Digital fashion is about to take on a new industry

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Digital fashion is about to take on a new industry

Non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, have enjoyed a breakout year with fiscal third quarter sales delivering an absolute exclamation point for $10.7 billion.

And yet despite that eightfold increase from $1.2 billion in the second quarter of 2018, NFTs are just getting started if you believe advocates who predict use cases for the technology are about to stretch into new industries far beyond digital art.

The fashion industry is providing the latest mind-blowing example of just that. Fashion juggernauts, like Dolce Gabbana, have recently started testing wearable, digital collectibles which are attracting virtual prices. In a recent auction, a combo sale including a digital crown coupled with a jeweled physical NFT version sold for more than $1M. Accompanying custom-made digitally wearable Dolce Gabbana jackets attracted more than $300,000 apiece in ethereum.

Megan Kaspar, one of the members of the Red DAO Group behind winning bids for the items, explained to Yahoo Finance that the opportunity in physical fashion poses groundbreaking potential if AR technology can come to replace the need for digital clothes.

The digital industry is $2.7 trillion and we foresee this at least double over the next two decades due to digital fashion, Kaspar said as she donned gold digital earrings during a Zoom video interview. Digital fashion wearables give a new utility to fashion in general and it takes fashion to a sustainable level where all the fashion you're wearing, kind of like the earrings that I have on in the digital world are not produced physically. That same promise has equally enthralled fashion companies looking to forego the raw materials and labor costs associated with producing physical clothing. It may seem like a far-off impossibility, but designers beyond Dolce Gabbana are already experimenting by offering such wares right now.

DressX, a digital wearable marketplace startup that works with artists to offer 3 D, AR garments, has already attracted millions in total investment from investors like Kaspar despite only launching last year. The company has an app to let users try on different digital garments and has partnered with retail platform FARFETCH to let influencers promote digital garments from the latest collections of Off-White, Balenciaga, Dolce Gabbana and others. DressX co-founder Natalia Modenova forecasts that while wearable NFTs for characters in games could also prove lucrative, even our current work from home lives set up nicely to use wearable NFT fashion today.

The other use cases will follow and they are already popping up when you can wear some of the items in the virtual world and game environment, but it is way more limited, says she. We all have our own bodies and we don't need any kind of avatars to appear on the screen. We all have some sort of devices which will help us show ourselves on the screen and that is why it opens up the biggest market, and the biggest opportunity. Dapper Labs, the parent company behind NBA Top Shot, which sparks a frenzy of digital highlight collectibles and more than $700 million in sales activity, is planning to launch an NFL version soon. This alone can help provide a boost to a back to back NFT quarterly sales record.