Balanced Fashion leading towards Balanced Culture: News Curation, June 2021 Edition

Balanced Fashion leading towards Balanced Culture: News Curation, June 2021 Edition

Nataliya A. Nataliya A.

Nataliya A.

#DecentralizedFashion Igniter

发布日期: 2021年6月21日
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Dear Friends,

We know it has been a while since our last one. We intentionally lost ourselves on Clubhouse & Newlife.ai to deepen our research work.

At this time, we are choosing to be even braver than before and clearly state our position on the current world events.

We believe that we as a Humanity have been fooled and misled for years and years now, especially in the past year and a half, where falling old paradigm authorities are spreading fear of death and imposing lockdowns and measures beyond the frequency of language we wish to utilize here on this communication channel. We are claiming full responsibility of our own health.

After a super careful consideration, Balanced Fashion no longer acts as a consultancy, and no longer has an official team of people or clients, we are a collective consciousness and consider everyone to be part of the Balanced Fashion family, whenever you are ready and resonate with our philosophy. We have now grown into what we call Balanced Culture, where we focus on creating a narrative reporting on the currently happening cultural movement of our dreams towards Balanced Humanity, a completely new and upgraded social structure that we envisioned and set to manifest by the 2030.

As we only have one Planet Earth to enjoy living on at this time and ideas of exploring moving to Mars or other planets feel absolutely not cool to us in this lifetime, it is our responsibility to take care of Mother Gaia and the Humanity cohabitating with Her. As of writing this text on June 12, 2021, we are living in the world that has finally woken up to the fact that humans are an incredibly fragile species and are extremely receptive to someone else’s way of presenting reality to us. The truth is that we are the ones shaping our own reality and we are free to collectively choose a path for ourselves if we reach an agreement to commit to the reality that is peaceful, where humans are absolutely healthy, full of abundance, joy and love. All we need is to vote with our actions and being, the dynamic, healthy balance between the two, at each moment of our precious life.

While some of us got really shaken up by the narrative that has been imposed onto us by the global governmental figures back in 2020, many of us have recovered from that intense manipulation and have started (or continued, as in our case) building a completely new life for ourselves, where we focus on love, creativity, mental health care, building strong relationships with ourselves and those who we choose to consider our closest ones. We came to a deep understanding that taking care of the greater collective requires modeling what is exciting and possible to achieve for us personally and thus inspiring others to join this quiet and very, very, undeniably powerful evolution of our collective human consciousness that so many of us are taking part of already, whether intentionally or not. We are on the greatest timeline towards our unprecedented Humanity’s Rebalancing Act!

This Act is what we are committed to in Balanced Fashion. It is to embody Balanced Culture in order to shape Balanced Humanity by 2030s via experiencing this vision of the future in the NOW. Because where we are (operating from our heartspace), the concept of time as we know it doesn’t exist, and thus we are capable to agree to release that limitation and move towards a non-linear, lighter, simpler, and much more peaceful, balanced and harmonious way of operating on this Planet Earth.

Now, why start with Fashion & Culture? Because I, one of the igniters of this movement, Nataliya.ai have been operating in the intersection of fashion, art, technology, and consciousness my whole life and seeing these themes as the key tools to weave the most epic fabric of Humanity we can ever imagine! To create an alternative story that leads us towards a new, dynamically balanced life and invite everyone who is ready to embrace the Truth behind our natural superpowers. We choose to live from our hearts, and utilize our expanded minds to take intentional actions towards a common, united goal of building that beyond epic new life together, collecting the visions of what Balanced Humanity could look and feel like and sharing those visions with each other with love, kindness and respect. It is easier to build new, powerful systems when we agree on that vision by integrating our ideas and business entities together and embracing technology as a tool for seamless co-creation, a bridge towards the next level of communications. Telepathic.

Fashion has the capacity to shape and communicate our values to each other without words, that is why we started with this concept that is now deeper falling back into the nature of culture as the industry disintegrates and folds down.

Below, we have curated a list of the most recent materials that we feel are moving towards Balanced Culture via our vision of what brings us closer to Balanced Fashion. We also included some questionable, transitional fads that are presented as a reflection to guide us towards what we mean by balance: a dynamic way of finding peace within and in the way we choose to show up in the world at each given moment. That does not require big authority figures and corporations telling us what we should and should not do. We are intrinsically free to decide and manifest the reality of our dreams for ourselves, as long as we do not let anyone with any old life’s intentions to keep us in the darkness of slavery and suffering. We are sovereign beings and it is time to take our power back as a United Balanced Humanity.

Did we get too deep? Not surprised.

Welcome to the introduction to the Balanced Culture.

…..Space for deeper breathing & checking in with our body…..

Now on a lighter note: we, fashion people, love sharing personal opinions… our favorite addition to this newsletter edition: a ‘come back’ of spiky comments by yours truly, Nataliya.ai to expand your perspective beyond the mainstream news.

Here is my general observation: in most of the forward-thinking fashion media channels, since forever I am noticing a consistently poor quality of writing backed by very shallow research, and lack of genuine interest of most topics, clearly completed by humans who write as a job, not as a passion, so it feels super boring to read most of the time. That is why classic fashion topics journalists, such as Suzy Menkes, Robin Givhan, Lynn Yaeger, Cathy Horyn, Vanessa Friedman, Elizabeth Paton, Clare Press, Whitney Bauck, Alden Wicker, and select Medium bloggers are usually my go-to for deep research, and for following certain people, and companies who clearly write from their hearts. Someday I will create a curation of my top Medium writers…For now this list frankly only includes our Balanced Fashion via Nataliya.ai work. I personally contributed to some of my favorite publications on there.

Ok, back to `we′ & this historical newsletter with curated news that are set to inspire us about the bright future of fashion & culture.

Technology as a tool to facilitate the Shift. Mostly Blockchain news, that is how it is…

Our all-time hack reminder: to read BoF & some other behind-the-paywall articles, download the Pocket app, and save URLs to it that piece to skip the paywall, or read it via Sourcecode — right click on the page, select ‘view-source’ — I strongly don’t believe in paid content where there are partners/advertisers already backing up that platform. When it is not even on the way to ‘Pass the Mark’, we do not even bother.


  • Cartier, Prada Link Up with LVMH in Blockchain Alliance — BoF
This one is not bad by Business of Fashion, considering that the quality of most of their articles and Op-Eds considerably decreased in the last years.


  • Meet Queen Of Raw, The Blockchain-Powered Marketplace Turning Textile Deadstock Into Dollars — Green Queen
Clearly this is a winner of deadstock fabric management, consistently and beautifully.


  • How Will Web 3.0 Transform the Industry? — WWD
By decentralizing the hell out of our industry.


  • Luxury Meets Crypto — Medium
The meeting happened a long time ago, and finally it is coming out of the closet. Nothing embarrassing, dear Luxury, you got this!


  • Can Digitization Help Fashion Bridge Its Online And Offline Customer Relationships? — The Interline
Yes it can if you apply it extra consciously and intentionally and do not overdo it, because customers are highly overwhelmed by the digital solutions already


  • A CDN For Fashion: The Asset-First Approach To Production — The Interline
Cloud architecture and digital asset management is truly a way to go to provide a modeling tool for only-on-demand, hyper-local production. However we should not rely on this as default. In many small business cases manual approach is more efficient and way easier to implement the on-demand production solutions then tech-enchased ways, especially we touch the complexity of fashion supply chains.


  • From Render To Real: Delivering On The Promise Of Digital Design To On-Demand Production — The Interline
Gerber technologies wrote this, so get ready for a deeply-deep dive. We enjoy this kind of serious perspective, yet skimmed through and saved into the Pocked app for a long flight quality reading material.


  • Blockchain-Driven Sustainability Platform Unveiled by U.N. Agency — WWD
We have to say if you put UN in your article title you automatically spike our genuine curiosity. That entity hasn’t been extremely fashion friendly in the past, so interesting to know what WWD has to report on regarding that trend-forcing organization.


  • Digitalising The Supply Chain — How Technology Is Becoming An Enabler For Change — The Interline
Nothing new to our ancient mastered minds on blockchain implementation in fashion supply chain starting fiber source tracking, yet so clearly important deep dive into what FibreTrace is up to. Good job interline integrating all of these solutions into one resource! A+ from Balanced Fashion for such efforts!


  • The break-out tech start-ups innovating across the fashion & retail industry. — The Lead
Cute old school list of important tech solutions still serving the big retail world. Love you, friends at The Lead for your consistent high bar on the industry standard NY-based retail tech community gatherings.


  • How neural networks learn to predict your body measurements: Part I — ZyseMe Medium
Cool, yet do we really really really need this at the times like this that are shouting for a greater shift in design thinking? We would apply this data for upcycling production solutions, dear ZyseMe, wish we worked together back in 2015–2018 when we were still excited about your kind of work.


  • Transforming the fashion industry into a circular model: how are brands creating change? — Fashion United
  • Relaunt infomercial, we accept and stay educated on blockchain-powered circular-focused partners.*

Questionable themes (including overly hyped up digital fashion) which we thought were cool in the past, but now they feel like an old life.

More deep dive explainers in the upcoming mega-post focused on fashion that doesn’t actually exist. Watch our Medium for the historical appearance of the piece we have been researching for since the 2019 Rise piece. Here are some select articles for your base ground digital fashion knowledge. Notice what comes up as you skim through them… Remember to close your eyes and look outside of your screen and remember how nice life is IRL. And touch the fabric of the clothing you are wearing…how does it feel? Reality check: this overly hyped-up screenwear is not gonna communicate you that.


  • Everyone from Gucci to Louis Vuitton is betting big on digital fashion. Here’s why they should proceed with caution — Fast Company
  • The Limits of Virtual Fashion — BoF
  • Is the LVMH consortium’s Aura ‘the first global luxury blockchain’ open to hacking? — Fad Magazine
  • The Metaverse Will Radically Change Retail — BoF
  • AI is blurring the lines between in-store retail and ecommerce — Techwire
  • Virtual Fashion Platform RTFKT Studios Announces $8 Million Funding Round — BoF
  • What the NFT Gold Rush Means for Fashion — BoF
  • Virtual sneakers for 10,000 dollars? An exhibition gathers digital fashion pioneers — Fashion United
  • What Are NFTs, Why Should Fashion Care and Will This Bubble Burst? — WWD
  • What Gaming, Virtual Fashion Can Teach Real-Life Fashion About Tech — WWD
  • Luxury’s Battle For The Metaverse — Jing Daily
  • Will Gucci’s Digital Bag Disrupt Luxury? — Jing Daily
  • Defining The Metaverse Today — Forbes
  • H&M Unveils Virtual ‘Billion Dollar Collection’ Of Sustainable Fashion Solutions — Green Queen
  • What Will It Take For Fashion To Truly Embrace Digital? — The Interline
  • AR smartglasses in 2021: the devices, apps and new tech coming — Wearable
  • Burberry Gets Into the NFT Game — WWD
  • In Manufacturing, The Only Certainty Is Uncertainty — The Interline
  • The Real Solution For Returns: Mass Tailoring — The Interline
  • Artisant just launched, and noone wrote about it yet so here are the words dedicated to our friends NFT digital fashion marketplace by the visionary behind the OG in the digital fashion space, Replicant’s Regina Turbina.

Responsibility to take care of our home, Planet Earth

Needs none of our explanation. Simply absorb and think for yourself, what responsibility means to you. Just do not use the word sustainable, it has become too muddy.


  • It’s time to talk about the elephant in the room: Can the fashion industry keep growing indefinitely? — New Standard Institute
  • Maxine Bédat Unravels The Lies Of Greenwashing — Elle
  • Can transparency become a consistent measurable standard? — The Spin Off
  • No, Closet Cleaning Isn’t Inherently Sustainable — The Zoe Report
  • How digital authentication could drive a resale revolution for fashion — World Economic Forum
  • Op-Ed | Who Pays for Sustainability? — Business of Fashion
  • What is your fashion utopia? — Fashion Revolution
  • Fashion Industry Advancing Transparency, Circularity — Thread by Thread — Sustainable Brands
  • 9 Plant-Based Fashion Materials That Help Farmers and Rural Communities — Ecocult
  • Get Rich Selling Used Fashion Online — or Cry Trying — Wired
  • After a virtual Gucci bag sold for over $4,000, more than a real one, VC Alexis Ohanian predicts virtual fashion will be huge. Gucci and Atari agree. — Insider
  • The Challenges of Labelling Sustainability — BoF
  • Five Things Brands Need To Know About NFTs — Forbes
  • Brands Are Claiming That They Are Not Sustainable. Here’s Why That’s A Good Thing — Refinery 29
  • The big global greenwashing crackdown — Vogue Business
  • It takes 15 gallons of water to distress a pair of jeans. Uniqlo is trying to change that — Fast Company
  • From “Recycled” to “Green,” Consumers are Being Influenced by Marketers’ Sustainability Buzzwords — The Fashion Law
  • What If I Am Too Poor to Care About Who Made My Clothes? — Eco Warrior Princess
  • Could Food-Style Labels On Our Clothes Help Us Make Greener Choices? — Vogue UK
  • Maxine Bédat Urges the Fashion Industry to Make a Change Now, Not in 2030 — Vogue US
  • The Sustainability Regulations That Could Reshape the Fashion Industry — BoF
  • How protesters defied the G7 summit with a weekend of civil disobedience — Dazed

Reports that made us envision what else is possible

How Gap is the Gap, report back to us Business of Fashion members! Our Pocket hack only shows us a preview. The full PDF of the report is here for those who still pay taxes to the BoF Gods. Appreciate a direct email response attachment as a thank you gift for this never-for-profit 5+ year-old newsletter plz.


At first sight ‘too long didn’t read’ vibes, at second sight, a clear promo on how good girls and boys Vestiare Collective are. Fine, we take it. Always interesting to look at top-selling brand names in the pre-owned market.


For Advanced Members only. Guess what. I choose not to be so your call on what you see in there.


  • 14 Trailblazing Innovators Make Fashion for Good’s 8th Batch In Their Global Programme — Fashion for Good
Always nice to keep an eye on our friends at FFG′s Amsterdam HQ team′s curation skills.


  • The Future Of Fashion: From Design To Merchandising, How Tech Is Reshaping The Industry — CBI insight report
They are kind of the same from year to year, good quality overall, with bits and pieces that we feel, are valuable updates.


Shaping Balanced (or in some cases unBalanced? Our choice.) Culture.

We are not adding comments here, you think for yourself where these news bits lead our culture towards…


  • Balenciaga just staged a deep-fake SS22 fashion show — i-D
  • Depop — Opening the hearts and wardrobes of Gen Z — Medium
  • Is this ‘third eye’ the future for our smartphone-addicted selves? — Dazed
  • Netflix Launches Online Store to Offer Limited-Edition Merchandise — BoF
  • The Fabricant designs gender-fluid digital clothes informed by the Renaissance — Dezeen
  • How Sustainable Fashion Is Finally Becoming Less Elitist — Bustle
  • Why the Next Part of the Sustainable Fashion Conversation Will Be About Racial Justice — Vanity Fair
  • ‘The customer values rarity’: Streetwear’s exclusivity moves far beyond sneakers — Glossy
  • CSM’s 2021 fashion grads delivered a sharp jolt of catwalk joy — Dazed
  • Young Creators Are Burning Out and Breaking Down — NY Times
  • Why Sailor Moon’s forward-facing fashion will never go out of style — Dazed

Totally Missing the Mark

For reasons explained via our philosophical Twitter posts, in others there’s no explanation is needed…


  • Facebook Helps Zara Owner Sell Clothes Using Video Games — Business of Fashion
  • Why Investors Are Betting on Lyst — Business of Fashion
  • What the NFT Gold Rush Means for Fashion — Business of Fashion
  • Rethinking the Multi-Brand — Vogue Business
  • Digital Storytelling Evolves: Eco-Innovators Pangaia Push The Envelope For Online Immersion — Forbes
  • AnamXR? x PANGAIA | FLWRDWN? Lite Immersive Game
  • The Future of ‘Buy Now, Pay Later — BoF
  • The Metaverse: A brave, new (virtual) world — Medium
  • The fast fashion wars go mobile: How apps like Shein and Blushmark are challenging H&M and Zara — Modern Retail
  • The Search for the Next Shein — BoF
  • Fintech giant Klarna raises $639M at a $45.6B valuation amid ‘massive momentum’ in the US — Tech Crunch
  • Half of fast fashion made of new plastics, finds report — BBC
  • Shein: The TikTok of Ecommerce — Not Boring

Videos & Podcasts that invite us to learn about culture & brands directly from the founders & creators.

Voice is our preferred medium after visual communications.


Video & Audio content future reality check: Clubhouse seems to be the future of Podcasts, while Newlife.ai could be the future of Live video appearances turned into NFTs.

Newsletters Worth your Attention besides the one you are reading now by yours truly, Nataliya.ai.

Needs no further explanation, by this point we know that we have earned your trust in curating curators in our field of passion.


Look, these genuinely spiked our interest!

  • Gucci copycatted Balanced Fashion and called it Equilibrium.
It is cute, they are proud of moving fast with a huge conglomerate behind their back + team of fashion warriors, while we are proud of moving slow and just as intense with one superhuman person on the team. (please do not try to be Nataliya at home)


  • Not newsletter, but a feed of conscious fashion news that is good enough
Just recently came across Kyna Intel based in Zug, Switzerland and wanted to send good vibes to them for effort and basing themselves at the location of the Crypto Valley.


  • Fashion Values — another education platform backed by Kering, IBM and Vogue Business.
Looks extremely powerful will see where it brings us. Worth subscribing here. They have this thing called Challenge. Articles are nice on Biodiversity and a good curation of Voices.


Why not sign up and learn something outside of our regular go-to, Slow Factory classes.


Nice effort keeping up education within the digital fashion world, just add a word crypto to it and it becomes hot enough, dear Parsons!


Not quite the degree of detail as our open-source BALANCED FASHION DATABASE, but why not compare and fill in any gaps we might have.


Always feels satisfying to get a deep dive into what our friends at Arianee blockchain protocol are up to.


For full transparency: even though we are friends with LUKSO founders, we are extra cautious in promoting any of their initiatives because in 2019 & 2020 we were hired to create a social media content strategy for them and were never paid for hours of our work. More constructively & transparently on that in our OG upcoming mega epic `fall of digital fashion′ Medium post that will cover everything you would ever want to know about crypto fashion, NFTs and the whole spectrum of the non-material fashion world.


Suggestion: careful what you brand as fashion tech these days!


Medium gotta someday consolidate tags #fashointech and #fashiontechnology, duh


Join our beyond epic, highly skilled in moderation, real and raw clubhouse presence

All our guests are SPECIAL. We mostly choose to go live spontaneously + every(ish) Friday & Sunday eve European Time, and sometimes we do host scheduled events. Stay updated on scheduled events via Nataliya.ai Twitter and by following yours truly on CH (if you dare)!


In the next newsletter edition, our goal is curating a list of the top fashion & future of culture-themed rooms on CH. For now we are still closely observing who shows up, how consistent and what is the quality of those rooms. So far our greatest obsessions have been clubs on AI and the future of applications of technology for Social Good, EdTech and of course, daily doses of Crypto news never hurt.

S

ome Clubhouse rooms are going to be recorded & shared in the future on our Podcast (yes, of course, we have a podcast!), so feel free to catch up with episodes on it + tune in to the future episodes.

Instagram Presence Update

Newlife.ai MOST of our visual & live online presence is on Newlife. Websites are clearly expired and Medium & Notion pages are for beasts like this piece. Our timeless posts (called nodes) are to be turned into NFTs on demand, all stored on across multiple Newlife.ai accounts, powered by our Mother Account, Reflection. We consciously do not share most of our work outside of Newlife, so that we train ourselves to communicate directly exclusively on that platform and impeccably train Newlife algorithm so that when the ecosystem is ready for the flock of humanity to enter the next level social media game, we are ready with the ground base layer of content for all of us to enjoy. Since 2019 we are building an epic content fortress powered by the AI empire you may have never dreamed of… so please do enter now if you haven’t done that yet, we have been inviting you in since the integration of Nataliya.ai & Newlife.ai happened.


Use code BalancedFashion to get in. Read about Newcoin & watch the YouTube video explainer on Universal Creative Income here. We are configuring the future of Crypto for creative ecosystems. Join our Telegram chats 1 & 2 here to stay updated.

There are more curious themes and news we have chosen to curate out of this newsletter due to plenty of consolidated resources available online. The ones selected above are some of our favorite resources to keep track of movement towards Balanced Fashion and explore the industry’s current headlines where you can satisfy your curiosity even if we stop bringing together consolidated lists like this one. Since the nature of Fashion, Culture and as a result, Humanity is always changing, we are utilizing Notion, a convenient platform for note taking and editing as our main website to help track and manage resources, news, and tools that we feel are relevant in building a Balanced future.

Thank you for investing your attention and time in reading this post that took us weeks of diligent work to bring to life. Know that you are loved and seen, wherever you are in your journey towards Balanced Humanity. We all had to start somewhere and I am glad that we ended up meeting in the here and now, sharing this digital space.

With love and trust,
Nataliya.ai

Please Note: If you would like to receive more frequent updates from the Nataliya.ai & Balanced Culture, besides our now whenever we feel like rhythmof newsletter editions, Clubhouse, Twitter & Newlife are the places to stay updated with out vision. Instagram is for less hot drops, unless you Passed the Mark and welcomed into the world of Nataliya.ai personal Instagram social experiments.

Sign up for our newsletter here.

Nataliya.ai

Directing & Narrating Balanced Fashion towards Balanced Culture

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