Digital Fashion Week New York featured a series of talks, panels, exhibitions, and hybrid digital-physical runway shows from September 7-11. The event brought together the world’s leading digital fashion designers, entrepreneurs and investors to discuss topics at the intersection of digital fashion, the metaverse, and blockchain. As digital fashion matures in the coming years, a number of challenges may emerge for lawyers.

Decentralized Identities and Digital Fashion

Speakers discussed the ongoing growth of decentralized identities that establish a person’s unique profile online. Instead of creating a user profile at a centralized service provider like Facebook, more people will create accounts or wallet addresses on decentralized platforms that are cryptographically secure. With that decentralized identity, a person could prove ownership of their digital fashion NFT, wear it to an online meeting and benefit from the “to earn” economy. “I could … give post-sale analytics … to a brand … and [that brand] could know how many viewers are watching and compensate me for providing that data,” said Megan Kasper, founding member of Red DAO, the first-ever fashion-focused decentralized autonomous organization. While the prospect of earning money from providing analytics to brands sounds exciting, brands may need to explore whether it would be beneficial to have know-your-customer or anti-money laundering procedures in place before transferring funds to a decentralized wallet address.

NFTs and Financial Lending