For Vogue Italia, we’ve taken a step into the future of creative storytelling and brought the Vogue Talents event to the immersive, alternative, hyper-digital world of the metaverse, in what is the first Italian augmented experience of this kind.
Launched on September 23, during Milan Fashion Week, the online platform we exclusively created for the latest edition of the project that regularly spotlights next-gen designers from around the world bridges the real and virtual worlds of fashion, editorial content, and video games. Visitors are transported into an imaginary pastel pink-tinted desert that blossoms as they move across the portals indicating the different thematic areas. They become real-time protagonists of a memorable and interactive experience that allows exploring physical fashion collections — photo-realistically showcased on 3D models — in a highly engaging and shared digital environment (the metaverse, precisely).
“Vogue Talents is an event dedicated to the most exciting emerging creatives and designers on the international scene, and we wanted to present their work in a virtual setting that would be just as original and innovative. MONOGRID has put visitors at the center of an imaginary world representing the future of fashion storytelling: immersive, engaging, and allowing us to experience the featured collections and projects beyond traditional possibilities. This digitally augmented presentation is a glimpse into the future,” said Sara Sozzani Maino, Head of Special Projects Vogue Italia.
After the suspended palace we designed for the Vogue Italia’s initiative one year ago, the latest world of Vogue Talents pushes our exploration of immersive, real-time technologies and gaming methodology even further. The metaverse is here to become one of the most powerful communication and marketing tools in the creative and luxury industries, and we at MONOGRID can’t wait to continue working at the intersection of imagination and technical skills to unlock its full potential.
3D REAL-WORLD CLOTHES TO EXPLORE FROM ANYWHERE
Having invested in an in-house set-up with more than 70 cameras that can be placed around any person or product, we used photogrammetry to map and obtain photo-realistic 3D versions of models wearing clothes from the collections of the five international designers selected for the current Vogue Talents. This solution allows online visitors from anywhere in the world to experience and interact with high-definition 360-degree renditions of real-world garments that fit and move on avatars as they would in real life, overcoming the limitations of traditional online 2D fashion displays.
THE GAMIFICATION OF THE USER EXPERIENCE
People are energy, presences that move through space, leaving a mark. On the platform, the visitor is represented as a bright light spot. With their actions, their explorative journey across the different thematic areas of the Talents project leaves behind a trail of blossoming flowers, transforming the deserted virtual environment into a living and thriving green land. Beyond metaphor, this navigation strategy — that gives a clear nod to video games — puts both the individual and the community at the center of a highly interactive experience, where the virtual world evolves based on the decision of the users within it, as the flowery trails they leave will remain on show on the website.
INNOVATION WITH A PRACTICAL PURPOSE FOR BRANDS
The immersive experiences of the metaverse world are not only incredibly exciting digital novelties — and buzzwords — for those in the know, but effective practical tools leading to new mainstream interactive narratives for the fashion and luxury industries. We were thrilled to bring the Vogue Talents experience to life also because it is the first Italian project to offer a sneak peek into the future of what the best technology, technical expertise, and creativity can achieve.
Immersive solutions will change the way we interact with brands, try and shop for new products, and actively participate in events. Fuelled by the physical restrictions imposed by the Covid pandemic, all over the world, consumers show interest in digitally-driven, unexpected, and experiential brand activations, and big media companies and iconic fashion houses have already been taking notice. From digital clothing collections to virtual catwalks and showrooms, social media filters, digital prototypes, augmented-reality try-ons, NFTs (non-fungible tokens), and entire branded video games, the demand for hybrid experiences that can merge business, connection, and entertainment in unprecedented ways keeps on growing. And at MONOGRID, we are ready to take on the challenge of building this next stage of virtual productions and interactions. Thus we are gaining more of the necessary technical skills and investing in the advanced technology that more and more forward-thinking media, fashion, and luxury companies are going to look for.
After all, the metaverse is all about what has not been done or possible before, and so are we.
