Fashion Week - OVER MVFW 2023 - Metagate

Fashion week - over mvfw 2023

The Metaverse Fashion Week 2023 and the ARwards by Over the Reality were an incredible opportunity.
Data suggests that participation was lower than in 2022, but do people really believe that technology will stop here, and humanity will settle for where we are now without further development?
We are at the beginning of a technological revolution that is starting to have real, useful use cases. We have the opportunity to position ourselves in a Blue Ocean still unknown to most, and once it becomes clear to everyone, it will no longer offer today's advantages.

If I had to describe the spirit with which we are experiencing this transition, I could paraphrase as follows:
“If we fail, we are already more than enough, but if we succeed, the fewer we are, the greater our share of glory will be! We couldn't have wished for one more participant in this edition of MVFW23. We participants, we few participants, we fortunate few! Those who didn't feel like participating certainly saved some money today. But those who believed, ten years from now, will be able to say they were there, showing their NFTs and their Wearables minted on the blockchain, certifying what was, and the name of the MVFW will grow higher. And this event, etched on the blockchain, will forever be remembered with the names of us few, us happy few!”

Setting aside the Shakespearean folklore, the spirit with which we live this period is not too different for better or worse. However, this decline in numbers is not an issue tied to MVFW, nor to the crypto world. The current Bear Market is mainly linked to the correlation with corrections in traditional markets and the liquidity injections made by central banks during COVID, which triggered inflation and rate hikes (with a guilty delay). Paradoxically, the context is a huge ad for Bitcoin & co. Moreover, if we look at where the technology was at the beginning of the last bubble, we have made incredible strides in just a few years! How can we think that we'll stop now?

Perhaps that's why being ranked as Metagate at MVFW23 on OVER the Reality with our “Metaverse Fenix” (also created for Decentraland) was particularly gratifying. The wearable in question was meant to be a wish for the Metaverse for a quick recovery after the undeniable hardships of the past year.
Moreover, despite the technology being in its early stages and the participation not extraordinary, the quality of the wearables proposed was very high, and we are aware that there wasn’t a significant gap between the proposals. This surely is an incentive to keep improving, knowing that technology grows exponentially, and if we get distracted even for a moment, we might miss the train.

 

But aside from the glory of MVFW23, for Metagate, it was a success, especially in relation to the investment, and that’s what really matters in the end, even as a case study for others.
As Metagate, we had the opportunity to walk the runway with Gucci, Pinko, and Ilona Song. We had important networking moments with people we would never have had the chance to interact with. We multiplied contacts with universities and students approaching these experiences in their theses and Ph.D.s from a multitude of disciplines: art, architecture, psychology, economics, marketing (every mention is not purely coincidental). In conclusion, as a startup, the exposure this event gave us couldn’t have been achieved in any other way… and this is just the beginning.


Nowadays, we often fall into the cognitive bias of comparing ourselves to the results of large companies. However, with decentralization, in our vision, we see a world moving towards giving more space to the merit of the individual. From the perspective of a small entity, this is a unique opportunity that should be seized. Here, new communities, new organizations, and new DAOs will be born, which will influence humanity in the near future. Traditional companies can respond to this new cultural and economic model by either stubbornly resisting and competing with the entire world or by stepping back, listening, and repositioning themselves smartly with de-risking strategies. Today, we are all lucky because we are still in the early adoption phase where everyone is allowed to make mistakes, even the big players (since their target audience in web3 is likely different from that in web2). We all start on equal footing. As someone once said: the best time to start was probably yesterday, but the second best time is today!

I’d like to conclude by recounting the narrative of two more wearables we presented at MVFW23, which carried important messages about personal identity in the metaverse, which were significant for us at Metagate:


1. The digital-twin in collaboration with Elle_IZED, which aimed to highlight the possibility of remaining yourself in the metaverse. You can certainly choose to be anyone, but you can also choose to be yourself;


2. The “Wallent” is essentially a garment covered in moss and bark. This was a nod to the Ents from The Lord of the Rings, who used the collective experiences of living creatures as their name. The use of our wallets, which record all our experiences and transactions, could indeed create repositories of virtual identities that identify us similarly to our names in Entish.

 


I wanted to highlight these two elements because in web3, individual responsibility is extremely strong, but we are no longer used to it. “Not your key, not your wallet” is the sacred motto of many maximalists. Over time, we have delegated the custody of our assets, data, and identities to intermediaries. However, delegating responsibility doesn’t just lead to a better User Experience at the cost of losing control over our properties. It also has a much worse side effect: it has made us forget how to choose to take on our responsibilities. Blockchain, in this sense, is a cold shower for everyone at first. We are not used to choosing who we are, but it’s the system that “suggests/imposes” it on us. There’s a lot of talk about how in the metaverse, we’ll be able to choose who we want to be, but we are no longer used to choosing. The avatar will no longer just be a skin won in a video game but will represent the person who chose it (NFTs are precursors in this). The choice of how to present oneself will be an expression of a much deeper cultural revolution where people will once again be called to choose and reclaim their identity, data, and property. What now may seem like a fashion show actually carries very deep cultural repercussions, which it’s too early to try to imagine the outcome of.

Finally, it’s worth mentioning that for this event, 5 different NFT POAPs were created, which have been added to Metagate's collection!

Waiting for Meta Quest 3 and Apple Vision PRO!!

 

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