Decentraland, a virtual gaming platform accessible only through laptops and desktops, held its second annual Metaverse Fashion Week on the last week of March. Notable brands that participated in the virtual experience included big name fashion companies like Tommy Hilfiger (under PVH
PVH,
-2.81%
), DKNY, Adidas
ADS,
-0.12%,
Dolce & Gabbana, and others.
But unlike last year, when the event drew in over 100,000 unique visitors, this year only brought in 26,000 unique active users, according to data that Decentraland provided to MarketWatch. Despite the low turn out and the broader layoffs in metaverse divisions at massive companies like Disney
DIS,
+0.06%
and Meta
META,
+2.18%,
fashion companies are still embracing the so-called metaverse. For example, this month, Gucci, which operates under French conglomerate Kering
KER,
-1.79%,
announced partnering with Yuga Labs, the company behind the popular non-fungible token collection Bored Ape Yacht Club, which features 10,000 cartoon apes that drew a lot of hype and criticism in 2022. Yuga Labs and Gucci are working together to release a limited-edition series of physical Gucci products that are associated to non-fungible tokens tied to Yuga Labs’ long-awaited ape-themed metaverse game called Otherside. Gucci also has an entire team dedicated to metaverse initiatives. Similarly, Meta, which recently laid off 10,000 employees, has partnerships with digital fashion houses like DressX to sell virtual clothes for the avatars that Instagram and Facebook have been pushing to users. The main reason fashion companies haven’t backed away from the metaverse when other companies have is because they’re making money in it, and there is the opportunity to tap into a younger audience which is increasingly spending their time in gaming over other forms of entertainment. “The [Otherside] platform registered an impressive $222 million in trading volume in Q1, a remarkable 237.34% increase from the previous quarter,” said DappRadar’s blockchain analyst Sara Gherghelas. “Yuga Labs has also been dominating the NFT fashion industry. In Q1 of 2023, the NFT trading volume for fashion collections amounted to $15,314,672 […] With this new partnership with Gucci, Yuga Labs is set to take its dominance in the …