Brands including Forever 21, DKNY, and Estée Lauder have joined the first Metaverse Fashion Week, which began on Thursday and runs until Sunday in Decentraland
Brands including Forever 21, DKNY and Estée Lauder are using the digital event in part to study how consumers will shop in virtual worldsTweets:@wsjcmoand@davidleetongTweets:@wsjcmo:A new Fashion Week is underway in an unusual setting: the virtual world called Decentraland https://www.wsj.com/...DLT /@davidleetong:“It sends a signal that virtual fashion is here to stay and virtual fashion will continue to become something that is of interest for brands,” said @CathyHackl, chair of #Metaverse Fas
Context & Ripple Effects
The inaugural Metaverse Fashion Week lands weeks after retailers like Forever 21, Nike, and Chipotle opened virtual stores on Roblox — but Decentraland is a different bet: an open, crypto-native world rather than a closed gaming platform with Roblox's built-in audience. Forever 21, DKNY, and Estée Lauder are treating the four-day event as research, using it to study how consumers shop in virtual worlds before committing further.
The timing matters because the infrastructure underneath is unproven: analysts had already flagged that immersive metaverse experiences demand far more home network capacity than currently exists, meaning these brand activations are running ahead of the pipes they depend on.
First-order effects
- Forever 21, DKNY, and Estée Lauder get first-mover data on virtual shopping behavior at near-zero media cost, while Decentraland gets mainstream brand validation for its land-based economy.
- Estée Lauder and DKNY must staff teams that can design and run experiences inside a browser-based 3D world — a capability most beauty and fashion marketing departments did not have before this event.
Second-order effects
- Rival platforms now face pressure to match the event format: Roblox hosts like Walmart, which later launched Walmart Land as an explicit testing ground for younger shoppers, show brands hedging across worlds rather than committing to one.
- Decentraland's MANA-denominated land market becomes the visible scoreboard for the experiment — a bet that later soured badly when median land prices collapsed from roughly $45 to $5 per square meter as hype receded.
Third-order effects
- The pattern that follows is instructive: by March 2023 attendance had fallen 76% year over year despite Tommy Hilfiger and Adidas sponsoring shows, suggesting brand-led metaverse events without durable consumer pull are not self-sustaining.
- With the consumer metaverse faltering, capital and corporate attention have rotated toward industrial applications — the World Economic Forum projects a $100B industrial metaverse by 2030 led by Nvidia Omniverse — leaving fashion's virtual experiments as an early marker of where consumer interest actually held and where it didn't.
The trend: Brand experimentation in open metaverse worlds peaked fast and deflated faster, pushing virtual-fashion investment from speculative land economies toward platforms with existing audiences or industrial use cases.