The British Fashion Council's Metaverse Design Award Is Peak 2021
The British Fashion Council has added a new category honoring "metaverse design" to its annual Fashion Awards.
You won't see designer NFTs or Animal Crossing fashion shows take home the first-of-its-kind award, though. Created in partnership with Roblox, a popular online children's game, the category is limited to Roblox creators.
cSapphire, a user who runs an in-game clothing store, is presented with the title at a virtual ceremony, available to download on Roblox through December 7. An avatar version of Alessandro Michele — a Roblox collaborator and the winner of this year's BFC Trailblazer Award — passes off the honor in the very meta affair.
The in-game experience is complete with a Roblox-ified red carpet and a virtual recreation of the Royal Albert Hall, where the real-life BFC Awards will take place on Monday evening.
In May, Gucci launched a digital retrospective that featured a Roblox component. As part of the virtual activation, the Italian house dropped a Roblox-exclusive version of its monogrammed Dionysus handbag, which eventually resold for 350,000 Robux, or approximately $4,115 — nearly $1,000 more than the IRL version of the bag.
Vans and Stella McCartney are among Roblox's other fashion-gaming crossovers, a genre that's seen a firestorm of interest over the past year: Gucci's monogrammed Xbox, Balenciaga's runway-show-cum-video-game, and Stefan Cooke's The Sims co-sign are just a few examples of metaverse-oriented fashion.
Given the industry's collective plunge into the metaverse, a term that garnered renewed cachet after Mark Zuckerberg rechristened Facebook "Meta," you might be feeling burnt out from fashion's seemingly endless string of NFT drops and digital collaborations.
Better buckle up, though — if The Fashion Awards' new category is any indication of what's to come, 2021 is just the beginning of metaverse design.
