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Nicola Formichetti — who famously dressed Lady Gaga in a body-sized egg and in a dress made of meat — has joined digital fashion platform Syky as artistic director. The avant-garde creative director built a career on out-there approaches to fashion; now, he is hoping to onboard fashion industry colleagues to the digital fashion universe.
Formichetti will help forge partnerships with established luxury brands, identify and foster emerging talent and shape Syky’s physical events. He will also serve as an ambassador of sorts who can bridge the traditional fashion industry with tech — an important role as scepticism of the metaverse is high.
“The reason why I was so attracted to Syky was [because] they were treating this fashion-tech universe like a traditional fashion brand. I love the attention to detail, and the [concept of] nature mixed with tech. It was as if a fashion company was doing something phygital, and I was like, that’s it,” he says, speaking to Vogue Business while en route to a flight to Tokyo.
Formichetti is a fashion insider with a bit of a free pass to champion the unexpected. He’s established a reputation for an experimental aesthetic across fashion, pop culture and media; his work with Lady Gaga, which began in 2009, gained notoriety not just for its shock value, but because of the use of unexpected shapes and materials. He will be staying on as creative consultant at Haus of Gaga and Haus Labs, as founder of streetwear brand Nicopanda and creative fashion director at Uniqlo. He previously served in creative and artistic director roles at Diesel and Mugler, and was an editor at Vogue Hommes Japan, among others.
The role of artistic director was created to bring Formichetti on board, says founder and CEO Alice Delahunt, who founded Syky in 2022 after spearheading digital strategies at Burberry and Ralph Lauren. “We weren’t looking at the time, but I knew that at some stage we were going to approach this. And then I met Nicola and everything became accelerated and clear, and it felt like this was just the right next step,” she says, adding that it’s rare to meet people who have a similarly strong conviction in the digitisation of fashion. “He has an incredible history of pioneering some of the most innovative work in the fashion industry, and by the end of the first meeting, we were saying, ‘We have to make this happen’.”
Syky, which has raised at least $10.5 million from investors including Alexis Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six Capital, launched last year with an inaugural membership NFT (called a “Keystone”), followed by a collective consisting of 10 emerging digital fashion brands, who receive mentorship and investment in exchange for sharing a percentage of revenue. Formichetti says he is “already obsessed” with the collective, and sees potential for its members to reach a larger global audience. “I’m really excited about making that community bigger by bringing my traditional fashion people in there,” he says.
Digital fashion, the metaverse and Web3 have been on a roller coaster of popularity since the pandemic. Interest surged in 2021 after Facebook changed its name to Meta, Christie’s sold an NFT artwork by Beeple for $69 million and the value of ETH 1 reached a record high of more than $4,800. Now, ETH 1 is worth half of that, and the pace of fashion NFT drops has plummeted. A survey of the Vogue Business community revealed that going into 2024, Web3 and NFTs came last in terms of tech-category excitement. In its place? Artificial intelligence. Fashion, it seems, may have moved on.
The shift has been “at best disheartening and at worst detrimental”, wrote Daniella Loftus, digital fashion influencer and founder of Draup, writing that 2023 was the year that killed the “trend” of digital fashion. In its place, she notes, digital fashion can slowly grow as an industry, rather than a trend.
Delahunt acknowledges this reality. “When it comes to the metaverse, it was very in fashion and [then] it fell out of fashion. But if you remove the noise and look under the hood, there’s no better time to build than a bear,” she says, referring to the market downturn known as a “bear market”, during which developers often say there is more time and opportunity to experiment and grow a company without the pressures of a fast-growing hype period.
The tides of fashion are “always a moving thing”, Formichetti says, but he is optimistic in the long-term potential, pointing to the imminent release of devices such as Apple’s spatial computing headset to bring virtual and mixed realities into the mainstream. “Throughout my career, I watched things happen in the early stage and people don’t believe in it, but it eventually happens. I really trust my gut on this.” In the time since he’s been interested in the space, he’s seen the tech become more user-friendly. “We just have to keep getting more people involved because the tech side is becoming easier for people to use and adopt.”
Formichetti gets why some in the industry have a less-than-impressed perception of clothing that lives and breathes on screens and in video games. He hopes he can help contribute to another side that is both aesthetically and technologically appealing. “I’m going to be the first one to critique everything, you know? I was really hard on it at the very beginning, then I got so excited — and then got almost depressed because I was like, this is not it. Aesthetically, it’s not pleasing.” A first step, he adds, is semantics, in which “digital fashion” is positioned as an extension of physical clothing. “I’m not going to call it digital or physical anything. I think it should just be a new era of new fashion, where everything is existing and mixing and merging.”
Formichetti hopes to shift lingering scepticism by focusing on aesthetics and a move away from stereotypes — think less sci-fi, more romantic. “I talk about aesthetics a lot because, you know, we fashion people, we’re obsessed with aesthetics,” he says. Formichetti says that fashion might do well to in turn be inspired by the digital fashion community, which he has found to be quite different. “It’s about this idea of less ego, more collaboration. I always believed that from day one, and I feel really at home in the community.”
The future of fashion “doesn’t need to be dark and dystopian”, Delahunt adds. “Give tools to the right people, like creatives and creators, and it can be something really meaningful and beautiful that is adjacent to our physical world.”
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