The beginning: from the metaverse to digital fashion
This is the first in a series of posts introducing altr_, a digital-first fashion house built and owned by creators.
“Like any place in Reality, the Street is subject to development. Developers can build their own small streets feeding off of the main one. They can build buildings, parks, signs, as well as things that do not exist in Reality, such as vast hovering overhead light shows, special neighborhoods where the rules of three-dimensional spacetime are ignored, and free-combat zones where people can go to hunt and kill each other. The only difference is that since the Street does not really exist -- it’s just a computer-graphics protocol written down on a piece of paper somewhere -- none of these things is being physically built. They are, rather, pieces of software, made available to the public over the worldwide fiber-optics network. When Hiro goes into the Metaverse and looks down the Street and sees buildings and electric signs stretching off into the darkness, disappearing over the curve of the globe, he is actually staring at the graphic representations -- the user interfaces -- of a myriad different pieces of software that have been engineered by major corporations.”
The “Street” was the first conceptualization of the metaverse, imagined by Neal Stephenson in his 1993 novel Snow Crash. It’s a vision of a metaverse that is an escape from reality, where the novel’s protagonist, Hiro, can withdraw from his day job as a pizza delivery driver for the Mafia and become whoever he wants to be.
It’s a compelling and imaginative vision, but an acutely dystopian one. Similar to the more recent depictions of hypothetical metaverses, like Ready Player One, where virtual reality supplants the typically decrepit wastelands of the “real world,” it’s a vision of the future that, frankly, we should all strive to prevent.?
And yet, the concept of the metaverse is fundamentally changing how we interact with our reality—not in the future, but already right now. Every major corporation today is actively investing in their metaverse strategy, from gaming studios like Ubisoft to internet behemoths like (newly christened) Meta, to global retail brands like Adidas and Gucci. In fact, whoever you are, you are probably underestimating the impact of Web3 and the metaverse on our world.?
Ok, so then what the hell is the metaverse? The term has become particularly tricky and ambiguous of late, with some latching on to one or another narrow, static definition, and others so repulsed by it that the mere mention of its three syllables creates a reflexive mental fortress. It can be useful as a reference to a broad and limitless set of technologies and possibilities, but it can also be pernicious in that people assign it too much preconceived meaning.
The definition we find most useful comes from Matthew Ball:?
“The Metaverse is a massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time rendered 3D virtual worlds which can be experienced synchronously and persistently by an effectively unlimited number of users with an individual sense of presence, and with continuity of data, such as identity, history, entitlements, objects, communications, and payments.”
This is a good definition because it reflects the iterative and multi-faceted evolution of technology that has manifested time and time again over our short history. It recognizes the magnitude of the change, but builds it upon previous technology shifts, like the internet and mobile, and also leaves room for the unknown, which is inevitable. Most importantly, rather than defining the metaverse as separate from reality, it acknowledges that it is frictionlessly connected to it. The metaverse brings about a gradual thinning, perhaps even a dissolution, of the barrier between the virtual and the physical worlds—a rapprochement of our dual realities.
While novels like Snow Crash depict the metaverse as virtual reality, it would be more accurate to think of VR as just one of many ways to experience the metaverse. The metaverse places “everyone inside an ‘embodied’, or ‘virtual’ or ‘3D’ version of the internet and on a nearly unending basis. In other words, we will constantly be ‘within’ the internet, rather than have access to it.” That’s a hugely useful framework for understanding this shift. The metaverse is simply a persistent, digitally immersive extension of your reality—and in some ways, it’s already here.
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Let’s take a look at how it’s slowly invaded our lives to date.
Figure 1: MAUs per Gaming Platform
The writing is on the wall. Against this backdrop, it is clear to us that not only will the Metaverse be host to real economic activity, it will also produce an entirely new cultural world, one that is accessible to all and completely permissionless when it comes to innovation and creativity. New cultural assets are already being created in the form of NFTs, from generative art, to memes, to music and video.?
One area that has started to follow suit more recently is fashion. Companies like RTFKT Studios, The Fabricant, DressX, and others are beginning to create entirely digitally-native fashion. And while we are inspired by these pioneers, we think these companies are only scratching the surface of a market that is gigantic, living at the intersection of fashion, gaming, collectibles, and crypto.
It is thus our opportunity to create a fashion house of brands focused on the metaverse, but still connected to our physical world; one that targets the new wave of creative talent entering this virtual world, while embracing the qualities that have captured the fascination of fashion devotees.
We’re excited to tell you more about altr_ in the coming posts. In the meantime, stay up to date by following us on Twitter at @altr_____.