Metaverse Fashion Week ends this week, demonstrating the growth of digital platforms and emerging technology. It also demonstrates how we can adapt and express fashion in a digital world. Grimes closes up the week’s festivities with her highly anticipated AUROBOROS collaboration.

With the growing world of the metaverse, we are seeing digital fashion becoming more popular, with the first Metaverse Fashion Week being launched on March 24th 2022 and lasting for four days, on Decentraland.

The event included four fashion shows, shopping options, musical guests and even an after-party. To close out the event, musician Grimes in collaboration with AUROBOROS performed in the AUROBOROS world in Decantraland.

Grimes in the Digital Space

In 2020 Grimes promoted her album, Miss Anthropocene, using her avatar War Nymph, which was designed as a cherub-like creature that later evolved into a teenage being. In 2021 War Nymph was also featured on the cover of The Face magazine, dressed in a gold Balenciaga dress.

Grimes goes on to auction off her crypto art collection Warnymph Collection Vol.1. It comes as a collection of NFTs, for $6 Million in March 2021. Grimes was also a judge on the avatar-based musician competition, Alter Ego. 

To say the least, Grimes has a great presence in this kind of digital sphere so it’s not very surprising that she would close the first-ever Metaverse Fashion Week event, collaborating with a Digital Couture brand such as AUROBOROS. 

What is The Metaverse Fashion Week?

The Metaverse Fashion week (MVFW) ran from the 24th of March to the 27th of March 2022. Decentraland, the host, is a digital space powered by the Ethereum blockchain. Here, users can roam around as a 3D-avatar. This event cost nothing for Decentraland users, acting as a space for them to buy Non Fungible tokens (NFTs) by different brands.

In this space, your Avatar can purchase NFTs in the form of plots of land, fashion items and attend events such as The Metaverse Fashion week. The creators behind the space provide many different spaces devoted to the fashion week events. The design takes its inspiration from popular fashion capitals around the world.

The event opens up with British department Selfridges, the first major retailer to announce selling NFTs in-store. The department store chain created a new digital space to emulate a futuristic version of their Birmingham stores. The MVFW had over 60 brands showcasing looks, the most notable of which are Selfridges, Dolce and Gabanna, Tommy Hilfiger, Estee Lauder, Etro and Bulova.

AUROBOROS x Grimes Collaboration

The digital Couture brand AUROBOROS creators Alissa Aubelkova and Paula Sello’s have stated that their first muse was Grimes. The artist captures the mystique, utopian yet creative aesthetic that they envisioned for AUROBOROS’ future.

The co-founders have said that Grimes reached out to them first, expressing an interest in their company and The Metaverse Fashion Week was the perfect event for them to first collaborate. For the closing event with AUROBOROS , Grimes did a custom DJ set, her avatar was fitted with the AUROBOROS Mystique bodysuit.

New and Current Cultural Moments

The event is described as a 360 immersive experience where users can dress up their avatars in the AUROBOROS designs. Users can also unlock physically-redeemable items through the game URL and see the intimate live performance with Grimes.

The standard catwalk fashion show doesn’t fit with what AUROBOROS sees for their future. This is exactly why they chose to keep the event intimate, which aligns with their community-first approach to business. AUROBOROS alongside this event has launched their new membership vault programme. Through NFTs, it brings their metaverse collectors new and current cultural moments.

Learning Experiences

The Metaverse Fashion Week is an extraordinary achievement for both the fashion and technology world. It has brought about a new way of engaging with a large audience and creating events in the digital sphere.

Grimes’ set at the AUROBOROS show comes in at around thirty minutes long. She creates her set around her current discography.

Reddit users in the r/Grimes forum shared their experiences of the event; the basic consensus is that this event would be the first of many learning experiences for the creators and that this event was basic compared to their expectations.

“This DJ Sets entire setup was so mediocre.. Like.. it’s good on Grimes’ side but the event organizers did it wrong.. DCL was so buggy and messy and crashed a lot, then it was postponed.. the event was a letdown..”

One Redditor posts in the forum with another member agreeing.

“They didn’t account for the timezone changes and Grimes ended up being late. The site couldn’t handle the amount of people and kept crashing. It felt very under planned. Hopefully, this is a kinda learn from your mistakes type situation tho.” 

This new type of creating and event planning is far too new for every designer or brand to get everything spot on and will be a learning curve for all. For AURBOROS and Grimes, they stuck to their mission, aesthetics and ethos to bring creativity to their collector community in the Metaverse, which is very admirable.

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