digital fashion

Middle Eastern retail operator Chalhoub is launching Sol3mates, its first Web3 sneaker brand. Countering recent negativity around sneakers and Web3, Chalhoub Group is betting on an innovative, consumer-centric approach to attract communities.
Photo: Courtesy of Chalhoub Group
Chalhoub Group, the largest retail operator in the Middle East representing the likes of LVMH and Christian Louboutin, is launching Sol3mates, a Web3-native sneaker brand.

The date of its first drop of sneakers, which will come as physical and digital wearables, and have NFC chip-enabled authentication, will be announced on 12 April at Sol3mates.xyz. The focus of the brand is threefold: boosting sustainability (and exclusivity) by never producing more than it sells; empowering designers to be “creative directors” of their own brands within Sol3mates (and paying them accordingly with royalties); and empowering community via co-creation.
Consumers will be encouraged to vote on decisions such as colorways or who the next Sol3mates designer should be. This co-creation element appealed to Sol3mates’s first designer, Kacimi Latamène, from France. It redefines the relationship between brand, designer and consumer, says Olivier Moingeon, CCO and co-founder of Web3 platform Exclusible, which is hosting the drop. “It’s one step closer to ultra-personalization,” he says.
This is not Chalhoub Group’s first venture into Web3. In May 2022, the company dropped a series of 500 NFTs, “925 Genesis Mood”, also in partnership with Exclusible. After this drop, Nick Vinckier, head of Chalhoub Group’s corporate innovation, began ideating Sol3mates. “After selling out in five minutes, I thought, this is crazy. We all underestimated the power, the size, the impact of Web3,” he says. “I thought, we need to do something with more impact at a bigger [scale].”
Through Sol3mates, Chalhoub Group is working to iron out identified pain points. One is overproduction — big industry players have a profit to make and shareholders to keep happy, Vinckier says. He also notes limits on sneaker designers executing their vision: “We’ll see big brands create an innovative silhouette every now and then, a crazy colourway with an artist, but pushing the boundaries of what is possible is not really happening [beyond] smaller niche brands because the crazier the silhouette, the lower the margin.”
The group faced challenges in its search for a manufacturer to produce the physical sneakers, with multiple factories saying likely quantities were too low. The solution has been to partner with a local factory in the UAE.
The mechanics
The first drop of what have been labelled “OG NFTs” is designed to “get the community together”, Vinckier says. Ownership will act as a ticket to the Sol3mates community. Crypto and fiat currency will be available, and the price point (not yet confirmed) will be pitched relatively low to broaden access. Membership perks will include merchandise, physical and virtual event access, and whitelists for future drops. There are four rarity levels — the rarer the NFT, the more utility attached.
Future bonuses are likely to include recurring raffles where community members win access to selected hype sneakers as well as weekly offerings for community members to purchase sneakers at retail prices, rather than the more inflated prices typical of the resale market.
OG holders will receive priority access to the first sneaker drop in April via a one-week window. The drop will then be shared for one hour with partner retailers (to be announced 12 April) before opening to the wider public. A two- to three-month lead time is envisaged between the closing of the pre-order window and the shipment of the physical shoe in the fourth quarter of 2023. OG holders receive their shoes a month before the public and also receive a complimentary digital wearable when they pre-order that can be worn in 3D virtual world Decentraland.
Sneakerheads and Web3 denizens: a perfect match?
Web3 is big on sneakers. Balmain’s first phygital collection is sneakers, created in partnership with digital fashion company Space Runners. This was a carefully targeted decision, aiming to link sneaker enthusiasts with NFT collectors, Balmain CMO Txampi Diz told Vogue Business. Rtfkt has also dropped phygital sneakers, including its Cryptokicks IRL.
The Sol3mates launch takes place at a time when formal eveningwear and casual luxury are leading the fashion conversation, with question marks over whether fashion’s sneaker bubble has burst. But many in the Web3 space remain committed to the sneaker. Vinckier sees a “natural overlap” between the two communities. “There’s a big affinity between sneakers and Web3,” he says. “Much more than if we were to go into Web3 heels or handbags.”
Sneaker enthusiasts say fluctuations in the hype cycle should be ignored. “I think that there’s a tendency in this generation to think that just because something isn’t hyped anymore means bad,” Danish sneaker collector Rebecca Hyldahl recently told Vogue Business. “Hardcore sneakerheads have always been there, and they’ll continue to be there.” In Web3, which has seen a similar cooling, entrepreneurs see value in this period of downtime and remain committed to blockchain’s potential.

It’s one step closer to ultra-personalization.”

To tap the existing dedicated community, Sol3mates is hosting a pop-up on Exclusible’s Discord ahead of the drop. It’s also a practical decision. “We are not a native Web3 fashion group. We want to make sure we leverage the expertise and experience of people like Exclusible,” Vinckier says.
“What we want to do is set something in motion,” he explains. “I believe we can be the snowball to push the boundaries, be more sustainable, more creative and pull the community closer into what we do.”
For Exclusible’s Moingeon, this is a moment he’s been waiting for. Sol3mates is the first Web3-native brand to come out of a luxury group, he says. “And it won’t be the last.”
Originally published in Voguebusiness.com
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Virtual fashion available from DressX. Photo: courtesy of DressX
In pure Carrie Bradshaw style of “I couldn’t help but wonder,” I have found myself recently thinking about this new “digital fashion” phenomenon and whether this means that physical clothes will eventually become irrelevant as our lives will be moving online and into metaverse platforms in virtual worlds. You only had to read the fashion press of the last few months to notice an increasing number of digital fashion releases, NFT collections, and articles studying this new phenomenon – and branding it as “sustainable.”
Our avatar versions can’t go around naked, and brands are here to solve the problem. And if you don’t have an avatar yet (like me), you will probably soon be able to stay in your pajamas for Zoom meetings (forgoing the casual leggings and dress-up top we’ve all been wearing the past two years), wearing a Gucci “shield” in the same way you can fake your environment with beautiful screens while working from bed.
I remember Marco Bizzarri, CEO of Gucci giving a lecture at the London College of Fashion in 2017 during which one student asked him how he would reconcile Gucci’s own sustainability agenda with the company’s need to keep producing new clothes season after season. He shrugged andsaid that while he didn’t have an answer yet, surely the only way would be for Gucci to become more of a content producer and diversify its business model. Fast-forward a few years and Gucci has become one of the first brands to have a virtual world, with digital products and gaming too. It is called the Gucci Good Game. Marco was right–and looking at it through this lens, it is a genius move. If you can keep your company profitable while not producing more physical clothes (with all the consequences this implies), surely, it’s a win.
But, as you probably know by now, for the last 10 years I have been particularly invested in the harsh reality experienced by the 70 million real people currently entrapped in the fashion supply chain to meet our insatiable consumption appetite, which is fed by a multibillion profit-making fast fashion model that now is presumed as being the norm. My first question is, what does this new virtual revolution hold for these 70 million people – the garment workers who are predominantly young women? We’ve already seen the consequences a global pandemic had on them, with brands refusing to pay for placed orders and cutting subsequent bookings without any responsibility towards the workers at all. Adding this new “virtual revolution” to an already existing problem of exploitation could spell a social crisis on a scale we haven’t yet witnessed – the dystopian nightmare, which we are all pretending not to be a part of. Predicting the future is a perilous business. And I don’t have an answer for you yet. But we need to stay vigilant and not let history repeat itself. Sustainability is not only about environmental justice, but, much more importantly, social justice. We need to make sure inclusivity and equality are fundamental pillars of this revolution.
My second question is, is it also truly sustainable from an environmental point of view? What are the metrics we will use to measure this? CNN recently reported on the limited data available about the reduced impact of digital fashion, quoting a sustainability report from digital fashion startup DressX saying digital garments emit 97% less carbon than physical ones. But how did they measure this? As we know by now, data can be manipulated, and reporting can be stirred according to what a business wants you to see. DressX states on its website, “We share the beauty and excitement that physical fashion creates, but we believe that there are ways to produce less, to produce more sustainably, and not to produce at all. At the current stage of DressX development, we aim to show that some clothes can exist only in their digital versions. Don’t shop less, shop digital fashion.” The devil is in the details and the sentences “Don’t shop less” (so continue to feed consumerism) and “At a current stage of DressX development we only sell digital fashion” (implying it may start selling real clothes in the future) set alarm bells ringing in my head.
This epoch promises plenty of disruption, but whether this is welcome depends on how we steer a course through change. The one superpower we have – and which we have the duty to use – is our action to push for the right governance and accountability. We don’t need our avatars to be better versions of ourselves.
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Originally published in the February 2021 issue of Vogue Arabia