• Hi, I am the owner and main administrator of Styleforum. If you find the forum useful and fun, please help support it by buying through the posted links on the forum. Our main, very popular sales thread, where the latest and best sales are listed, are posted HERE

    Purchases made through some of our links earns a commission for the forum and allows us to do the work of maintaining and improving it. Finally, thanks for being a part of this community. We realize that there are many choices today on the internet, and we have all of you to thank for making Styleforum the foremost destination for discussions of menswear.
  • This site contains affiliate links for which Styleforum may be compensated.
  • We would like to welcome House of Huntington as an official Affiliate Vendor. Shop past season Drake's, Nigel Cabourn, Private White V.C. and other menswear luxury brands at exceptional prices below retail. Please visit the Houise of Huntington thread and welcome them to the forum.

  • STYLE. COMMUNITY. GREAT CLOTHING.

    Bored of counting likes on social networks? At Styleforum, you’ll find rousing discussions that go beyond strings of emojis.

    Click Here to join Styleforum's thousands of style enthusiasts today!

    Styleforum is supported in part by commission earning affiliate links sitewide. Please support us by using them. You may learn more here.

Discussions about the fashion industry thread

Zamb

Distinguished Member
Affiliate Vendor
Joined
May 9, 2013
Messages
2,988
Reaction score
4,053
That might be a good business idea actually, charge by usage. RentARunway Virtual
so i can design a collection and not bother to actually produce it. just release it and sell in the digital space...........
 

ValidusLA

Distinguished Member
Supporting Member
Joined
Mar 14, 2019
Messages
4,063
Reaction score
5,922
Imagine spending the last ten years learning about shoe construction and trying to figure out how to eek out marginal improvements on quality. Then, as you've almost finalized the finishing touches on your handwelted shoe collection that will last the rest of your life, everything becomes digital and electronic shoes naturally last forever.

All the good RPGs have item degradation and repair!
 

cb200

Distinguished Member
Joined
Jan 30, 2010
Messages
1,418
Reaction score
1,970
The clothing/object subscription service Lot_2046 has closed down. While it got a fair bit of interest and PR early on I'm unsure of how solid it was as a business. Some of the things I saw them attempt were pretty interesting as an apparel/product brand. Most interesting to me was an attempt to balance mass customization with a minimalist uniformity. How to allow for smaller production runs and more customization without being a bespoke atelier is an interesting problem to me.

Another aspect that was interesting was that they adopted live streaming and enrolled a community in weekly updates and what was going on as well as other experiments. This was first on the gaming platform Twitch but moved to Youtube. The Twitch stuff is gone and some of the youtube videos are still up. The tone of these were always pretty much world/community building vs straight out marketing.


There was always a sense of thinking and building in public and experiments were attempted and attempts were made to change directions and evolve constantly from what I saw. I lost some interest in following the brand a few years ago but would check in to see what was going on every now and again. The tone got more anti-capitalist and utopian and seemed to be expanding into an DAO (distributed autonomous organization) type of thing. They switched to bitcoin only as a means of payment.

While that was all "interesting" feels like maybe a bit too far in the future to be sustainable. Probably the case for most of what they did. Futures not evenly distributed and all that... careful staring into the abyss etc.
 

FlyingMonkey

Distinguished Member
Joined
Sep 5, 2011
Messages
7,131
Reaction score
11,035
The tone got more anti-capitalist and utopian and seemed to be expanding into an DAO (distributed autonomous organization) type of thing. They switched to bitcoin only as a means of payment.

This doesn't seem to make sense to me (as someone who studies platform economies). DAO and Bitcoin aren't anti-capitalist, they are both species of libertarian hyper-capitalism, DAO being primarily just an investment vehicle (albeit one that's decentralized and without the standard corporate structure around it). Bitcoin also epitomizes the worst of capitalism in that it externalizes its costs onto local communities and the future via massive conventional energy use and resulting pollution (energy demand for bitcoin mining even led to the restarting of mothballed dirty coal power stations in China). But anyway, 'bitcoin only' would pretty much be the deathknell for any business...
 

clee1982

Stylish Dinosaur
Joined
Feb 22, 2009
Messages
28,808
Reaction score
24,609
Hard to imagine calling crypto anti capitalist, when it started out as more like they don’t like central bank have a say in monetary supply, worry about inflation post 2008 QE type of thing
 

cb200

Distinguished Member
Joined
Jan 30, 2010
Messages
1,418
Reaction score
1,970
This doesn't seem to make sense to me (as someone who studies platform economies). DAO and Bitcoin aren't anti-capitalist, they are both species of libertarian hyper-capitalism, DAO being primarily just an investment vehicle (albeit one that's decentralized and without the standard corporate structure around it). Bitcoin also epitomizes the worst of capitalism in that it externalizes its costs onto local communities and the future via massive conventional energy use and resulting pollution (energy demand for bitcoin mining even led to the restarting of mothballed dirty coal power stations in China). But anyway, 'bitcoin only' would pretty much be the deathknell for any business...
The anti-capital angle could be a mis-categorization / or poor reading on my part. Being more conceptual makes it a bit hard to decipher what they were aiming at. The livestreams that were online did cover the changes and it's kind of too bad that many of those are gone. I can't go back for a closer look. The last stream was quite odd.

I'm DAO curious but hard to grasp it outside of all the hype around crypto/NFT/DAO at the moment.
 

blacklight

Senior Member
Joined
May 26, 2019
Messages
320
Reaction score
842
I played games like RuneScape and World of Warcraft for years, so I’ve experienced firsthand grinding out dozens of hours for vanity items. I’ve also personally bought $15 or $30 in-game vanity items. The biggest question I have is, what price points would designers charge for virtual clothes? I don’t know what the market would be for a $450 Balenciaga digital tshirt.

Then you have at least some familiarity with the economics of real world trading. At RS' peak of popularity blue partyhats were going for close to $1000 in real life. Today the market for discontinued skins on games like Fortnite and Dead by Daylight has limited edition looks going in the hundreds of dollars because gamers will for some reason pay incredible amounts of money to look as if they've been playing longer than they have. $450 is nuts but I can easily see something like $100 for digital versions of a Balenciaga/Vetements seasonal collection becoming a thing.

Take this out of the context of a couple hundred thousand addicted teenagers and manchildren and there is easily some serious money to be made in this space.
 
Last edited:

BlakeRVA

Senior Member
Joined
Aug 17, 2012
Messages
754
Reaction score
2,005
Then you have at least some familiarity with the economics of real world trading. At RS' peak of popularity blue partyhats were going for well over $100. Today the market for discontinued skins on games like Fortnite and Dead by Daylight often has limited edition looks going in the hundreds of dollars because gamers will for some reason pay incredible amounts of money to look as if they've been playing longer than they have. $450 is nuts but I can easily see something like $100 for digital versions of a Balenciaga/Vetements seasonal collection becoming a thing.
The biggest question that arises with this is: will users be able to trade / sell their digital skins after using them?

If so, people could cycle through an infinity of options without ever inserting more real-world money (assuming digital items don't depreciate / the digital economy would dictate prices).

This leads to the question: would it really be that profitable for designers?
 

ValidusLA

Distinguished Member
Supporting Member
Joined
Mar 14, 2019
Messages
4,063
Reaction score
5,922
The biggest question that arises with this is: will users be able to trade / sell their digital skins after using them?

If so, people could cycle through an infinity of options without ever inserting more real-world money (assuming digital items don't depreciate / the digital economy would dictate prices).

This leads to the question: would it really be that profitable for designers?

I'm just going to assume video game rules.

"Bind on Pickup" vs "Bind on Equip" in MMO parlance.

EG if someone owns something, but never displays it, they can sell it later. If they "use" it on their Avatar, it remains bound to that avatar (or sometimes that account).
 

ValidusLA

Distinguished Member
Supporting Member
Joined
Mar 14, 2019
Messages
4,063
Reaction score
5,922
Y'all bunch a nerds.
james-franco-the.gif
 

Featured Sponsor

How important is full vs half canvas to you for heavier sport jackets?

  • Definitely full canvas only

    Votes: 55 36.7%
  • Half canvas is fine

    Votes: 59 39.3%
  • Really don't care

    Votes: 15 10.0%
  • Depends on fabric

    Votes: 26 17.3%
  • Depends on price

    Votes: 26 17.3%

Forum statistics

Threads
505,147
Messages
10,578,746
Members
223,878
Latest member
timlockhaxtzbn
Top