Fashion Guest : Olivia Merquior The - Fabrics - Première Vision Paris
AW 22-23 Digital languages and the Metaverse
Olivia Merquior, creative director and founder of DACRI DEVIATI, represents Brazil / Latin America at the Première Vision’s international meetings. She is highly active in the executive production of in-house projects such as The Greenhouse Project at São Paulo Fashion Week. Recently, she launched Brazil Immersive Fashion Week, the first fashion event with XR (extended reality) technologies in Brazil. Here she shares with us her vision about the future of fashion regarding the new technologies and innovations.
“I remember 4 years back when it came to my attention that the space we experience on the internet (the web) was being replaced by something else: the metaverse. The idea of the metaverse wasn’t new; it alters between David Cronenberg’s 1990 past and a future yet to come.
Although the thought of a metaspace where we all have our lives mirrored sounds yet like “game” fiction, all the technologies surrounding that are already very real.
The main transition between Web 3 and Metaverse 1 is that we are leaving technologies triggered by digital and jumping into an immersive experience. As digital, we mean all tech interactions in which you need your fingers and are limited by your phone/desktop’s screen. As immersive, we mean the experience with technology is organic, triggered by our faces, heartbeats, temperature, and movements.
This new technological environment connects our biometrics to all things around us, and guess what the main intermediate between your private intimacy and the data world is?
Yeap, the things you have the closest to your skin, your garments. From accessories like glasses, watches to connected fabrics and permanent earphones, all you wear expands your experience with reality. That’s called XR.
In this new meta-ambient, clothes are not only there to provide their wearer individuality – they actually speak for themselves. Welcome to a future where garments are the media. New storytellings will grow from the merge of the brand’s ideology and client humour. Prints will jump out of T-shirts personalized by the zen day mode of its user. You won’t need to worry about real make-up since filters are everywhere. Overcoats in plain colours will turn rainbow when you get a “match” on Tinder.
Weird futuristic stuff? No, just our boring real present world observed through our wearable devices.
Fashion has an amazing opportunity facing its market. However, we need to understand how garments now are not only fabrics and stitches – they are media. By that, we as an industry, need to be curious about this new role of our products. Technology has many gaps which need to be legislated and corrected. But, in terms of creativity, we are on the edge of a very exciting experience.“
Discover the preview of the Autumn-Winter 22-23 season as seen through the eye of Desolina Suter, Sabine le Chatelier and Michiko Ikenishi.