IMVU Partners With Top Real Life Brands to Sell Virtual Fashion, Becomes First Non-Crypto Virtual World to Mint Items as NFTs

I don't always get my metaverse news from Vogue Magazine, but when I do, I'm not surprised IMVU is involved:

“Fashion is at the epicenter of why people create avatars and connect with others on IMVU,” says Lindsay Anne Aamodt, the site’s senior director of marketing. “Part of that is because dressing up an avatar in a digital space gives people access to anything that they want to look like, and it’s hard to do that in the real world.” 

... Now, she’s spearheading a first-of-its-kind virtual fashion show on IMVU that unites the real-world labels Collina Strada, Gypsy Sport, Mowalola, Freak City, Bruce Glen, My Mum Made It, and Mimi Wade with expert creators who know their way around the 3D meshing and texturing process that brings IMVU’s clothes and accessories to life. The show will stream on May 27, after which IMVU users will be able buy and dress their avatars in the designer looks they saw on the virtual runway.

Subscribe to IMVU's YouTube channel to watch the show. Reached by phone after a whirlwind of preparing for this event over the last 6 months, Lindsay tells me that it was Vogue's global director who first reached out to IMVU about covering the show, after hearing about it from one of the brands. 

While there have been similar crossover events in other virtual worlds (for instance, Armani once had an official store in Second Life, with decidedly mixed results),  this is the most prominent real-to-virtual fashion launch in some time.

Another newsworthy feature:

Lindsay tells me that select copies of the IMVU fashion items featured in the show will be minted as NFTs. While Ethereum-backed Decentraland and other blockchain-based virtual worlds have jumped into the NFT trade, IMVU is the first non-crypto virtual world I'm aware of to start selling NFTs. (And that with prominent designers and coverage from Vogue, no less.)

Ms. Aamodt hatched this plan last year during last year's pandemic lockdown, and worked with her team to find well-known brands that could fit the virtual world aesthetic, while  also finding IMVU creators who could turn these brands' designs into mesh-based fashion that IMVU avatars can wear. As you can see from the Vogue spread, this yielded many not possible in real life styles which (in my view) elevate the looks on display beyond the more mainstream/shopping mall type of clothing that tends to be popular in virtual worlds. 

The real life brands featured in this show will get to collect most of the sales of their items on the IMVU platform, she tells me.  And while Lindsay declines to speculate how much these brands will make from this event ("Let's experiment with it and see how it goes" being the general understanding, as she puts it), she does note that the top IMVU-based fashion brands make six figures in US$ sales on the platform. Personally I wouldn't be surprised if this runway show generates sales in the seven figures.

Comments

[Art Chick NFTs]

i like how they are applying all these NFTs crypto concepts to fashion