Then I headed to my default Oculus 3D home screen, a virtual room that looks like a tropical hotel lobby with palm trees, hanging egg-shaped chairs, and views of red rock mountains in the distance - a definite upgrade from the decor of my 500-square-foot studio apartment.

In its current form, my options for stuff to do in the metaverse were limited to activities like playing games, watching VR videos, and attending meetings. I played some games and watched YouTube videos in 3D; the highlight was dancing with a robot with gummy arms that beckoned me to twist and twirl with it.

Then I took a mock work meeting using Meta's VR meeting software, Horizon Workrooms, which gave me a glimpse of how Facebook is envisioning the future of work in virtual worlds.

As I sat in a virtual meeting room with my cartoon avatar, I was able to do some things I couldn't on a video call: I could turn my head toward my meeting mate and hear her voice more loudly than when I turned away; I could pinch my fingers to draw a note on a virtual chalkboard wall (although this was a bit challenging to get right), and I could see meeting participants all hang out in the same "room" together, rather than their heads cropped into a mosaic of side-by-side 2D boxes like they would be on a Zoom call. But there were clear drawbacks - mainly, that my avatar didn't have any legs (because the headset can't pick up your leg motions the way it can your head and hands, there are no legs in the Horizon Workrooms app), and I looked less professional than a normal video or picture of myself.

After I spent a few hours in the metaverse, more drawbacks of this new world emerged. For one, I started to sweat and feel nauseated. My headset weighed on my face. Anytime I wanted to play a game in this space that Facebook hadn't developed itself, I had to go through the process of creating a new avatar from scratch. The initial wonder I had felt started to drain away. It's hard to imagine myself wanting to hang out in the current version of Facebook's metaverse for long stretches of time.

That being said, technology develops quickly, and it's easy to imagine a world where all the practical problems I had with the metaverse are solved with lighter headsets, advanced hardware, and improved avatar graphics. But there are major technical challenges for Facebook to sort out here, and they're going to take investment.

Why Facebook is going after the metaverse

Those are investments Facebook is willing to make because it sees the metaverse as the successor to the mobile internet. The technology creates an opportunity for Zuckerberg and Facebook to get ahead of the competition.

Unlike Apple or Google, which created iOS and Android, Facebook doesn't control an operating system. Facebook has famously feuded with Apple over the fees the company charges for purchases made on iPhone apps, and the general control it exerts over companies like Facebook via its terms for developers.

For Facebook, this is a chance to become less reliant on Apple and Google.

"Not only is there an extraordinary opportunity for Facebook to build value in the metaverse, but it also provides them another opportunity to establish something that they lack and that has been a hindrance for years," Ball told me. "For any of these major tech companies that have the assets, resources, capabilities, and interest in the metaverse, it absolutely makes sense for them to be investing in it."

However, some close to the company see Facebook's investments in virtual reality as a diversion from fixing the company's tedious real-world problems.

It's a "lot more fun to build a metaverse" than it is to answer the tough questions Facebook is facing about issues like political polarization, the spread of misinformation, or teenagers' mental health, Brian Boland, a former vice president of partnerships and marketing at Facebook, told me.

And that makes sense: For Zuckerberg and his company, the metaverse presents an opportunity to shift Facebook's mission back to building something new, rather than only fixing a troubled existing product.

Facebook could become an even bigger part of our lives

If the metaverse as Facebook envisions it succeeds, it would mean that the company will become even more powerful than it is today.

Right now, the two tech giants that effectively control entry to the mobile internet, Apple and Google, set some parameters around Facebook's business.

Facebook designs its mobile app software to run on Apple's and Google's operating systems. In turn, Apple and Google take a 30 percent cut of any financial transactions that take place in Facebook's iPhone app (a policy Facebook has long denounced). Apple also can pressure Facebook about its content policies, like in 2019, when tensions flared between the two companies after Apple threatened to kick Facebook out of the App Store if it didn't do a better job preventing people from using its platform to traffic domestic workers in the Middle East.

The metaverse presents a potential future where Facebook won't have these constraints anymore. If Facebook succeeds at being a pioneering founder of the metaverse, then it would be the company building and selling virtual reality headsets used to access that metaverse, and it could control a major app store distributing metaverse apps. This would all give Facebook a level of control and influence over the future internet that it doesn't have today on the mobile web.

At an immediate level, that means even more people would use Facebook, and they would do so in a way that's more immersive and interactive than how they use its current products.

If you think Instagram or Facebook's main app can suck people into filter bubbles of engrossing, endlessly scrolling content, imagine people plugged into headsets, focused only on the Facebook-engineered alternate reality they're in.

And if you're already concerned about Facebook's impact on privacy, the metaverse would open a new world of data sources that the company could track: finger movements, facial movements, and in the future, potentially brain reading. While Facebook has shut down the facial recognition tech it once used on its main platform, it said it will continue to potentially use it in the metaverse, as my colleague Rebecca Heilweil reported earlier this month.

Facebook says it's taking privacy, moderation, and safety concerns seriously, pointing to a blog post earlier this month by soon-to-be Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth that reads, in part, "technology that opens up new possibilities can also be used to cause harm, and we must be mindful of that as we design, iterate, and bring products to market. We want everyone to feel like they're in control of their VR experience and to feel safe on our platform." The company says it's collaborating with outside partners including civil rights groups, government agencies, and nonprofits to make the metaverse safe, and has funded related outside research.

Facebook's efforts could end up normalizing spending time in the metaverse the way it normalized sharing our private lives on the internet. Already, during the pandemic, the lines between our "real" life and our digital life have become more blurred, as billions of people around the world have depended on technology in unprecedented ways to connect with other people through interactive games, mock office settings, and escapist television.

"The pandemic led to extraordinarily more time [spent] in virtual worlds, and the destigmatization of time in those virtual worlds," Ball said.

Of course, it's not at all clear if Facebook will succeed in its metaverse ambitions. When Google attempted to take VR/AR products mainstream with Google Glass in 2014, it failed because the tech was seen as uncool and privacy-invasive.

Facebook will have to convince people to give up their time in the real world for participating in the metaverse instead, and to trust Facebook - a company mired in privacy and political scandals for the past five years - to be their stewards of this new realm. Users could instead use competing metaverse products from Microsoft, or perhaps Apple, which is reportedly working on its own VR/AR efforts. They could also choose to opt out of the new technology entirely.

And political scrutiny will likely also be an issue. As my colleague Peter Kafka has written, regulators who are concerned about Facebook's potentially monopolistic power in the economy may start turning their attention to the company's many new VR/AR acquisition efforts.

In light of all these unknowns and potential challenges, it's too soon to say whether the metaverse will indeed become the next version of the web, and even if it is, whether Facebook will be the dominant player. But it's still an important experiment worth paying attention to. If the relentlessly ambitious Zuckerberg is devoting thousands of employees and billions of dollars to pursue the idea, the odds are high that the metaverse will be more than a passing, oddball whim from a billionaire tech CEO.

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Why you should care about Facebook's big push into the metaverse

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Uncovering and explaining how our digital world is changing - and changing us. It's the next big breakthrough in technology. It's a joke. It's a marketing strategy. It's a techno-dystopian nightmare. It's the metaverse - defined most simply as a virtual world where people can socialize, work, and play - and Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg believes it is the future of the internet and of his trillion-dollar company.

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What to Wear in the Metaverse (Published 2022)

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Dressing for a virtual world is going to be both enormously liberating and potentially very, very messy.

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https://www.statista.com/chart/26869/luxury-fashion-nfts/

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The Statista "Chart of the Day" currently focuses on two sectors: "Media and Technology", updated daily and featuring the latest statistics from the media, internet, telecommunications and consumer electronics industries; and "Economy and Society", which current data from the United States and around the world relating to economic and political issues as well as sports and entertainment.

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Infographic: The Luxury Brands Selling Luxury NFTs

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Statista "Chart of the Day" currently focuses on two sectors: "Media and Technology", updated daily and featuring the latest statistics from the media, internet, telecommunications and consumer electronics industries; and "Economy and Society", which current data from the United States and around the world relating to economic and political issues as well as sports and entertainment.

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https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58749529

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Apparently, it’s the next big thing. What is the metaverse?

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What does it mean, and what have Facebook and Fortnite got to do with it?

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https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/what-is-a-metaverse

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Enterprises are starting to place bets on the metaverse, but don't overcommit in these early days of nascent metaverse technologies.

Despite hype about "the" metaverse, it isn't yet a single entity. Rather, a metaverse today comprises multiple emerging technologies - and organizations should be careful when investing in a specific metaverse as it is too early to determine which investments are viable for business in the long term.

Nevertheless, metaverse technologies promise the next level of interaction in the virtual and physical worlds, providing innovative new opportunities and business models. In fact, Gartner expects that by 2026, 25% of people will spend at least one hour a day in a metaverse for work, shopping, education, social media and/or entertainment.

Download Now: Your detailed guide to Gartner Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends, 2023

"Emerging metaverse technologies may be nascent, but they offer strategic opportunities - with potential benefits that aren't limited to virtual worlds. Metaverse will transform the physical world, as well as transport or extend physical activities to a virtual world," says Gartner VP Analyst Marty Resnick.

Technically, a metaverse is a collective virtual shared space, created by the convergence of virtually enhanced physical and digital reality. For simplicity's sake, think of a metaverse as the next iteration of the internet, which started as individual bulletin boards and independent online destinations. Eventually these destinations became sites on a virtual shared space - similar to how a metaverse will develop.

A metaverse is not device-independent, nor owned by a single vendor. It is an independent virtual economy, enabled by digital currencies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

As a combinatorial innovation, metaverses require multiple technologies and trends to function. Contributing trends include virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), flexible work styles, head-mounted displays (HMDs), an AR cloud, the Internet of Things (IoT), 5G, artificial intelligence (AI) and spatial computing.

Download now: 2021-2023 Emerging Technology Roadmap

Innovation No. 1: Web3, which is a new stack of technologies for the development of decentralized web applications that enable users to control their own identity and data. Web3 and metaverse complement each in a community or ecosystem where value in some form is exchanged between people or organizations - or a combination.

Innovation No. 2: Spatial computing, which can be defined as a three-tiered technology stack through which users experience the intersection of the physical and digital worlds.

Innovation No. 3: Digital twin of a person (DToP) not only mirrors a unique individual, but is also a near-real-time synchronized multipresence, with the ability to be present in multiple places at the same time in both digital and physical spaces.

Innovation No. 4: Digital twin of a customer (DToC), a subset of DToP, is a dynamic virtual representation of a customer that simulates and learns to emulate and anticipate behavior. Customers can be individuals, personas, groups of people or machines.

There is a lot of excitement around metaverse, driven by technology companies preemptively claiming to be metaverse companies or creating a metaverse to enhance or augment the digital and physical realities of people.

Eventually, metaverse will provide persistent, decentralized, collaborative and interoperable opportunities and business models that will enable organizations to extend digital business. But metaverse opportunities are already emerging - for enterprises as well as individuals. For example:

J.P. Morgan has become the first bank to establish a presence in the metaverse, predicting a market opportunity of $1 trillion and eyeing virtual real estate.

Automobile dealerships could keep limited stock on hand of particular vehicles and use spatial computing, specifically the AR cloud, to seemingly change interior and exterior attributes digitally in real time to showcase more options.

Games can be created to train employees on how to handle hazards without actually exposing them to those hazards.

DToCs and digital humans can interact with customers to aid in areas, such as financial transactions, concierge shopping experiences or patient health monitoring.

Virtual workspaces can enable organizations to develop better engagement, collaboration and connection opportunities for employees. (Virtual meetings, powered by metaverse technologies, are already a fixture of hybrid work.)

Download 2023 CIO Agenda: 4 Ways to Ensure Your Tech Investments Pay Digital Dividends

"The next one to three years will be a time of learning, exploring and preparing for a metaverse with limited implementations," says Resnick. "The financial and reputational risks of early investments aren't fully known, and we advise caution."

For now, however, these actions will help you begin to map a strategy that includes metaverse technologies:

Explore opportunities where metaverse technologies could optimize digital business, or create new products and services.

Build metaverse products and solutions through a pipeline of combinatorial innovation rather than trying to find a "killer app."

Identify metaverse-inspired opportunities by evaluating current high-value use cases.

Invest in specific emergent metaverses cautiously and protect your reputation by proactively establishing a data governance, security and privacy policy to protect customer and employee data.

Marty Resnick, VP Analyst at Gartner, primarily studies the futuristic disruptions that impact enterprise mission-critical priorities, with a special focus on how to spot, select and implement emerging and futuristic technologies through trendspotting and tech radars.

Recommended resources for Gartner clients*:

Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2023
Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2023: Metaverse
Predicts 2022: 4 Technology Bets for Building the Digital Future
Building a Digital Future: The Metaverse

*Note that some documents may not be available to all Gartner clients.

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cio technology and innovation leadership

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What Is a Metaverse? And Should You Be Buying In?

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Four key innovations make metaverse a strategic technology trend: 1️⃣ Web3 2️⃣ Spatial computing 3️⃣ Digital twin of a person (DToP) 4️⃣ Digital twin of a customer (DToC) Should you be buying into the metaverse? Find out here. #GartnerSYM #GartnerIT #Metaverse

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https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/luxury/luxury-watch-nfts-opportunity-or-headache/

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Luxury watch brands are questioning whether the burgeoning marketplace for virtual goods created by the rise of NFTs and the early stages of the metaverse presents a real opportunity or a real headache.

For opportunists, early entry into the metaverse - a persistent, parallel reality created by the stitching together of virtual worlds, where users can buy and "wear" digital goods - could give them a long-term competitive advantage. After all, the markets for luxury watches and NFTs are both rooted in a culture of collecting.

But the metaverse also challenges the core philosophy behind the sector's biggest businesses - that mechanics and craftsmanship have deep meaning and long-lasting value. What's more, the shapeless, unregulated metaverse is a virtual Wild West for carefully crafted reputations.

Whatever the calculus, few are ignoring the phenomenon.

In January, LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault said during the company's earnings call that the metaverse presented a business opportunity, but struck a note of caution, saying the group was in no rush to "sell virtual sneakers for €10."

Watchmakers have begun to dabble in the space. Last year, Jacob & Co. became the first high-end brand to sell a digital version of one of its watches, the NFT SF24 Tourbillon, which sold at auction for $100,000. In February, Louis Moinet, which makes only a few hundred physical watches a year, offered its first NFT collection, a run of 1,000 unique pieces that it says sold out in seven minutes when it went on sale last month.

But much remains behind closed doors. Stéphane Bianchi, head of LVMH's Watch and Jewellery division, confirmed in January that brands in his stable - which includes Bulgari, Hublot and TAG Heuer - were experimenting with the technology. "At the end of the day we should be part of it and we will be," he told the New York Times in January.

TAG Heuer's chief executive Frédéric Arnault confirmed the brand is exploring the space, while Bulgari's chief executive Jean-Christophe Babin said he sees huge potential in NFTs and the metaverse. "The metaverse could be a magnifier of the real world and take us into a dreamland, like Alice in Wonderland," Babin said. "This then creates huge value."

But the metaverse also opens up a world of legal wrangling. In January, Hermès sued Mason Rothschild over his " MetaBirkin" NFTs, claiming trademark infringement. It'll be interesting to see what becomes of Generative Watches, a collection of 1,000 NFTs that ape designs by Switzerland's two largest watchmakers.

What Rolex makes of founder Jesus Calderon's "Rødex Bitmariner," a swipe at the superbrand's signature Submariner design, remains to be seen. In the meantime, Calderon told the watch website Hodinkee earlier this year that he'd sold 68 virtual watches for around $700 a piece, and that one he'd given away changed hands on the secondary market for the equivalent of $20,000.

For now, brands are left with more questions than answers.

Given real-world watches are designed using 3D software, producing watch NFTs would be relatively cheap and easy. But how to set appropriate volumes and retail prices? "The laws of the metaverse will be very similar to the real world," said Babin. "If you make a few, they cost a lot. If you make many, they cost little. But whether the price should be higher or lower than the real piece - it's difficult to say."

For all its cultural influence, the Swiss watch industry remains highly conservative, and many brands are expected to steer clear of the metaverse. "The Swiss brands will worry about perception and they'll be really late to the party," said William Rohr, former managing director of watch forum TimeZone and founder of watch brand Massena LAB.

"But if they decide to invest, big guns like Rolex will invest massively and try to occupy as much space as possible, because the rest of the industry will follow like a herd," he added. "I think that this will happen in the second part of this decade."

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Luxury Watch NFTs: Opportunity or Headache?

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Luxury watch brands are questioning whether the burgeoning marketplace for virtual goods created by the rise of NFTs and the early stages of the metaverse presents a real opportunity or a real headache.

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Balenciaga and Fortnite have teamed up to bring the physical and virtual worlds closer together.

The companies today unveiled a collaboration including virtual clothes and accessories, an immersive destination within Fortnite inspired by Balenciaga's design, and a physical line of products that will go on sale at Balenciaga's stores and e-commerce sites. The first partnership between a luxury fashion house and Fortnite, a giant in the gaming world with 400 million registered accounts, its aim is to span online and real-world spaces.

"We have the same marketing assets happening in both places, the same look and feel and product lines launching in the physical and digital world at the same time," said Adam Sussman, president of Epic Games, the game developer behind Fortnite.

The in-game clothing will include outfits for four of Fortnite's popular characters - Doggo, Ramirez, Knight, and Banshee - inspired by real-world looks from recent Balenciaga collections. Unlike the originals, a few of the digital versions will react in the game, changing colour in response to damage inflicted during battle for example. Fortnite players will be able to unlock some of the Balenciaga products by performing tasks in the game. Other items will have to be purchased using V-Bucks, Fortnite's in-game currency. The most expensive items cost 1,500 V-Bucks, roughly equivalent to $12.

One hoodie worn by Doggo, an anthropomorphised dog, bears both Balenciaga and Fortnite branding, and physical versions will be available for purchase in different colours through Balenciaga. The brand will also sell items such as T-shirts, hats, dress shirts and a denim jacket as part of its line with Fortnite.

The companies are putting up 3D billboards featuring a hoodie-clad Doggo in Tokyo, Seoul, New York and London. The same billboard will appear inside the game in what Fortnite is calling the "Strange Times" hub in the game's creative mode, where players can interact without battling. Fortnite launched as a battle-royale game in 2017, but half of its users now spend time in this creative mode, according to the company. Last year, players even staged their own fashion show. At the centre of the hub sits a recreation of a Balenciaga store, while billboards will showcase looks created by the Fortnite community.

"Fortnite at the end of the day is obviously a tech company, but it's really about self-expression and agency," Sussman said, referring to the agency of players to choose what skins or costumes they want to wear.

For Balenciaga, a brand known for pushing boundaries under creative director Demna Gvasalia, the collaboration serves multiple purposes. It's a way to engage with gaming, which has become a key part of modern society, Cédric Charbit, the company's chief executive, told BoF in an emailed statement.

Balenciaga's interest in gaming is also about "re-designing the lines between content and product," Charbit said. "The Fortnite project allows us to push it even further, the product being the content itself."
The Growing Romance Between Fashion and Gaming
The project isn't the first time Balenciaga and Epic Games worked together. Last year, Balenciaga created a game called "Afterworld: The Age of Tomorrow" to showcase its Autumn/Winter 2021 collection. It used Epic's 3D creation platform, Unreal Engine, to do it, sparking the relationship that led to the new collaboration.

The worlds of luxury fashion and gaming have been increasingly cozying up to each other as people spend more of their time and money in virtual worlds. Louis Vuitton was a pioneer in establishing ties with gaming, and other companies have shown growing interest. Gucci recently created an immersive space in Roblox, another popular game.

These ideas of agency, fantasy and self-expression are very similar consumer themes around why fashion connects with people around the world.

It's not hard to understand fashion's attraction. Globally, 2.7 billion people are gamers, according to an estimate by Accenture, a strategy and technology services firm. Many are happy to spend on in-game purchases. Accenture's research has found the game types that prompt the most spending are online battle arenas, fighting and battle royale games, "which is interesting as they are game genres that generally offer a wide variety of purchasable skins and cosmetic upgrades," said David Reitman, Accenture's global gaming lead.

The popularity of these purchases is part of the reason Sussman believes Fortnite is a good partner for fashion companies interested in building a virtual presence in gaming.

"The whole business of Fortnite is surrounded in this business of cosmetics, which are players' choice of how they want to express themselves within the community: what they want to dress as, what they want to look like," he said. "These ideas of agency, fantasy and self-expression are very similar consumer themes around why fashion connects with people around the world."

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Balenciaga and Fortnite Are a Match Made in the Metaverse

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The collaboration spans virtual and physical clothes, as well as a marketing campaign that will appear on billboards in cities like New York and Tokyo, as well as in Fortnite itself.