DFWNY Metaverse fashion shows cancelled due to technical difficulties

Digital Fashion Week New York was supposed to be an event during which some of the most innovative and groundbreaking digital designers and creators showcase their creations in the metaverse. Unfortunately, after having already been postponed once, and due to further technical difficulties, DFWNY’s presentation could not move ahead and was definitely cancelled. To put it in the words of the organizers, “ We have had to cancel the Metaverse Fashion Show. [...] It was an ambitious project, but there were technical issues throughout and the environment has been unable to go live. Everybody involved has worked hard to bring you this experience and we all share the disappointment.”

Both the event’s organizers and the designers themselves are precursors in their field opening up one of the most exciting new areas of the fashion industry, the exploration of shifting realities, to a larger public, or at least that was the initial idea.

Digital fashion and the metaverse are both still in their infancy shoes, embodying the frontier to a whole new concept in fashion but also in terms of our consumption and interaction with digital and online content. Especially the metaverse is hailed as the next big step. Some even estimate that its impact could be comparable to the beginning of the internet, fundamentally changing the ways of how people interact and perceive the world.

It is true that over the last years, great strides have been made in this field, but the reality is that unfortunately, we are not yet at a point where this technology can be rolled out inexpensively on a large scale. More and more big fashion houses are making inroads into the metaverse at considerable investment, realizing impressive projects. This was exactly the issue that DFWNY encountered. Launching a fashion presentation in the metaverse on the planned scale requires a considerable amount of hardware and processing power, which unfortunately still require major investment. The event was planned to be hosted over the platform Queendom.io, a decentralized platform that is not solely focused on the technical side, but has embraced its social responsibility and made it its mission to create a safe, equitable and thriving environment. Queendom.io is also a small company itself and its GPU servers were simply not able to process the hyper-realistic multi-player metaverse with several highly complex digital garments and to provide an interactive experience for everybody. Yet.