Blenders Pride Glassware Fashion Tour showcased India’s first metaverse-exclusive fashion show on December 10, 2022. In its 16th year, Blenders Pride Glassware Fashion Tour, powered by Fashion Design Council of India, has reimagined its iconic legacy to bring a more youthful, inclusive, and innovative edition.
The Fashion Tour launched ‘Blenders Pride Glassware Fashion Tour Park’ in Decentraland, a global web3 platform. Decentraland is a 3-D digital game that is a user-owned, Ethereum-based virtual world platform, or Metaverse, allowing users to be part of a shared digital experience. It offers crypto investors a unique opportunity to buy into early-stage technology and projects. In Decentraland, users can play games, exchange collectibles, buy and sell digital real estate or wearables, socialize and interact.
The highlight of the Fashion Tour Park in the Metaverse was India’s first metaverse-exclusive fashion show. It featured outfits from the ‘Style Gallery’ exhibit of the Fashion Tour called ‘This is not a T-shirt’ project. These were unique T-shirt outfits designed by 60 designers & homegrown fashion labels, who embellished and/or deconstructed the basic T-shirt to celebrate their authentic interpretation of the four themes of ‘Pride’ showcased in the four city chapters this year.
The Blenders Pride Glassware Fashion Tour Park also features multiple interactive areas, gamified zones and showcase areas, with multiple engaging activities for users to interact with. Decentraland is a free to use and easy to access metaverse platform but it comes with its set of challenges too. Since it is a low-poly, scene limited platform, there are restrictions on the kind of experiences and styles that can be built and developed in Decentraland. The Fashion Tour has made a number of novel scripting and load optimisation enhancements to ensure a visually appealing experience without compromising on user experience, considering the limitations within Decentraland.
Among the various fashion & lifestyle experiences available in the Fashion Park in Decentraland, guests can visit the Lounge, a zone that houses all the information about Blenders Pride Glassware Fashion Park, where they can claim a free ‘Proof of Attendance NFT’ from the POAPBooth. At the Designer & Trial Zone, users can try-on and buy one-of-a-kind wearable NFTs from renowned designers of the tour – Shantnu and Nikhil, Amit Aggarwal, Falguni Shane Peacock and Kunal Rawal; buying the NFT also gives users access to the real, physical outfit, making the experience truly one-of-a-kind. Users can then head to The Ramp, where they can strike a pose, walk the ramp as the showstopper or watch the live streams of the ultra-glamourous fashion shows from the Fashion Tour itself. Visitors could also visit unique Selfie Spots all around the Fashion Tour Park. And then there’s The Metaverse Treasure Hunt, an engaging activity where users must collect clues from across the Fashion Tour Park arena to stand a chance to get their hands on an iPhone 13, stylish Bluetooth earphones worth INR 15k or online shopping vouchers worth INR 5k. The Hunt began on December 1, 2022.
Guests attending the exclusive shows of the Fashion Tour at the 4 city editions have the opportunity to ‘Step into the Metaverse’ – an experience zone that extends various elements from Fashion Tour Park metaverse platform. Guests can interact with a Smart Mirror, where they can try-on unique wearable NFTs designed by the Fashion Tour designers, take selfies in the outfits and even get their hands on the outfits by buying these one-of-a-kind wearable NFTs – an incredibly new experience for the fashion & lifestyle elite.
Speaking about the exciting new metaverse experience, Kartik Mohindra, Chief Marketing Officer, Pernod Ricard India, said, “The 16th edition of Blenders Pride Glassware Fashion Tour has entered a new era of fashion & lifestyle in a cutting-edge new avatar. Taking the Fashion Tour to the metaverse is an attempt to make fashion more inclusive, accessible and futuristic. We take pride in bringing the first metaverse-exclusive fashion experience in Decentraland to India. It is part of our endeavour to build a community and celebrate the ‘Pride’ of today’s youth.”