SYKY Launches New Incubator for Web3 Fashion Designing, First Batch Has Ten Artists

Consumers of the Web3 world are not backing away from engaging with digital fashion trends, despite the market being shaky. SYKY, a digital fashion platform, has decided to contribute to the Web3 fashion world with a project incubator programme. This one-year initiative has an already prepared list of ten digital artists who will make for its first batch. The aim is to give these designers a platform to make improvements to their skills that would eventually uplift the overall qualities of the metaverse and NFT sectors.

Fashion house Pet Liger, fashion artist Stephy Fung, photographer GlitchofMind, and digital artist Calvyn Dylin Justus are among the first ten of beneficiaries of SYKY's initiative.

Alice Delahunt, the Founder and CEO of SYKY, reportedly wishes to usher newer trends into the traditional fashion world and in turn ‘decentralise creativity'.

“We believe design talent is equally distributed throughout the world — not just at select schools or to those with industry relationships. We're opening access to game-changing technology and opportunities that will hone each designer's creativity and craft,” SYKY's website says.

The British Fashion Council, Vogue's creative editorial director Mark Guiducci, and Calvin Klein's chief marketing officer Jonathan Bottomley are part of the mentor panel established by SYKY to assist its group of up-and-coming designers.

In recent days, several fashion brands have taken their first steps into the metaverse and NFT arenas.

Gucci, for instance, has signed a multi-year deal with Yuga Labs, the parent company behind popular NFT series like Bored Apes Yacht Club (BAYC) and CryptoPunks, to see how the metaverse can be the next destination for fashion and entertainment purposes.

As per Delahunt's observation however, digital designers are still facing cynicism.

“The metaverse and NFTs had an absolutely mainstream hype cycle and then we went into the trough of disillusionment and kind of felt discarded a little bit. I think that we had to really cut through the noise … there are designers who are designing in these spaces, and there are consumers who are in digital worlds consuming and expressing their identity,” Coindesk quoted Delahunt as saying.

In order to stir up the digital fashion industry, events in the metaverse have begun to pick pace.

Adidas, Tommy Hilfiger, and Vogue Digital took part in the Metaverse Fashion Week (MVFW) 2023 that kicked off on March 28 this year. The virtual event was hosted by Decentraland, where over 60 fashion brands, both physical as well as digital native ones, showcased their spring collections on the digital runway.

From India, Blink Digital, an independent digital agency, also participated in the event alongside Aldo and Coach among other fashion brands. The first instalment of the MVFW went live last year.