Welcome back to Now Runway, where we report from the front lines of the digital fashion and luxury revolution. By Zara dropping a spring-inspired digital line Zepeto to a new dreamy metaverse for our ever-expanding digital wardrobes built by The Manufacturerhere’s what you may have missed this past week.
Zara x Zepeto: Fairy Magic Idols
Spanish fast fashion brand Zara has introduced its latest fashion capsule collection, Fairy Magic Idols, which combines physical and digital aspects. This collection combines fantasy elements with spring-inspired features such as flowers and butterflies and integrates them into modern fashion through lace accents, piercings and innovative denim pieces. The physical collection, available exclusively on Zara.com, features six denim pieces, four tops featuring the collection’s iconography, two bags and two pairs of sandals.
The digital collection includes one-of-a-kind items such as a pair of sock sandals with oversized lace, a set of fantasy wings and one-of-a-kind sunglasses. The collection is designed exclusively for Zepetoa South Korean mobile chat app where users create 3D avatars in different worlds and interact with each other.
These fresh elements, in addition to the six denim items from the physical collection, have been adapted for the digital universe. This collection marks Zara’s fifth venture into the metaverse, following previous collaborations such as Ader Error, Lime Glam, Y2K Creatures, and Valentine’s Tale. In addition, a new Snapchat lens has been developed especially for this new collection.
H3NSY, Hennessy’s Web3 platform, has unveiled its latest project for the exclusive Café 11 member community. Hennessy involves her community in the creative process, building on past collaborations with well-known figures such as Kim Jones, Maluma, Frank Guery and Refik Anadol on bottle designs. Starting this week, H3NSY will be releasing a design brief to the Café 11 community on Discord, allowing members to vote from May 22 to May 29 for members to choose design direction.
For this project, H3NSY chose three emerging artists who are representative of their web3 community culture and emerging web3 artistic trends. The artists nominated by H3NSY for their Café 11 community to vote for are @Johnsville, @EdouardMusicAnd @florianzumbrunn.
The selected artist will collaborate with the Café 11 community to generate ideas and inspiration, ultimately creating a collective artwork for the bottle. Once the final artwork is revealed, Hennessy’s packaging design office will refine the files and reveal the bottle rendering, box design and bottle NFT. This limited release is available exclusively to Café 11 NFT holders.
BlockBar will develop a token-gated page for Café 11 holders to store their title deed NFT. The entire process is expected to be completed by the summer of 2024, with the bottles being stored at BlockBar’s facilities in Singapore for redemption or long-term storage. Once production is complete, holders can redeem their physical bottle with their NFT.
The Manufacturer x Cornerstone
The Manufacturera digital fashion house, collaborates with Cornerstonea photorealistic metaverse and part of the ZOAN Groupto create a carefully crafted digital fashion environment that showcases virtual garments of exceptional visual quality, aiming to take the industry’s aesthetic to the next level.
This bespoke space meets the needs of the digital fashion industry for a high-quality display platform for digital garments that meets The Fabricant’s standards of craftsmanship. Using Cornerstone’s advanced cloud rendering technology, users can access the photo-realistic experience through a web browser without having to invest in an expensive gaming computer that can run high-end graphics.
The showcase event is integrated into the Cornerstone metaverse, offering early access and initially featuring digital couture pieces from The Fabricant’s Wholeland collection. A premium fashion experience called “Wholeland, Primal Rave” will take place in Cornerstone in early September, showcasing Wholeland’s garments.
Cornerstone’s innovative, automated cloud publishing system – a CI/CD pipeline – enables development teams to quickly turn Unreal Engine creations into browser-based experiences. The shared goal is to turn the experience into a value-generating ecosystem that allows holders to wear their items and empowers brands and creators to develop their own customizable galleries within an existing framework.