Doing some deep research in fashion ai prompting and ai generated avatars/editorials field.

I’m currently impressed by the works prompted so far by this list of profiles:

My personal top:

Francesca_cutecircuit

Cutecircuit

M.ai.yo

remiroman_stclaire

Brand-ey:

Rickdick__

Fashion_future

Artificial_vogue

Ai_clothingdaily

Maison.meta

Street:

Scoprionsorbet

Tonycncp

Str4ngething

Stnd_ai

Pop:

Paiope_london

Avatars/editorial/portraits:

Katisokokoiso.ai

Sy_the_ai_photo_guy

Fragile_realities

Unmadeunmade

Giant.orchard

Nngcurated

Homoaliens

Digital Shamanism scenery/intergalactic/tribalism:

Xandermarkusson

Unreal_appeal

Supergalacticlover

Alemarah4

Tukumogusd

Hybridritual

Spyzter.ai

Artificially_goddess

Throughmollysai

Stnther_p

Etherealworld.ai

Surface.modulation

Anchorball_ai

Midnite_on_mars

Longoland_ai

Neuralfad

Retro_scifi_ai

Joooo.ann

_vanilla_voyage

Footwear:

Micheletorresi

Jewellery / accessories / product:

fallen_alien

Arturotedeschi

Beauty:

Illusorybeauty

Generated_paint

Please note that categories might shift with time, excited to see how they improve their prompts in the future based on our collective feedback.

It’s amazing how you can feel the depth and intelligence level of an individual coming up with prompts. Their knowledge of history of fashion and cultural references coding truly reflects in what ai generates.

This space is to be huge. Let’s see who stays and who emerges.

Let’s collaborate on decentralising it as much as we can so that current giant brands do not take over the best talent and monetise/take advantage on our future-forward network.

Please share here your favourites, I might have missed some of the key ones! I’m rarely on instagram/meta platforms so I might have not looked at some popular hashtags in our field.

Let’s collaborate on curating!

It’s our chance to #decentralisefashionnow

Now let’s enjoy the show:

Enough visual treasures indulgence for now.

More imagined fashion realities to come.

The Rise of AI Fashion was originally published in Decentralized Humanity on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Screenwear is out, innerwear is in. That is the fact. Noone really cares about what you wear on or behind the screen, while everyone is affected by what you choose to wear within you, in other words, what is your emotional and mental health wardrobe. In this review we will not unwrap this idea yet but will give you clear examples of what is actually going on in the digital fashion world. Spoiler: a hyped-up digital waste generating mess that is affecting everyone’s mental health and how to be careful and hyper intentional when you are getting yourself into the space of digital fashion. And crypto. Because fashion is everything, even crypto. Which is scary and true.

This article was written in June 2021, alongside with this crypto fashion mega piece and edited & completed in December 2021 when I felt it was finally time to share it publicly. I took me a 6 months long sabbatical from fashion to focus on crypto narrative building to confirm the thoughts shared here are still relevant. I am not planning to come back to the crypto fashion world babysitting activities, but wanted to make sure that this piece is published.

Here is a bonus secret YouTube video I created to pair with this article.

Ok dear friends it is time I am more blunt and honest with you than I have ever been. It took me a year and a half (now two years!!) to write this piece and I am not even joking. The energy required bring this piece together took that long to process and it is finally ready to be expressed. I thought hard about this topic, trust me.

Let’s start outside of fashion as an intro, simply because I am TIRED of giving you existing examples from the current state of folding, hurting, dying fashion world.

If you are in your thirties like me and had multiple close (and perhaps romantic) relationships in your life, you know how it works: the more you date, the better you know who is a better fit for you, the faster you guide yourself towards a type of person who you are more attracted to and faster you filter out people who are not a great match. For some of us who have trained ourselves in the dating games, (I see it similar to sports competition) we only need a split of a second to feel if that person of interest and you have an exciting potential together. You just know, because with experience, your eye gets sharper, your intuition becomes clearer, your decision-making process becomes faster, you become a superhuman of Self and you know and claim your best currently existing in your consciousness match immediately. Same with relationship between me and fashion tech. I know my match when I see it. And in 2019 it was Newlife. I won’t go into all the details, but for those of us who know the story behind Nataliya.ai and my work on Newlife you get it — I want to give you no more data on that at this point. All I can say I clearly is that I have met a perfect fashion-tech match for my fashion identity. For now.

Back to the dating version of me to continue with my intro: I have been playing in all forms of dating in the fashion & technology worlds since my early teenage years: played at top costume ateliers at the gentle age of 13, during fashion weeks in Moscow at VIP zones I experimented with being a 14-year-old PR bitch bouncer, worked backstage as a turbo dresser, played my own lead role as a designer, production specialist & stylist, experienced being an archive manager, assistant, researcher, and editor in magazines such as Vogue & emerging epic online publications, experimented as one of those early wave bloggers, launched my own online store, sales & PR showroom, and MULTIPLE fashion tech startups, led designer sales & PR for most badass emerging global brands, explored multibrand, multiplatform buying, engaged in designer collaborations for customization start up, explored 3D visualization technology when it was sooo, so primitive, did buying and planning at top multibrand stores in NYC, did merchandising in top brands, led technology teams and managed 2000+ brand integrations at the most impressive marketplace, consulted numerous brands on tech implementations, helped develop innovative, conscious business models and advised technologists on emerging fashion market opportunities, developed tech implementations for responsible & circular fashion movement, hosted and featured in top industry podcasts, co-organized conferences, led monthly industry insiders events series on the future of the intersection of fashion, tech, and consciousness, created media content strategy for blockchain technologies in fashion and lifestyle, modeled circular fashion systems implementations of shared wardrobes with political leaders and developed a visual language of new life merch and ignited implementation of the future of trade — you name it, I probably missed it, it is still on the list. I dated fashion, tech, and conscious biz dev a lot, non-stop. Never had longer than 2.5 years of relationship with any of these aspects besides my consultancy, Balanced Fashion, which was more of polyamory than a committed, monogamous relationship. I BECAME what we as industry mean under the concept of combining conscious fashion tech, without needing to know how to look like one, I simply embraced my own version of fashion tech with a deep touch of purpose and responsibility (I called it Balanced), constantly evolving and expanding myself and clients I worked with by embodying a notion of dynamic balance, learning to build relationships with the industry leaders and launched & commercially applied trends at their most nascent form — simply because I had a luxury of being the one advising edgiest startups, brands and influential companies on launching those trends. Clear? Should be. If not, read the above paragraph again, slowly. In other words, what you see on LinkedIn is only a micro fraction of all my activities in the fashion tech world which I studied, researched, built, modeled, consulted and taught in from inside out. And I have to say, it is one of the dirtiest, painful, annoying, exciting, sexiest, fun, fast-paced, coolest worlds out there. And it is about to oh so deeply transform…

This what brings me to the topic of the state of digital fashion. In Spring of 2019 I hosted one of my Blockchain fashion tech events in NYC’s The Assemblage, the hottest conscious coworking space where I was a resident and one of the community leaders at, and had the LUKSO co-founder Fabian Vogelsteller and Neliana Fuenmayor, founder of A Transparent Company came to speak at my event on the future of blockchain for fashion, where Fabian uncovered the visions behind the digital fashion as this new hottest trend that we were launching as fashion technologists. It was around the time when the first digital-only fashion garment was auctioned as NFT for an equivalent of $9,500, created by Dapper Labs x Fabricant x modeled by Johanna Jaskowska. Check out the link to the sold item now.

Here is the screenshot I took on Jun 12 2021, just to confirm the page still looks the same way. Where is the item? Tell me. Where?

Where is that dress???

*Clicked on the arrows sign on the left bottom side to expand the view… oh, here it is.

GONE. Hello. To the beginning of the fall of digital fashion. When pixels are gone and what is left is…what… ipfs file paths… nope, just memories… of money spent. Do you even remember how that digital garment looked like? Do you remember how all the physical garments in your wardrobe look like?

Ok, here is a picture I found online for us thanks to the article I wrote back around the same time that garment was sold (yes, it is called the RISE of the digital fashion, because that what I felt when I wrote it and we are still on the upward side of the bell curve of the trend). Thank God this piece of historical writing was saved under the LUKSO Medium blog because my Balanced Fashion Medium blog posts were cleared when my Medium-specific domain was expired and I would have had to dig even harder for it to show you the reference of that first-ever sold digital garment as NFT. So you got the idea of how short-term this relationship of fashion and its digital reflection or should I write on? Too short, ok. Much shorter than physical garmets, as we all have learned so far… we still have to deal with physical waste, while your crypto backed digital waste can be burned just like that. And do not try to tell me that blockchain technology is oh so secure, I won’t buy it. Technology as secure as humans who built it. Humans are not secure, I checked. They die. Fabrics don’t. Got the idea? Again, should I even write on?

I WILL WRITE ON AND THIS IS GONNA BE A TRIP YOU HAVE BEEN CRAVING FOR IF YOU WERE SEEKING FOR TRUTH, SO GET READY, YOU, CURIOUS HYPED-UP FASHION TECH TROOPER.

I advise you to take several sips of deep belly breaths now and stop looking at your screen, look at your hands, perhaps even close your eyes, look inside…contemplate on the question if you really want to spend the rest of your life staring at the screen making sure those pictures and pixels are still there to play around with…

No, seriously.

Now I want you to look outside, check out nature if you are lucky like me to live/work where you can SEE nature right outside of your window if you have a window nearby. I am looking just now and typing without seeing the screen… enjoying the nature views outside of my window and feeling much more relaxed and prepared to make my main point: THE FUTURE OF FASHION IS CULTURE.

Balanced Culture. My 5-year long, most committed relationship with Balanced Fashion is coming to an end and we are currently in the process of conscious uncoupling, so I consider this article as a way for me to release all of my attachments to fashion tech and really take a leap of faith towards my new lover, Balanced Culture which brings me closer to my visions of Balanced Humanity, the future of media & public relations enterprise.

Let’s take another breath together… imagine what we mean by screenwear.

Let’s take time to deeply think about why we think we need to own garments that do not exist in physical. How long this ownership will last? Where that garment is gonna be stored? How much it would cost me to purchase and to store it? What if I had no access to screens or the internet, would I still be able to see it or transfer my ownership of it to someone else? Would that someone else even want that garment? Especially considering the fact I am struggling to sell some items from my vast and highly curated collection of physical garments? Why do I even have to think about these digital problems that I don’t even have?

Well, surprise surprise. The reason of my decision to break up with technology of fashion is because we as fashion technologists and futurists often create more problems than solutions. We literally make up a problem cases to solve it with technology that we are set to build, while the real problem is not solvable with any technology that is outside of us. But I am not gonna go there right now, just to say this is a consumerism issue. And what digital fashion is promoting? Consumerism. And problems… that come from owning a digital asset. Whether it is a pixelated art piece, or any other piece of NFT. Digital asset. Who needs those? Really, humans. We have gotten ourselves waaaay too far I think. The future of Internet and everything that is posted on it is decentralized and collective, without individual ownership. This is simple and true. Lets not make up new problems anymore please. Whatever I post online, anywhere becomes a public asset. It is my choice what and where and when to share.

if technology gonna be there forever really? Not at all. Please wake up to this simple fact. When there is noone left to keep tech running you will see. Things are gonna start to fall apart faster than you may imagine and that is ok, just get ready for it and invest in crystals. I will teach you how to work with them someday.

Back to the hype.

I strongly believe that the future of fashion is physical, it’s not phygital, as I used to say 2 years ago, before 2020 events hit. Things are going to be much simpler than we may envision, especially when we all collectively get fed up with technology that is presented to us now, which is, let’s be honest, a joke that is not even funny or entertaining anymore. And it is affecting our mental health more than ever.

Let’s circle back to 2019, when I wrote the article The Rise of Digital Fashion. Until today it is one of the most viewed articles I have ever written. It was the time when many of us in the industry finally realized that the fashion industry needed great, great changes. And the blockchainzation of fashion was only in the stage of early development, and in the process of creating language around those concepts. There were a lot of attempts in the edgier sides of fashion to enter the digital sphere. And the idea of blockchain was not as foreign as it used to be for the fashion application, I wrote a couple of deep dive articles about that in 2018, here and here. And when March 2020 hit, we all knew that we had to all go digital to survive imposed on us global narrative. And at that moment I realized: nope. That article that I wrote back in the summer time of 2019 is no longer relevant because we are now forced to get digital. And when you force something, by default, it becomes repelling after some time. Because forcing is the opposite of inviting. Back in 2019 I was excited to invite the readers into the digital sphere of fashion because it felt new and playful, helping direct our consumerism from fast fashion into digital felt like the right step we all had to take temporary to train ourselves to consume less generally. In 2020, many many brands started playing with digital fashion ideas, in 2021 with NFTs and crypto assets ownership… it all became hype. Which is a sign of a FAD. Not a healthy trend. When you have been creating and leading fashion world as long as I have, you will clearly see the difference between fads and trends. Both are temporary btw.

Back to the hype… we started to see marketplaces of digital-only fashion to pop up, selling ‘skins’ for a game that did not actually exist. Well, my way of thinking is that, yes, I used to spend a lot of time on social media, in the first several months of the global narrative of lockdowns, I went live every day. Basically, I went life and channeled my truth I shared what was going on in my life in the present moment, shared authentically, my stories, both on my personal nataliya.ai account and on my balanced fashion professional account and on balanced humanity, which was removed by Facebook at some point in 2021. That insident made me want to stop engaging with any social media. I stopped using Facebook in around January 2021 and I stopped using Instagram in November 2021. That is a conscious decision not to engage in web2 social media, which is extracting our data and using it for commercial purposes. Without our full transparent agreement of what is actually happening to our data. Even thought all of my accounts on social are private and closed, I knew that my data was not mine anymore once it was shared. And even though I did go live, almost every day and saved those live videos as IGTV, I knew that this is a part of a big experiment. I have to say I really enjoyed going live and sharing my truth back then. I would dress up every day, as going out and socializing wasn’t an option I felt was there for me at that time, I would still dress up for these lives and zoom calls. I enjoy dressing up for my digital presence. And already at that point a thought of digital fashion was ridiculous to me because, hey, I had so many things in my wardrobe already that I needed to walk through for my digital presence. At that point I was leading this huge project for Newlife, which was creating merchandising strategy for the whole web3 layer. So all the garments, accessories and lifestyle possessions that I had at home were going to be placed on chain via Newlife nodes as I have been posting photos of all of my possessions. To me, that was the ultimate representation of digital fashion layer. When the digital aspects are the photo and the blockchain technology that is tied to that photo, which comprises an NFT. I was transparently showcasing all the items that I own. And going live was a great way to model all that I shared on Social 3.0 via Newlife. Coming up with my outfits every day for my digital avatar that was as real as it gets was a pure joy to me back then. Putting together new looks and experimenting more than I would experiment in previous times, unless it was Burning Man. I felt like I could express myself freely and openly without censoring myself at all, and really putting on anything that I felt like, feeling great about it and looking epic as well. And at that point I was looking very closely at what was going on in the digital space. I was tracking the most innovative and the most fun creators in the digital fashion space, mostly through Instagram. I was attending meetups that Karina Nobbs was organizing, called digital fashion workouts. I was also deeply connecting with other innovators in the space and researching ways to present this new dimension of fashion.

I wasn’t really writing about digital fashion at that point, I was more of an observer and active participants of my own version of what digital fashion meant to me and seeing the mainstream version of it die in my head before it really took off, and even the blockchain innovation aspect of my work with many attempts to connect with Lukso and Lablaco to help model what it means to create a fully circular wardrobe. My fellow industry leaders simply did not want to listen to me. I received no communications from companies I would reach out to regarding my ways of looking at the digital fashion industry. I was simply not taken seriously. Maybe it’s because of all of my spiritual topics that I was engaged in my personal account, or maybe because of my way of presenting that was so edgy and different, and so real life, relevant, not as polished as the fashion industry used to showcase a final product. Anyways, I was ignored by the whole industry when I tried to share my visions of digitalization and blockchainisation of our closets, and very soon I realized that no one actually needs that. A picture of a garment that I own IS that digital passport, we do NOT need anything else. I know for a fact that I’m the only owner of that picture. And when I posted it on Newlife, it becomes an NFT. So it means that I’m a confirmed owner of that piece of merch. I also felt that I didn’t need to like take product shots of each garment. I could take a picture of a set of several garments and say hey, this is a passport for all of these 11 garments, so that the effort and energy invested in creating that digital passport was reduced. And just the fact that I could only take one photo and showcase several garments and put it on-chain was incredible because, you know, energy. It becomes also easier to sell or exchange bundles, collections, not separate garments only. Very simple things, humans, so simple…

It all really inspires me to envision what the future of trade is gonna look like.. Remember that fashion retail & e-commerce hasn’t changed much since the concept of fashion e-commerce emerged with Net-a-Porter over 21 years ago. The layout is still the same. And yes, there are VR/AR companies that are developing more fun and engaging digital experiences for retail. But those are gimmicky, feel like a bad computer game, they’re not user friendly at all. Everyone is just tired of digital life. Noone truly wants to shop online, it is boring.

And what I’m seeing right now with is digital, with the rise of NFTs hype is all oh so temporary. What is gonna stay is not the code that is chain, but a memory of a digital asset and its physical counterpart in a form of a garment, if you are smart and lucky. We’re all tired of digital, please do not deny this fact it is simple and true. We’re all tired of our screens. We’re all tired of each other who are still only connecting online. We’re all tired of looking at clothing online. Clothing is not made to look at on screens, it is made to be experienced in physical. I’m so much more fascinated by wrapping a piece of fabric around my body and being the designer again, being the stylist of my own physical wardrobe. I’m so much more excited to go out, dressed up in a much edgier way than I used to, and see the reaction of people around me, and receive compliments from people for the way that I show up in the physical world. I’ve stopped using social 2.0. I’m still on Newlife, but rarely. I don’t need an avatar. I am the ultimate avatar. And I’ve been deleting the videos that I posted and content that I’ve created, simply because I don’t want it to be seen anymore, I want people to get to know me in real life. Now we are all super overloaded with all kinds of information, we became content for each other, and we are oh so tired of each other. We are tired of the content that we created and shared online. These days, most times I spent offline with myself meditating, writing, drawing, illustrating, visualizing best future scenarios, making food, connecting with my loved ones, being out in the nature, going to museums, going to retail stores, connecting with the business owners, engaging in the local community in person, being out there, not being online.

2020 and 2021 showed us that enough is enough. I don’t see digital fashion growing much bigger than it has grown already. And then it will decline. Yes, some of those that were first in the market will stay in fashion/culture history books. Skins will be gone. Computer games will evolve into physical treasure hunts and quests. We soon collectively realize that screens hurt eyes and info we get exposed to online affect our mental health, and eventually we will stop and get invited to play in nature and connect with each other in person, just like many of us did in Summer 2020 after months of being locked up at homes. And perhaps we will still be coming back to screens, we would not want to stay in the metaverse for too long. It’s all a fad. And even I didn’t expect that it was going to go away so fast! The end. The fall of their digital fashion, it’s obviously coming, because let’s be honest with ourselves. Neither of us want to spend time on screens, any longer than we already did back in Spring 2020. So, what is the future of fashion? It is physical, fully circular and regenerative. It’s extremely creative. Fascinating. Diverse. And, yeah, it’s not going to be on screens, it’s going to be fully off screens. The AR layer is a fad, we do not need to enhance garments that are already physically perfect. We’re going to keep loving our fabrics that we have already produced as an industry, we’re going to create new garments from the existing ones, we’re going to weave a completely new aesthetic of upcycled products and digital will be only a layer that is just a helping hand for designers to visualize their creations. And yes, some of us will be using these on social media for some time until, again, we wake up to the fact that traditional social media is abusing us and our data. And it’s not healthy for us to spend our time on social media when we have each other to connect with in physical. Social 3.0 won’t stay for long either, mark my words. Digital currency ownership is a bridge to no currency, I have said this enough publicly to make my point. It is oh so temporary.

Now we have whole industry to reimagine, renew, recreate and upcycle, some of us will choose to learn to sew & mend, we will learn to remake what we already have, we will learn to drape and play around with fabrics like never before, generate completely new aesthetical ideas of what garments of the future would look like. We will be connecting in physical again more and we will remember how to touch each other with love and care, and how ridiculous that idea was back in 2019 and 2020 when the rise was really happening for the digital world. But by 2021/2022 we wanted to throw up when we saw digital fashion, we just didn’t want to go there anymore. It’s an obvious fad and I invite the whole fashion industry to stop wasting their time and energy producing technologies that are not actually needed for the industry and focus on reconstructing the physical industry from the ground up. I see a close future where factories will turn into educational centers and support systems for the local communities. The fashion designers becoming visionaries of what’s to come in lifestyle, whole reality creators. The ultimate creators, the community igniters, the ideas connectors, the imagineers. Brands embracing the power of their communities, the humans who believe that our love for beauty and the power of aesthetics are going to lead the shift in our humanity. No longer focusing on creating new, forget digital, forget blockchain. It is all about physical upcycling renaissance. Tapping into what we have already created and working from perspective of abundance and wealth, not digital narrative building into nowhere besides mental health crisis.

I believe in the economy of trust. The economy of authentic exchange. The economy of no screens and no technology to be involved in trade, on local and global scale. I believe in supporting local communities, nourishing local craftsmanship and exchanging skills and wisdom with each other, teaching each other to mend to recreate, to renew, to upcycle. It’s much more exciting to be offline and in community, than to be in online with your digital friends. Yes, the gaming world will continue, but that will be more of like edutainment, and it will be much more intentional, phygital in its nature. The schools will be both digital and physical, balanced. The students will learn to create digital garments, and then will be focused on transferring those ideas into the physical, the digital will only stay as a temporary, fleeting layer.

The layer that will all learn to respect, but won’t let it to overload our systems, as our eyes are not made to look at screens as much as we are looking at screens at the moment. My eyes are tired, and I am not working a full time job I don’t even have to look at screens every day. Balance, humans, let’s learn that. A digital fashion narrative won’t bring us any balance, it will only bring us mental and physical health problems.

Let’s talk a little bit more about blockchain & Web3. So, yes, there are companies that are currently developing something for the digital layer of fashion, tokenizing garments, and all the luxury brands that are trying to get into NFT/blockchain world, without really knowing where to start, and being all over the place, hiring people that have no idea about the industry or how to put together a high quality crypto product. People are trying to get into Web3 without understanding what that layer of the internet really is. It is all a big mess. We all see that it is a huge joke based on hype. We don’t need fashion crypto whatever to make us feel good and whole.

The raising of human consciousness is the answer. Slowing down is the answer. Tuning in is the answer. Connecting with each other deeply and learning to LISTEN is the answer. It’s the ability to learn to trust each other and to communicate with each other openly and freely, and to showcase our skills, negotiate the exchanges based on our skills see our possessions as collective assets, and hopefully transcend the idea of ownership, lead towards the sharing and fully circular economy, where we do not need to say: hey this is mine and this is yours. We can simply unite on the fact that this is ours. We will be sharing with each other, exchanging and constantly so circulating the garments, accessories and all the lifestyle objects that we have. Of course digital assets will stay, but we won’t need to own them. I really believe that investing in the digital assets, It’s a stupid idea. And I am a long term crypto holder and a founding member of Newlife/Newcoin crew. I still believe it is all going to disappear, maybe technology crashes or it would need constant support from those who can no longer support it. Remember, there are teams of humans working on any given technology product. Imagine hundreds of people behind screens, working, helping you see that photo or that interactive piece of garment. Servers consuming intense amounts of energy to store all your digital assets. And once that is shut off, you don’t have that anymore, you’ll have the idea/memory of it, maybe you would even have a screenshot somewhere saved on a hard drive or even a print out of it if you’re edgy, but you wouldn’t have that as an asset when technology is no longer there, whether it is on-chain or not, it will simply no longer exist. That brings me to the future of money and that would be a topic for another article.

So the moral of this whole piece is that ALL technology including digital assets stored on it is going to eventually disappear. But the physical items are not going to disappear so easily, until we train ourselves to create objects with biodegradable materials that will be 3d printed. So let’s go back to the Earth’s side appreciate the traditional crafts of our industry. And forget about the hype of the digital fashion as a beautiful dream we all collectively dreamed of as a temporary experience. Please, stop trying to reinvent the industry and start USING THE INVENTORY THAT HAS ALREADY BEEN PRODUCED. I want to see h&m, zara and other giants to be fully circular by 2023, starting with utilizing the materials that ALREADY EXSIT in their stock and circulating in the market.

In order to create the new industry, we need to redefine prosperity. To me prosperity is acknowledging the privilege of living on the Planet that is still somehow magically alive. That we haven’t extracted everything out of Her. That we found our collective will to stop raping her early enough and set the right examples as an industry that leads culture. STOP PRODUCING. Both digitally and physically. Start upcycling. It is SO, SOOO easy, once you get it.

I believe all companies have to stop production completely for at least 5 years and focus on creatively utilizing the textiles and accessories that have already been produced. After that, focus on developing new textile technologies that are based biodegradable, organic fibers.

Also a fact: nature IS free. Can we make that as our benchmark. How about no more money, start trading textiles and e-waste. I would like to see the industry where we freely trade our creative assets. Let humans who have built the industry assess the true value of new pieces produced.

Sometimes I laugh when I see technologies creating all these tools and new platforms and think about the amount of time they spend on screens, knowing the mental health issues we are facing are caused by our eyes glued to our screens instead of spending time in nature and with our loved ones.

The whole idea of digital fashion is clearly a fad and it pains me to see people taking these topics so seriously and creating companies around the issue that produces more harm than beauty. Trust me, I thought deeply about this article two years, and only now I have full confidence on the FALL of digital fashion is coming faster than we all may collectively understand the meaning behind NFTs. We will soon be ready move on to building inner tools for learning to trust each other without technology being on the way to block us from seeing each other’s truth. The truth is simple: tech generally hurts us, reality is not tech, tech is a tool to train our brain to communicate telepathically and perform magic irl. I won’t go there today, but you got the idea — hopefully this is enough to keep you intrigued on what is to come in Balanced Culture & our work as futurists.

Thanks for your attention. And yeah, no pictures of fashions or brands to spotlight at this point! We are one big brand we call fashion industry and we better clean up our act fast and not get stuck in digital fashion narrative, because crypto assets are not getting us closer to true inner Balance.

THE FALL OF DIGITAL FASHION & CRYPTO AS A RESULT was originally published in Decentralized Humanity on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Here is the original article with the collection of all the images, which I did not feature here on Medium for the sake of deeper curation.

Here is a link to our Balanced Culture work, that we have collected so far.

NOW, to the PIECE.

FINALLY, it is time to publish this digital art piece that this guide is intended to be. I feel beyond happy you are tuning in! This megalithic piece of literature has been brewing for a while. In parallel, I also wrote a gigantic meta article on the FALL of Digital Fashion which I will publish later, (to counter balance my until today most popular by far digital fashion focused piece of writing from 2019) as I strongly believe that the real future of fashion is physical, no matter how like we enjoy creating digital solutions. Physical world and all that we create, besides what is made from biodegradable materials, is not gonna go anywhere, so we all will have to deal with an overwhelming amount of by-product the industry has produced over the past decades. However, this article is not about that elephant in the room. It is about the air in the room so to speak…

This piece of writing is set to educate the readers and my fellow visionaries on the digital fashion as a layer of reality that we will be exploring until we reach a deep sate of inner peace as human beings and won’t need this ‘old life’, expired thing we call technology to satisfy our emotional needs outside of ourselves. We are more powerful than the technology tools that we have developed so far, trust me on that. When you spiritually advance yourself and learn to apply your inner technology such as heart space and third eye, and the intelligence of our body in your daily life, you will experience what I mean. Magic is what we choose to create daily. More about that in the mentioned above Meta article to be published when I feel it is ready to be seen publicly.

For now, what we collectively agreed to call DIGITAL FASHION is a cool new concept for us to direct our attention towards and utilize the tools we have developed to visualize and manifest a dynamic, exciting and fun creative infrastructure that will have a capacity to welcome in, hold and support the finally circular, transparent, traceable, ethical, and responsible physical fashion and consumer goods industries. It will help us model the new ways of consumption, collection and care for this beautiful creative medium we call fashion that has been shaping our global culture throughout the history of Humanity.

Fashion is cool. Fashion has the capacity to envision better and brighter realities. We, digital fashion natives, have the capacity to create a completely new dream for the WHOLE WORLD to follow. That is what this article is for, to boost YOUR personal feeling of empowerment in this space, dear reader.

If you feel overwhelmed reading this piece, simply stop and come back to it when you feel authentically curious to continue. This article is intended to be a study material, rather than a one-time, disposable piece of content that so many of us are so tired of at this point.

This piece is written by me as a result of my life’s work. I have been in competitive sports (which crypto fashion basically is), luxury fashion sales and PR, multiple businesses owner, product manager of hottest fashion tech ventures, consultant, advisor and investor in the broadest sense of digital fashion world for my whole life. For many, many months now I have been diving into incredibly rich process of research and collected a large body of work for an in-depth report around what is Newlife.ai, LUKSO, Arianee, Vechain, Aura and other upcoming giants in the crypto for the future of luxury & creative economies are here to bring. This article is not intended to cover such giants, but to show what is currently being built in the space and how fashion brands can start strategizing their phygitalization movement because that is part of what we call Balanced Fashion movement, whether you like it or not. Because we are going to stop producing new physical fashion in such great quantities and start training our community to consume less by entertaining ourselves via digital means, helping the fashion audience to understand our collective movement into DAOs & Universal Creative Income via crypto space in a sexy and fun way. Think back to the e-commerce in early 2000s. Crypto (hopefully, equivalent to digital at some point) fashion is that now. OK? Sank that in?

Let’s move on. I hope if you have stumbled upon this article I do not have to define NFTs for you. Anyways, we do not have to use that term anymore and simply call all digitally-native products on-chain.

Fashion and traditional art spaces desperately needed the next level blockchain ecosystems & storytelling around them to be built to cater to specificities of these creative areas that are renowned to be so stale in terms of technology applications. These fields are so drastically different from DeFi in terms of language, while the traditional monetary systems’ infrastructures seem to be less complex than the beast of the world we have built in fashion ecosystems in the past decades. I was early in the game exploring and reporting my visions of how blockchain technology can be applied in the fashion world for good. Check out the two-part (1 & 2) series I wrote back in 2018, when there was still very little research completed in blockchain applications for the fashion industry. This pre-dates all projects mentioned in this article below. OK? Ok. I know the topic. I am a crypto investor from earlier than you may assume. I know what I am talking about even when you meet me you think I am a creative strategist. I am a deeply geeky technologist at heart. Looking at code makes me feel relaxed. Talking tech is my love language. I fall in love with humans who code because fashion and art is a form of coding language too. Just more aesthetically pleasing and more universally recognized. In fashion, we speak with visual codes and program the consciousness of everyone who is exposed to our fashion choices. Nowadays with the word fashion we mean the whole industry, but when I use the word fashion, I mean universal language, a system of codes.

Back to the topic of digital fashion. We are currently taking part in the next iteration of the industry emerging and developing ecosystems to support the upcoming transition from the old ways of how fashion industry operated, to the new. This is still very much work in progress across all the companies I am closely watching, that are part of the Balanced Fashion ecosystem of Web 3.0.

I am still educating myself and seeing how CLOSED and relatively tight this space is for anyone like me who is extremely enthusiastic in my research, while not being directly affiliated with any technology, doing all the research all by myself, without any formal advisors and guides and digging passionately for answers of what is to come, reporting on the deepest Truth behind the big, ambitious statements on those Web 3.0 projects’ initiatives. Deeper about that to be reported in the future.

Grounding back to something that is more digestible for us now right now. Practical applications and narratives of digital fashion and examples of b2c platforms that are currently being developed.

WELCOME to my grand overview of Fashion Focused NFT Marketplaces and other supporting projects that make up the fabric of the emerging Digital Fashion World.

Here is a summary of the featured above projects for our convenience.

Call it table of contents, but not really because this platform doesn’t allow this feature. You know tech, it expands and limits us at the same time.

NFT Marketplaces & Brands

https://newlife.ai/

https://newcoin.org/

https://thedematerialised.com/

https://store.zora.co/

https://www.bnv.me/

https://www.digitalax.xyz/

https://artisant.io/catalog

https://digiwear.io/

https://rtfkt.com

Digital Fashion Marketplaces & Brands

https://www.replicant.fashion/

https://dressx.com/

https://xrcouture.com/

https://www.thefabricant.com/

http://auroboros.co.uk/

https://tribute-brand.com/

http://www.studiopms.nl/

Ecosystem

https://www.clo3d.com/

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/

https://www.marvelousdesigner.com/

https://www.gravitysketch.com/

https://browzwear.com/

CFW 22 | Crypto Fashion Week

https://www.3drobe.com/news

https://www.anamxr.com/

https://obsessar.com/

https://www.voor3d.com/

https://www.thisoutfitdoesnotexist.com/

https://www.armoar.com/

https://www.instagram.com/3dee_leonie/

http://institute-digital.fashion/

https://thedigitalfashiongroup.academy/

https://thedigitalfashiongroup.com/

https://globaltalents.digital/en/

http://helsinkifashionweeklive.com/

https://digitalvillage.io/

Now, first thing’s first…

Nataliya.ai via Newlife.ai

COMING UP.

My philosophy is that NATURAL is the way. Technology is only a tool for entertainment and data storage & management (including money management, that to me our creative expression in form of content represents). Every physical object that I own is a carefully invited into my life, deeply curated art piece, a costume for my physical avatar in our greater metaverse version we call real life. Each physical item that I choose to own is more precious than any digital product ever created, while every piece of digital content that I create and post anywhere online IS Digital Fashion. Every photo I take and every screenshot I make is a mintable on-demand NFT. Let that sink in.

Take your time.

The fact is that every node I post on Newlife.ai is already an on-demand mintable NFT piece, tradable on our marketplace in the future. More info to be disclosed in time.

As I have been working on the communications & merchandising integrated and interoperable strategy for Newlife.ai starting back in 2019 (without a monetary agreement, solely as my personal passion project), I have so far prepared multiple bundles of both physical and digital merch, ready to be dropped and distributed when the time is right. Some have already been dropped, but I do experience it as slow, balanced and careful unrolling process. Our project is still a toddler and being developed and the metastory of our new life is currently being written. If you have been following my work on Newlife.ai, you may better understand what’s up. If you ever tuned in to my lives on Instagram on Nataliya.ai and Balanced Fashion accounts back in 2020 when I went live almost daily you have some idea of the energy of what is being built. If you know me personally and close to me, you know how dedicated I am to this work. And if these concepts sparked your curiosity, take time to watch some of the explainers I recorded and posted on YouTube as a preview of what is to come.

For now, sharing with you parts of a raw presentation I created back in mid 2020 to showcase my visions to my team back then.

To express my personal emotions towards the whole digital fashion space I report on below, I took the initiative to be the first one ever to publicly borrow and present a featured on Dematerialized digital items and chose to playfully try them on using the most advanced image editing system I could access at that moment on my new MacBook Air: a legendary Keynote app. It took me around 2 minutes and 22 seconds to style myself, which included going on the ancient platform we call Facebook and selecting timeless, emotionally charged photos of me to model those historically significant garments.

Below you see the results. Please note that these are my first ever publicly shared and not removed digital garment modeling images since around 2014. (Yes I have been in the digital fashion space for that long, some day I will write a whole book on that… oh wait, we already have Newlife.ai for that story layer to be filled in!). These three works are visually representing my real opinion on the future of digital garments, which I believe is purely created for our entertainment. I do acknowledge that this article is not about me and my personal opinions only. It is about the projects featured below and all the teams of people who are working hard to create new ecosystems that are beyond fashion, art and technology, it is a space to shape culture of the future, an authentication of physical and digital assets, a redefinition of ownership, where we are invited to consume less in physical world, while sharing and having fun more while in digital worlds. Hopefully, the better ecosystems will still keep us more off-screens than inside of the metaverses. Or what we now call metaverses will be less about screens and more about physical interactions with augmented reality visualization and projection and holographic technologies advancements. (forget your glasses and lenses old life dreams pls, those are not that cool, trust me)

These three art works are already featured in my signature style of nodes preview layout and mintable on-demand on our native digital fortress platform, Newlife.ai. I might also print them out and place our light language codes on them, which will immediately mark those pieces as infinite value, backed by the next level of blockchain technology off traditional technology that we utilize now. More about that and Nataliya.ai phygital mega project in the articles I publish in the future, as this is still deeply in dev mode. What you see below and what I share on my social channels are only teasers to my work that is yet to be met by the worlds of fashion, tech, art and culture, unless you are on Newlife.ai, where with time spent on our platform, you would get a deeper preview on what Nataliya.ai is about.

Artisant.io

Clear and simple digital fashion NFT marketplace, super fresh out of Regina Turbina’s beautiful brain oven (launched on June 17 2021). I love her and currently building deep trust with her, as she is acclaimed by our space as a Veteran of Digital fashion marketplace game, starting with sharing her own digital designs, moved on to creating space for other brands to be represented at The Replicant marketplace, way earlier than Dress X or Dematerialized were birthed into the Metaverse. Now, I see Artisant has a HUGE future, so mark my words. Also, yes, I am personally aiming to be involved in supporting Regina’s vision and helping nurture the ecosystem and community of the creators that are curated to be part of this project from the early stage. Currently, the designs featured on the platform are over the top and fantastical, exactly the way I want to see digital space to be. Realistic designs feel old life to me when it comes to garments that are only available in digital format. I look forward to seeing capacity to purchase selected layers and elements of the garments to be able to use them as AR add-ons in my personal projects and initiatives in this incredibly rich in potential space. What I see featured on Artisant so far is not fashion, it is art, but not the kind of simplified crypto or gaming art, but rather a true sample of what a new, never seen before cultural movement towards what experiential visual arts could do in entertaining our digital presence and satisfying our self expression fantasies.

Would I invest in my first official digital garment on it? Actually, maybe. We will see.

Dematerialised

Insta Twitter

This project has a lot of energy behind it than the currently carried substance, solely because it is running on LUKSO-powered blockchain infrastructure for which I have been trained to set extremely high expectations to resolve many fashion and lifestyle industry problems connected digital assets management and certification of authenticity, phygitalization of ownership, universal public profiles, etc…

Before we go any further, here is full disclosure: I have a personal relationship with LUKSO team since 2019, featured them in the big pieces of writing that are connected to the fields of blockchain & digital fashion, hosted the co-founder Fabian at my NYC event in Spring 2019 focused on blockchain and digital fashion, co-hosted an event at their Berlin location, and generally have always supported LUSKO initiatives with informal and public industry communications, without being hired or paid for my communications work.

In late 2019 Marjorie asked me to develop a content strategy plan for LUKSO but we were not able to find balance in our interpersonal communications flow and all the outcomes from the hours of work I spent doing research and development of the comms and content strategy were not seen and reviewed by Marjorie and thus not paid by the company. So, yes, I am sad, angry and frustrated, even though 50% of this is my responsibility of not setting clear boundaries of my work. Won’t go into more detail because I trust we will find time with LUKSO team to resolve this in the near future. Just saying that this is a painfully common thing in the fashion space, not being paid without any explanation or feedback. Lack of communications…manifesting in ignoring this issue for months, although acknowledging the year 2020 in general has been the weirdest time for all of us collectively, not expecting full clarity of what has been going on for anyone until years after.

Thus it is still difficult for me not to be slightly negatively biased in reporting on Dematerialised, the platform that has the same co-founder as the LUKSO team. And I love you Marjorie, you are my fellow visionary! We will make our communications work, I promise. So I will try my best to stay neutral here. To be honest it took me months and months to sit down and focus on putting together this whole piece because I was hoping to resolve this heaviness with the LUKSO team before further featuring this powerful project run on LUKSO, Dematerialised, in my strategic Balanced Fashion public communications. But here I am, doing it. As transparently as it feels ethical, considering I am intentionally naturally emotional and raw in my public communications. The idea behind Dematerialised is great, execution is beautiful. Very game-metaverse-like, so fashion feels very far away when I think about this project. I personally simply not guided to support this work as unconditionally as I did before and not choosing to invest more energy in reporting on this platform that has a HUGE future if the strategic industry relationships are built more carefully and the history we are creating is clean, transparent and open. I invite you to study Dematerialised’ rich in info media kit for further details about this NFT marketplace and digital assets wardrobe management platform.

Here is a copy of the way they describe themselves on their website.

‘THE DEMATERIALISED are creating a new reality for fashion.

Our purpose is to converge and nurture the emerging digital fashion ecosystem providing viable new revenue streams and visceral experiences with a Web3 marketplace for authenticated virtual goods.

Ultimately, our experimental yet empathic approach towards digital fashion assets aims to challenge the traditional fashion business models of production, consumption and ownership with a more transparent, efficient and equitable approach.’

Brand New Vision

Instagram Twitter

A less fashion-ey and more bro-game-y digital fashion marketplace-auction portal where you can bid for, collect, and trade virtual apparel, footwear and accessories from questionable brands. From what is currently present on the platform as of early June 2021 this is already a stale project but I may be wrong because they just got an investment poured in. Take a look at their Notion page with a quick explainer on what is this about and judge for yourself. No story, for now feels like a hype-led quickly executed MVP. I may be wrong, but so far it feels like an experiment without a big intentional work behind it. I do appreciate that some items also came in physical if you purchased an NFT, that is something to deeply explore for the digital fashion space in general. Excited to be in touch with them in the future — I have seen and consulted many many many projects like these in my career and know how to turn a project like this into a perfect work of art for the whole industry to admire and feel inspired by.

Digitalax

Honest and direct here. Nothing personal at all! Just everything about this project makes me cringe hard since its launch. The Marketplace is live and very curated. Communications is out balance and all over the place, visually super confusing as of now. Even the lovely founder Emma-Jane MacKinnon-Lee speaking on YouTube feels confused and tired while explaining the complex systems of the Digitalax infrastructure. With the name like hers, we can imagine, long, complex pieces of data are not a problem for her brain but they are for many of us! I personally do want to come visit her sometime and give her a big hug and say that everything is gonna be OK and she doesn’t have to play this game so hard because this game is an illusion and she is the one that sets pace and rythm. I do respect the deep effort placed to build this ecosystem that is clearly valuable for a gamers market and see a bright future for this entity once it is a little less energetically electric and more relaxed and simplified.

Digitalax Medium Blog can be a good insight for those who actually want to support this company by learning what is being developed. Digifizzy, the Metaverse magazine they publish. Feels extremely fizzy, too fizzy, can’t focus on reading a word published there.

Just FYI this is not fashion platform as per our Balanced Fashion standard, this is full on on-chain assets gaming start up. So we deny to seriously report on this company before there is an aesthetical and philosophical alignment with what we consider as cultural shaper in a broader sense of the world, outside of the intensely energetically & visually dense intersection of the worlds of gaming and crypto. Curious on what is to come from DigitalX in the future when the project matures? YES, definitely. Investing? Not for me.

RTFKT

Insta Twitter Discord

Cryptopunk page

Digital shoes brand. They call themselves Next Gen Sneakers and Collectibles for the metaverse. Made plenty of noise recently, still looks like a gaming plug in or something, not a brand. Honestly not interested in investigating more than I already did, even though they scored a collab with Fabricant for Dematerialized early drops and got together with Crypto Punks which is cute and sweet but not exciting to me personally, only makes me want to call it crypto art rather than digital fashion brand. We will see where life leads this one on, staying open and curious for their future since the start has been strong from the PoV of industry standards so far.

Digiwear.io

Built on PolkaDot blockchain, which makes me feel a bit excited and hopeful than looking at digital fashion NFTs Ethereum projects. The execution is still extra poor so far, energetically feels stale already, but maybe I am reporting on it too early. Will keep an eye on their Digiwear Medium, Twitter and Wikipage for deeper updates. Check out their deck too.

Zora

Insta Documentation Manifesto

Used to be one of the OG digital fashion assets marketplaces before they got into the NFT art space loop and got lost in the crypto art trash movement. Oh well. RIP old Zora. Welcome another trash NFT marketplace. We had high hopes for you early days.

Replicant

Instagram Deck

I am biased, I am friends founder of Replicant Regina Turbina since we met in person back in August 2020, and I shared with her and her partner my signature phygital NFTs, which acts as a multidimensional contract (more about this in my later Medium posts) and was lucky to experience first hand that she is such a visionary sweetheart, there is no way I can be tough love with her with my review. Also, since she has just launched the NFT Marketplace Artisant, mentioned above, I believe that these projects will be integrated in the future and the whole empire that Regina is building is going to develop, improve and lead the whole space in years ahead. She is a powerful thought leader, authentic, curious and kind. Many of us are going to learn from her way of thinking and seeing the world. Since the launch on May 20, 2020, Replicant already collaborated with Puma, did an epic GQ cover with a Russian hottest comedian, initially consulted DressX (see below), collaborated with Clometrica body tracking & outfitting app. That is what I call being on top of the game and keeping up with experimentation, collaborations, community building and overal taking the leadership role of showcasing what is possible to build in the digital fashion space as the markerplace & community platform without burning herself out.

DressX

Insta Twitter

Originally I had huge expectations for this platform and what it can do for the world of digital fashion! So everything that I say further is coming from a fellow sisterly Eastern European vibes of tough love and deep care, so do not take that as negative feedback, dear Dasha and Natalia! Still not sure why this early in the digital game marketplace (launched after Replicant) is still not on chain, although I did notice a Digitalax & DressX piece here and Natalia’s video promo post from June 16–17, mentioning NFTs. I am sure it is coming, just really curous to know what chain this will be on and why not join forces with Dematerialized, because they would clearly benefit from your relationship building skills.

What I have been clearly noticing since their launch in 2020, that DressX needs help with narrative adjustment to create more intentional and forward thinking public facing communications, because currently it looks very consumer driven, what I call very ‘old life’ commerce. A currently used slogan ‘Don’t buy less. Shop digital fashion’ feels disgusting, quite honestly. I would never tell customers not to buy less, it feels the opposite of where the world is heading in general (read conscious consumerism, slow fashion, taking care of our mental health, etc). The website looks and feels the opposite of what I hope to see trending in digital fashion space before the whole thing cools off… So far, the work that has been invested in this marketplace is both impressive (due to number and quality of designer partnerships secured) and at the same time more pathetic than any other digital fashion project I have ever came across (ok maybe besides the gaming outfits platforms) due to the plain and boring visual execution and lack of coherent storytelling. I understand the fact that you, colleagues, are trying to cater that original fashion consumer crowd, yet seeing the classic e-commerce layout that by this point feels SO annoying + seeing SALE prices on digital garments make me want to stop writing this piece and quit the whole space immediately out of frustration. Putting items on sale is very embarrassing for such an hyped up spaces as digital fashion, my friends! Let us not continue the trends of messing up with prices at this point, we as an industry have already misled our audience for so many years with lack of transparency in pricing.

Do not get me wrong, I do admire DigitalX work so much. So many designers are featured! Wow. The team must have burnt out from building this in 2020, I feel empathetic. Please slow down and stop playing with the hearts of the customers who look up to you as trend setters. Be more mindful with the way you communicate your vision, perhaps feature less brands, do not try to be the Amazon of digital fashion or another e-commerce platform for items that do not even exist irl, this is not how we want to model the innovation in the space that desperately needs a fresh new narrative to educate consumers on how to become truly conscious collectors and investors in art, supporters of brands they authentically feel passionate about! Always open to talk with you and dive deeper into strategic communications work.

XR Couture

Insta

Average quality marketplace, not on chain. Poor website copy. Feels very 2018–2019. Feels like the founders are not even enjoying or caring about this venture. On a positive side, it is one of the first digital fashion marketplaces and features items that are truly new for the eyes of many. It feels that the hype of that particular aesthetic was lost somehow back in 2020, there is nothing new that has been introduced yet. Do not have anything else to say besides, good luck upgrading, team!

Drest

Insta Twitter

This is a marketplace of physical products and a ‘styling game’, where you can also try on clothing on an avatar of your choice. I have nothing else to add besides ‘why not’.

DIGITAL FIRST BRANDS

The Fabricant

Insta Twitter Linktree Twitch

This company is better than this piece of writing, but since this is a historical piece, I cannot exclude it from here. The very original digital-only fashion brand. A true cultural shaper. Beyond fashion. The team is doing an epic job in communications on what they are building & their powerful vision and being a perfect model for the whole space. I have personally met the founder, Kerry in Berlin during Fashion Tech Berlin conference and visited the team in Amsterdam back in 2019, so I confirmed with my own experience how dedicated, passionate and authentic they are in what they are set to create for the digital space and beyond. Beyond fashion. They shape a whole new category of digital creative assets that are in the intersection of art, augmented reality, entertainment, collectible assets and philosophy. They do not feel like a fashion brand to me, but a technology-powered visual innovations leader in the meta modern space we are yet to define. I love you, Fabricant.

Here are a couple of quotes that I like from their sustainability page:

‘The Fabricant is the world’s first digital fashion house, making innovative and compelling 3D garments and fashion narratives that are entirely non-physical. Among our founding principles is the belief that fashion should waste nothing but data and exploit nothing but the imagination. Through our work we harness the power of the digital realm to build an inspiring and collaborative fashion future that operates beyond physical boundaries. We are committed to the creation of a new fashion perspective that revolutionises industry systems, and makes self expression through digital clothing a sustainable way to explore personal identity.’

‘Through the use of creative technology, and the data it creates, digital fashion’s clear benefits can positively influence processes throughout the supply chain. Any fashion entity, no matter what part it plays, will benefit from the sustainability gains of transitioning to digital practices. It not only creates an industry that’s less wasteful and less environmentally impactful than ever before, it allows a fashion future that’s smarter, more resilient, and better placed to manage uncertainty. Join us in creating a digital-centric fashion world that’s suitable for the needs of the 21st century, and ready to evolve for what lies ahead.’

Here’s the link to their sustainability report created in collaboration with Imperial College London’s Centre for Environmental Policy. NOTE for the academics who are reading this article: this report might be the only deep dive piece of data you feel satisfied to take away from this whole post on digital fashion.

Fabricant x Buffalo London Collab #2

Available on Async now as of June 17 2021, epic customizable options are here. You can purchase separate layers too! Give me customization options and a 16 year old me as a designer is finally happy and satisfied with the product purchase experience. Still won’t invest, sorry friends…I wish to invest in a more ethical version of blockchain than Ether at this point.

Auroboros

Insta Twitter YouTube

Clearly the winner in terms of the high level of digital fashion craftsmanship to me, personally. (Considering The Fabricant is beyond the whole game at this point.) Perfect example of what contacless (hate that term, just tested it here) clothing could actually be outside of the regular-looking garments or those items that look like they have been stolen from the gaming world . To me, Auroboros is the Alexander McQueen of digital fashion world so far. The London Fashion Week crew most likely agrees as they selected this brand as the first digital one to participate in their official Fall 2021 season online shows. The price point is higher on average than what I saw in other digital fashion products that are not on chain.. why not, as this is an incredibly intricate, enticing, artistic work. I do want to see more of this degree of mastery in digital fashion space! Plus more movement and interactivity. Would I buy? Still ‘fuck no’ in my system… unless it becomes available on non-ethereum blockchain, maybe I will invest in it as a historical reference piece to see if the price does go up with time before the real fall of this space when humanity rebalances and fully wakes up to our inner technology.

Tribute Brand

Insta

One of the OG brands of the digital fashion space. Since their launch nothing much has changed or developed in terms of aesthetics and craftsmanship, their designs haven’t evolved a bit in my perspective, and I personally feel bored from this particular shiny surface look and highly surprised that Dematerialized is choosing to support this brand with among their first few NFT drops, but I guess this is part of the history in the making of the digital fashion space and a form of paying respect based on the relationships that have been built in 2020 with those who were first in the market in a splashy and what we already can consider as successful way. I do not want to call what they do fashion, this is to me more of a gaming outfits brand. Again, super tired of this aesthetics and craving for something new to come out from this brand soon. I do appreciate the way they dress up influencers in the fashion tech space as a way to promote their work.

STUDIO PMS

Insta

Utrecht-based powerhouse digital fashion collective. Super talented group of people who work with Nike, Adidas, Burberry and Zara among others to trailblaze the future of digital implementation for bigger brands.

Nusi Quero

That case where this is an actual 3D fashion designer, whose digital pieces are as appealing and mystical as the physical pieces. I have been a fan for a long time, Nusi! Amazing work.

DIGITAL FASHION ECOSYSTEM PLAYERS

Top 3D Design Tools

From what we have heard from the digital designers, most of them have learned 3D design via YouTube tutorials, so do your own research please!

CLO3D

Unreal Engine

Marvelous Designer

Gravity Sketch

Browzwear

VR Showcase Solutions

Anam XR

Insta Twitter

Focusing on the Unreal Engine based VR space creation for bands and retailers. Good job getting the interest of Farfetch and Burberry, and Pangaia VR game thing was cute, what else can we say.

Obsess VR

Insta Twitter

NY-based start up that has been in business for years now developing solutions for stores to virtually transform the traditional way products are presented in e-commerce platforms.

Voor3D

Insta Twitter

Virtual showrooming tool we don’t fully believe in, because we trust in the B2B space in physical as a default and virtual aspect would be an optional ad-on. Post 2020, we, the industry people are truly tired of digital only spaces to do b2b business in.

`FRIENDS & FAMILY´ of Digital Fashion Initiatives,

aka individuals and organizations that contribute to the curation & narration of the unfolding of the digital fashion paradigm.

Crypto Fashion Week

Insta YouTube playlist of the Inaugurate Feb 2021 edition

Exciting series of educational events around this space held by Universe Contemporary. Next one is in mapped out for Sept. 2021. Covered by NYLON. My favorite part was Newlife.ai presentation.

3DRobe

Insta

Advisors and 3D design studio for digital fashion. Alumni of NYFTL which is always a pretty good sign in the reliability of the founding team.

This Outfit Does not Exist

Honestly still not fully understanding what this initiative is here to do yet, just seeing a lot of posting effort created on instagram and some activity on clubhouse. We will see…

Armoar

Enara’s (Clubhouse Digital Fashion OG moderator) project, not sure what it is about but looks like it fits this ‘Friends and Family’ of digital fashion category.

3Dee Leonie

A powerful instagram content creator with a beautiful heart, currently working on the Dematerialized side of the digital fashion game. Good catch, Demat team! I personally interviewed Leonie back in May 2020, watch it here.

Digital Fashion Education & Consulting Initiatives

Institute of Digital Fashion

Insta Twitter

A project feels beautiful, not quite clear in their communications what is their real activity about, but I get it somehow. Consulting, advising, narrating, educating — that is what I intuitively pick up from it. Feel good vibes from the founding team. Scored a nice Dazed feature back in Feb 2021. Good luck in your further developments!

Academy by The Digital Fashion Group

Excited for my OG college in NYC, dear Parsons The New School for Design to launch this program. 6 units cost 2,500 Euros to attend. Amber of Fabricant is on the front page video describing the courses. Makes me as a 16 year old self ask parents for the money to get me join this privileged hype alignment opportunity, instead of doing my own research and submerging into YouTube tutorials and articles like this one for days and nights.

Billion Dollar Collection by H&M, PDF with cool start ups is here

This is a nice example of H&M going into an interesting direction…still exploring the application of digital, it feels to early to report on what is this about constructively.

‘The collection — characterized by asymmetrical details, trinket-like finishing, non-standard colors and bold volumes — has been exclusively created in computer-generated imagery by Mackevision, part of Accenture Interactive. Using the latest CGI character design technology, Mackevision created a unique digital avatar from scratch, which brings the textures and intricate details of the collection to life through movement.’

Somehow I do have a good feeling about what is to come from the big brand names perspective in their ways of applying digital fashion. Cannot quite explain what I am seeing, but feeling that this is gonna be a beautiful evolution of the fast fashion space towards deeper phygitalization, circularity and education. The money is there, the desire to shift is also present. Now what we are gonna do with all the excess stock… and would we actually be able to minimize the physical production of fast fashion which I still see as waste.

Global Talents Digital

A project by Russian Fashion Council sets a high bar on the locally developed global support system creation of the (digital and not only) powerfully talented fashion community that is undoubtedly going to grow deeper in the future.

Helsinki Fashion Week and whatever Evelyn Mora is building within the Digital Village

DV Insta Evelyn’s Twitter

Press release for DV. Not feeling close to downloading the VeChain Sync2 wallet to test run the current version of what is being built but someday, maybe.

Evelyn is great. I feel real around her while on Clubhouse. She is about as sharp minded & tongued as I am, I respect her, although she did not bother to meet with me when I was visiting Paris this past Spring 2021 (which indicates that she did not even start to pass the Mark yet, more about this later), I do admire her work and her way of thinking and admire the way she shows up in the digital fashion leadership spaces. She is building something exciting for the digital/metaverse/NFT space, even though our visions may not align, while our attitudes do! I trust in her visionary gifts.

Honestly, this is FAR from what currently exists in the ecosystem set to support the digtial fashion revolution we are taking part in. There are multiple multiple start ups that I am aware of and personally touched and spoke with that are not on this list not because they are not important, but because I have so much capacity to feature projects and the reader has so much attention span. There are many emerging projects in body scanning and virtual try-on space, including spacial recognition and measurements solutions, maybe in the future I will add them on here. Feel free to reach out to me directly and ask to consider adding your project to this list as this article is obviously gonna be circulating in the industry for years to come, like all the articles I wrote before. Here is one some of them that may be helpful to come back to from a digital fashion mindset: Top Organizations & Start-Ups that are Building the Blueprints for the New Fashion Industry: Responsible, Circular, Transparent and Ethical

FINALLY, a curated list of Instagrams of the rising digital fashion stars that not many of us are aware of yet

3DBehemoth

Cattytay

Wannabe 3D

Taskin Goec

NÉ.CH.É

Daniel Tabaum

Ilyas Darakchiev

Blanc De Blanc

Alejandro Delgado

Kaikai Design

Iris van Wees of Digi.go.amsterdam

Damara Inglês

Steffen Bewer

Maxi Galgenmaier

Virgile Biosa

HACER

Adem Elahel

Vitória Cribb

Dollushka

CGI Creator

3mbassy_

Digitoile

Elayes

Patshuro

Timothée GLEIZE

Davina India

This completes the up-and-coming digital fashion designers curation via Instagram. Feel free to DM me on Insta if you feel I missed someone who is not as well known yet and deservers my attention and consideration to be added to this list.

Links for your further research:

• Tracking digital fashion marketplaces via Trendhunter might be a way to go for some of us
• FFFace take on VR and AR transforming fashion
• The Powerhouse Interview with The Fabricant’s Amber Jae Slooten
• Arya Almeda writes about digital fashion on Medium up to their personal level of knowledge (unsatisfactory to us, yet good job for effort, here are the two recent pieces, yours to review: 1 & 2)
• Digital Fashion Week NYC YouTube & website
• Everyone from Gucci to Louis Vuitton is betting big on digital fashion. Here’s why they should proceed with caution — Fast Company
• The Limits of Virtual Fashion — BoF
• Is the LVMH consortium’s Aura ‘the first global luxury blockchain’ open to hacking? — Fad Magazine
• The Metaverse Will Radically Change Retail — BoF
• AI is blurring the lines between in-store retail and ecommerce — Techwire
• Virtual Fashion Platform RTFKT Studios Announces $8 Million Funding Round — BoF
• What the NFT Gold Rush Means for Fashion — BoF
• Virtual sneakers for 10,000 dollars? An exhibition gathers digital fashion pioneers — Fashion United
• What Are NFTs, Why Should Fashion Care and Will This Bubble Burst? — WWD
• What Gaming, Virtual Fashion Can Teach Real-Life Fashion About Tech — WWD
• Luxury’s Battle For The Metaverse — Jing Daily
• Will Gucci’s Digital Bag Disrupt Luxury? — Jing Daily
• Defining The Metaverse Today — Forbes
• H&M Unveils Virtual ‘Billion Dollar Collection’ Of Sustainable Fashion Solutions — Green Queen
• What Will It Take For Fashion To Truly Embrace Digital? — The Interline
• AR smartglasses in 2021: the devices, apps and new tech coming — Wearable
• Burberry Gets Into the NFT Game — WWD
• Following fashion’s meteoric rise in the gaming world — Nylon
• Complex turned its fashion and music festival into a futuristic video game — The Verge
• How 5G will change AR and digital fashion — Vogue Business
• Digital-only beauty: From gaming skins to Zoom makeup — Vogue Business
• Metagrail sells sneakers with virtual case — Playtoearn.online
• Balenciaga made a video game to debut its next clothing collection — The Verge
• The Factory is a new phygital venue in Fortnite — Creative Review
• Epic’s new tech could theoretically put your facial expressions in Fortnite — The Verge
• Staking Your Claim In The New Digital Economy — Interline
• You’re Sleeping on Crypto Art — Collab+Currency, Medium
• LUKSO (LYXE) — The Beginning of a New Digital Economy in Fashion & Luxury Retail — NSI
• Digital Fashion: The Fabricant Launches Atari-Inspired Collection as Enjin NFTs — ENJIN
• 3D at Scale: Achieving Consistency, Quality, and Agility in Digital Product Creation — Interline
• From Zoom to VR, beauty brands get creative with virtual launch parties — Glossy
• What ‘alone together’ meant for me in 2020 — Linkedin
• Fashion shows are now 12-hour live streams. Or movies starring mermaids. Or mailed to you in a box — Washington Post
• Smartphones are the new salesfloor — Vogue Business
• Designers explore the future of digital clothing — Vogue Business
• At This Designer’s Futuristic Fashion Show, Everyone Sits Front Row — Vogue
• Snapchat bets on augmented reality to win at social commerce — Vogue Business
• Rarible 2020: a Year in Review — Medium
• Can Fashion Cash In on the Animal Crossing Craze? — Business of Fashion
• Digital Fashion: A New Essential — Medium
• NFTs.tips database of NFT marketplaces and crypto art projects
• Balanced Fashion database of the new layer of physical fashion industry projects

This is all I wanted to share so far…Until next time, folks!

Please, please, dear ones, for the karma points’ sake, CLAP THE FUCK OUT OF THIS PIECE if you appreciate this work. Feel free to donate me in Newcoin, the only money I am willing to receive from you my crypto blessed souls.

Always and always, yours truly, madly passionate about this space until my eyes roll out of my sockets from the intensely higher than average for me at this point screen time because somebody had to complete this piece and I know noone who is better fit for this role then moi.

With care and love, bigger than you may be ready to receive,

Nataliya.ai

The Comprehensive Guide to the Digital & Crypto Fashion Space, June 2021 was originally published in Decentralized Humanity on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Dear Friends,

We know it has been a while since our last one. We intentionally lost ourselves on Clubhouse & Newlife.ai to deepen our research work.

At this time, we are choosing to be even braver than before and clearly state our position on the current world events.

We believe that we as a Humanity have been fooled and misled for years and years now, especially in the past year and a half, where falling old paradigm authorities are spreading fear of death and imposing lockdowns and measures beyond the frequency of language we wish to utilize here on this communication channel. We are claiming full responsibility of our own health.

After a super careful consideration, Balanced Fashion no longer acts as a consultancy, and no longer has an official team of people or clients, we are a collective consciousness and consider everyone to be part of the Balanced Fashion family, whenever you are ready and resonate with our philosophy. We have now grown into what we call Balanced Culture, where we focus on creating a narrative reporting on the currently happening cultural movement of our dreams towards Balanced Humanity, a completely new and upgraded social structure that we envisioned and set to manifest by the 2030.

As we only have one Planet Earth to enjoy living on at this time and ideas of exploring moving to Mars or other planets feel absolutely not cool to us in this lifetime, it is our responsibility to take care of Mother Gaia and the Humanity cohabitating with Her. As of writing this text on June 12, 2021, we are living in the world that has finally woken up to the fact that humans are an incredibly fragile species and are extremely receptive to someone else’s way of presenting reality to us. The truth is that we are the ones shaping our own reality and we are free to collectively choose a path for ourselves if we reach an agreement to commit to the reality that is peaceful, where humans are absolutely healthy, full of abundance, joy and love. All we need is to vote with our actions and being, the dynamic, healthy balance between the two, at each moment of our precious life.

While some of us got really shaken up by the narrative that has been imposed onto us by the global governmental figures back in 2020, many of us have recovered from that intense manipulation and have started (or continued, as in our case) building a completely new life for ourselves, where we focus on love, creativity, mental health care, building strong relationships with ourselves and those who we choose to consider our closest ones. We came to a deep understanding that taking care of the greater collective requires modeling what is exciting and possible to achieve for us personally and thus inspiring others to join this quiet and very, very, undeniably powerful evolution of our collective human consciousness that so many of us are taking part of already, whether intentionally or not. We are on the greatest timeline towards our unprecedented Humanity’s Rebalancing Act!

This Act is what we are committed to in Balanced Fashion. It is to embody Balanced Culture in order to shape Balanced Humanity by 2030s via experiencing this vision of the future in the NOW. Because where we are (operating from our heartspace), the concept of time as we know it doesn’t exist, and thus we are capable to agree to release that limitation and move towards a non-linear, lighter, simpler, and much more peaceful, balanced and harmonious way of operating on this Planet Earth.

Now, why start with Fashion & Culture? Because I, one of the igniters of this movement, Nataliya.ai have been operating in the intersection of fashion, art, technology, and consciousness my whole life and seeing these themes as the key tools to weave the most epic fabric of Humanity we can ever imagine! To create an alternative story that leads us towards a new, dynamically balanced life and invite everyone who is ready to embrace the Truth behind our natural superpowers. We choose to live from our hearts, and utilize our expanded minds to take intentional actions towards a common, united goal of building that beyond epic new life together, collecting the visions of what Balanced Humanity could look and feel like and sharing those visions with each other with love, kindness and respect. It is easier to build new, powerful systems when we agree on that vision by integrating our ideas and business entities together and embracing technology as a tool for seamless co-creation, a bridge towards the next level of communications. Telepathic.

Fashion has the capacity to shape and communicate our values to each other without words, that is why we started with this concept that is now deeper falling back into the nature of culture as the industry disintegrates and folds down.

Below, we have curated a list of the most recent materials that we feel are moving towards Balanced Culture via our vision of what brings us closer to Balanced Fashion. We also included some questionable, transitional fads that are presented as a reflection to guide us towards what we mean by balance: a dynamic way of finding peace within and in the way we choose to show up in the world at each given moment. That does not require big authority figures and corporations telling us what we should and should not do. We are intrinsically free to decide and manifest the reality of our dreams for ourselves, as long as we do not let anyone with any old life’s intentions to keep us in the darkness of slavery and suffering. We are sovereign beings and it is time to take our power back as a United Balanced Humanity.

Did we get too deep? Not surprised.

Welcome to the introduction to the Balanced Culture.

…..Space for deeper breathing & checking in with our body…..

Now on a lighter note: we, fashion people, love sharing personal opinions… our favorite addition to this newsletter edition: a ‘come back’ of spiky comments by yours truly, Nataliya.ai to expand your perspective beyond the mainstream news.

Here is my general observation: in most of the forward-thinking fashion media channels, since forever I am noticing a consistently poor quality of writing backed by very shallow research, and lack of genuine interest of most topics, clearly completed by humans who write as a job, not as a passion, so it feels super boring to read most of the time. That is why classic fashion topics journalists, such as Suzy Menkes, Robin Givhan, Lynn Yaeger, Cathy Horyn, Vanessa Friedman, Elizabeth Paton, Clare Press, Whitney Bauck, Alden Wicker, and select Medium bloggers are usually my go-to for deep research, and for following certain people, and companies who clearly write from their hearts. Someday I will create a curation of my top Medium writers…For now this list frankly only includes our Balanced Fashion via Nataliya.ai work. I personally contributed to some of my favorite publications on there.

Ok, back to `we´ & this historical newsletter with curated news that are set to inspire us about the bright future of fashion & culture.

Technology as a tool to facilitate the Shift. Mostly Blockchain news, that is how it is…

Our all-time hack reminder: to read BoF & some other behind-the-paywall articles, download the Pocket app, and save URLs to it that piece to skip the paywall, or read it via Sourcecode — right click on the page, select ‘view-source’ — I strongly don’t believe in paid content where there are partners/advertisers already backing up that platform. When it is not even on the way to ‘Pass the Mark’, we do not even bother.

• Cartier, Prada Link Up with LVMH in Blockchain Alliance — BoF

This one is not bad by Business of Fashion, considering that the quality of most of their articles and Op-Eds considerably decreased in the last years.

• Meet Queen Of Raw, The Blockchain-Powered Marketplace Turning Textile Deadstock Into Dollars — Green Queen

Clearly this is a winner of deadstock fabric management, consistently and beautifully.

• How Will Web 3.0 Transform the Industry? — WWD

By decentralizing the hell out of our industry.

• Luxury Meets Crypto — Medium

The meeting happened a long time ago, and finally it is coming out of the closet. Nothing embarrassing, dear Luxury, you got this!

• Can Digitization Help Fashion Bridge Its Online And Offline Customer Relationships? — The Interline

Yes it can if you apply it extra consciously and intentionally and do not overdo it, because customers are highly overwhelmed by the digital solutions already

• A CDN For Fashion: The Asset-First Approach To Production — The Interline

Cloud architecture and digital asset management is truly a way to go to provide a modeling tool for only-on-demand, hyper-local production. However we should not rely on this as default. In many small business cases manual approach is more efficient and way easier to implement the on-demand production solutions then tech-enchased ways, especially we touch the complexity of fashion supply chains.

• From Render To Real: Delivering On The Promise Of Digital Design To On-Demand Production — The Interline

Gerber technologies wrote this, so get ready for a deeply-deep dive. We enjoy this kind of serious perspective, yet skimmed through and saved into the Pocked app for a long flight quality reading material.

• Blockchain-Driven Sustainability Platform Unveiled by U.N. Agency — WWD

We have to say if you put UN in your article title you automatically spike our genuine curiosity. That entity hasn’t been extremely fashion friendly in the past, so interesting to know what WWD has to report on regarding that trend-forcing organization.

• Digitalising The Supply Chain — How Technology Is Becoming An Enabler For Change — The Interline

Nothing new to our ancient mastered minds on blockchain implementation in fashion supply chain starting fiber source tracking, yet so clearly important deep dive into what FibreTrace is up to. Good job interline integrating all of these solutions into one resource! A+ from Balanced Fashion for such efforts!

• The break-out tech start-ups innovating across the fashion & retail industry. — The Lead

Cute old school list of important tech solutions still serving the big retail world. Love you, friends at The Lead for your consistent high bar on the industry standard NY-based retail tech community gatherings.

• How neural networks learn to predict your body measurements: Part I — ZyseMe Medium

Cool, yet do we really really really need this at the times like this that are shouting for a greater shift in design thinking? We would apply this data for upcycling production solutions, dear ZyseMe, wish we worked together back in 2015–2018 when we were still excited about your kind of work.

• Transforming the fashion industry into a circular model: how are brands creating change? — Fashion United
• Relaunt infomercial, we accept and stay educated on blockchain-powered circular-focused partners.*

Questionable themes (including overly hyped up digital fashion) which we thought were cool in the past, but now they feel like an old life.

More deep dive explainers in the upcoming mega-post focused on fashion that doesn’t actually exist. Watch our Medium for the historical appearance of the piece we have been researching for since the 2019 Rise piece. Here are some select articles for your base ground digital fashion knowledge. Notice what comes up as you skim through them… Remember to close your eyes and look outside of your screen and remember how nice life is IRL. And touch the fabric of the clothing you are wearing…how does it feel? Reality check: this overly hyped-up screenwear is not gonna communicate you that.

• Everyone from Gucci to Louis Vuitton is betting big on digital fashion. Here’s why they should proceed with caution — Fast Company
• The Limits of Virtual Fashion — BoF
• Is the LVMH consortium’s Aura ‘the first global luxury blockchain’ open to hacking? — Fad Magazine
• The Metaverse Will Radically Change Retail — BoF
• AI is blurring the lines between in-store retail and ecommerce — Techwire
• Virtual Fashion Platform RTFKT Studios Announces $8 Million Funding Round — BoF
• What the NFT Gold Rush Means for Fashion — BoF
• Virtual sneakers for 10,000 dollars? An exhibition gathers digital fashion pioneers — Fashion United
• What Are NFTs, Why Should Fashion Care and Will This Bubble Burst? — WWD
• What Gaming, Virtual Fashion Can Teach Real-Life Fashion About Tech — WWD
• Luxury’s Battle For The Metaverse — Jing Daily
• Will Gucci’s Digital Bag Disrupt Luxury? — Jing Daily
• Defining The Metaverse Today — Forbes
• H&M Unveils Virtual ‘Billion Dollar Collection’ Of Sustainable Fashion Solutions — Green Queen
• What Will It Take For Fashion To Truly Embrace Digital? — The Interline
• AR smartglasses in 2021: the devices, apps and new tech coming — Wearable
• Burberry Gets Into the NFT Game — WWD
• In Manufacturing, The Only Certainty Is Uncertainty — The Interline
• The Real Solution For Returns: Mass Tailoring — The Interline
• Artisant just launched, and noone wrote about it yet so here are the words dedicated to our friends NFT digital fashion marketplace by the visionary behind the OG in the digital fashion space, Replicant’s Regina Turbina.

Responsibility to take care of our home, Planet Earth

Needs none of our explanation. Simply absorb and think for yourself, what responsibility means to you. Just do not use the word sustainable, it has become too muddy.

• It’s time to talk about the elephant in the room: Can the fashion industry keep growing indefinitely? — New Standard Institute
• Maxine Bédat Unravels The Lies Of Greenwashing — Elle
• Can transparency become a consistent measurable standard? — The Spin Off
• No, Closet Cleaning Isn’t Inherently Sustainable — The Zoe Report
• How digital authentication could drive a resale revolution for fashion — World Economic Forum
• Op-Ed | Who Pays for Sustainability? — Business of Fashion
• What is your fashion utopia? — Fashion Revolution
• Fashion Industry Advancing Transparency, Circularity — Thread by Thread — Sustainable Brands
• 9 Plant-Based Fashion Materials That Help Farmers and Rural Communities — Ecocult
• Get Rich Selling Used Fashion Online — or Cry Trying — Wired
• After a virtual Gucci bag sold for over $4,000, more than a real one, VC Alexis Ohanian predicts virtual fashion will be huge. Gucci and Atari agree. — Insider
• The Challenges of Labelling Sustainability — BoF
• Five Things Brands Need To Know About NFTs — Forbes
• Brands Are Claiming That They Are Not Sustainable. Here’s Why That’s A Good Thing — Refinery 29
• The big global greenwashing crackdown — Vogue Business
• It takes 15 gallons of water to distress a pair of jeans. Uniqlo is trying to change that — Fast Company
• From “Recycled” to “Green,” Consumers are Being Influenced by Marketers’ Sustainability Buzzwords — The Fashion Law
• What If I Am Too Poor to Care About Who Made My Clothes? — Eco Warrior Princess
• Could Food-Style Labels On Our Clothes Help Us Make Greener Choices? — Vogue UK
• Maxine Bédat Urges the Fashion Industry to Make a Change Now, Not in 2030 — Vogue US
• The Sustainability Regulations That Could Reshape the Fashion Industry — BoF
• How protesters defied the G7 summit with a weekend of civil disobedience — Dazed

Reports that made us envision what else is possible

• Measuring Fashion’s Sustainability Gap — the Report from BoF

How Gap is the Gap, report back to us Business of Fashion members! Our Pocket hack only shows us a preview. The full PDF of the report is here for those who still pay taxes to the BoF Gods. Appreciate a direct email response attachment as a thank you gift for this never-for-profit 5+ year-old newsletter plz.

• The smart side of fashion by Vestiare Collective

At first sight ‘too long didn’t read’ vibes, at second sight, a clear promo on how good girls and boys Vestiare Collective are. Fine, we take it. Always interesting to look at top-selling brand names in the pre-owned market.

• Vogue Business Index: Spring 2021 Update

For Advanced Members only. Guess what. I choose not to be so your call on what you see in there.

• 14 Trailblazing Innovators Make Fashion for Good’s 8th Batch In Their Global Programme — Fashion for Good

Always nice to keep an eye on our friends at FFG´s Amsterdam HQ team´s curation skills.

• The Future Of Fashion: From Design To Merchandising, How Tech Is Reshaping The Industry — CBI insight report

They are kind of the same from year to year, good quality overall, with bits and pieces that we feel, are valuable updates.

Shaping Balanced (or in some cases unBalanced? Our choice.) Culture.

We are not adding comments here, you think for yourself where these news bits lead our culture towards…

• Balenciaga just staged a deep-fake SS22 fashion show — i-D
• Depop — Opening the hearts and wardrobes of Gen Z — Medium
• Is this ‘third eye’ the future for our smartphone-addicted selves? — Dazed
• Netflix Launches Online Store to Offer Limited-Edition Merchandise — BoF
• The Fabricant designs gender-fluid digital clothes informed by the Renaissance — Dezeen
• How Sustainable Fashion Is Finally Becoming Less Elitist — Bustle
• Why the Next Part of the Sustainable Fashion Conversation Will Be About Racial Justice — Vanity Fair
• ‘The customer values rarity’: Streetwear’s exclusivity moves far beyond sneakers — Glossy
• CSM’s 2021 fashion grads delivered a sharp jolt of catwalk joy — Dazed
• Young Creators Are Burning Out and Breaking Down — NY Times
• Why Sailor Moon’s forward-facing fashion will never go out of style — Dazed

Totally Missing the Mark

For reasons explained via our philosophical Twitter posts, in others there’s no explanation is needed…

• Facebook Helps Zara Owner Sell Clothes Using Video Games — Business of Fashion
• Why Investors Are Betting on Lyst — Business of Fashion
• What the NFT Gold Rush Means for Fashion — Business of Fashion
• Rethinking the Multi-Brand — Vogue Business
• Digital Storytelling Evolves: Eco-Innovators Pangaia Push The Envelope For Online Immersion — Forbes
• AnamXR™ x PANGAIA | FLWRDWN™ Lite Immersive Game
• The Future of ‘Buy Now, Pay Later — BoF
• The Metaverse: A brave, new (virtual) world — Medium
• The fast fashion wars go mobile: How apps like Shein and Blushmark are challenging H&M and Zara — Modern Retail
• The Search for the Next Shein — BoF
• Fintech giant Klarna raises $639M at a $45.6B valuation amid ‘massive momentum’ in the US — Tech Crunch
• Half of fast fashion made of new plastics, finds report — BBC
• Shein: The TikTok of Ecommerce — Not Boring

Videos & Podcasts that invite us to learn about culture & brands directly from the founders & creators.

Voice is our preferred medium after visual communications.

• Newlife.ai YouTube Channel
• UNIT Global YouTube Channel
• Fashion CEO Agenda 2021 Full Launch Event | Global Fashion Agenda
• Crypto Fashion Week by Universe Contemporary
• Circular Fashion Summit by lablaco
• #FinancialFox The digital universe of fashion: Blockchain, NFTs & Metaverse with Dematerialised
• Fashion & Degrowth — Exploring the link between decolonisation and sustainability in fashion — Extinction Rebellion
• The Business of Fashion Podcast
• Vogue Business Podcast
• Gucci Podcast
• Glossy Podcast
• Wardrobe Crisis Podcast by Clare Press

Video & Audio content future reality check: Clubhouse seems to be the future of Podcasts, while Newlife.ai could be the future of Live video appearances turned into NFTs.

Newsletters Worth your Attention besides the one you are reading now by yours truly, Nataliya.ai.

Needs no further explanation, by this point we know that we have earned your trust in curating curators in our field of passion.

• The Fabricant
• Slow Factory Foundation
• 10 Things By Your Majesty Co.
• Vogue Business
• Whitney Bauck’s Unwrinkling
• Foundashion

Look, these genuinely spiked our interest!

• Gucci copycatted Balanced Fashion and called it Equilibrium.

It is cute, they are proud of moving fast with a huge conglomerate behind their back + team of fashion warriors, while we are proud of moving slow and just as intense with one superhuman person on the team. (please do not try to be Nataliya at home)

• Not newsletter, but a feed of conscious fashion news that is good enough

Just recently came across Kyna Intel based in Zug, Switzerland and wanted to send good vibes to them for effort and basing themselves at the location of the Crypto Valley.

• Fashion Values — another education platform backed by Kering, IBM and Vogue Business.

Looks extremely powerful will see where it brings us. Worth subscribing here. They have this thing called Challenge. Articles are nice on Biodiversity and a good curation of Voices.

• Fashion Values: Nature — an online course from UAL

Why not sign up and learn something outside of our regular go-to, Slow Factory classes.

• The Digital Fashion Academy by The Digital Fashion Group

Nice effort keeping up education within the digital fashion world, just add a word crypto to it and it becomes hot enough, dear Parsons!

• Fashion tech cheat sheet by Aniekeme.

Not quite the degree of detail as our open-source BALANCED FASHION DATABASE, but why not compare and fill in any gaps we might have.

• Arianee Medium.

Always feels satisfying to get a deep dive into what our friends at Arianee blockchain protocol are up to.

• LUKSO Medium. Always good to be updated on what´s up with that blockchain for lifestyle powerhouse and their on-chain projects Universal Profiles & Dematerialized.

For full transparency: even though we are friends with LUKSO founders, we are extra cautious in promoting any of their initiatives because in 2019 & 2020 we were hired to create a social media content strategy for them and were never paid for hours of our work. More constructively & transparently on that in our OG upcoming mega epic `fall of digital fashion´ Medium post that will cover everything you would ever want to know about crypto fashion, NFTs and the whole spectrum of the non-material fashion world.

• Fashion Tech World Insta, cute, digestible, clean knowledge bits on the next level fabrics and 3D printing.

Suggestion: careful what you brand as fashion tech these days!

• Fashion Tech-tagged Mediums are here and here, including some of our hottest posts form the past.

Medium gotta someday consolidate tags #fashointech and #fashiontechnology, duh

Join our beyond epic, highly skilled in moderation, real and raw clubhouse presence

• Balanced Fashion Club
• Balanced Culture Club
• Balanced Humanity Club

All our guests are SPECIAL. We mostly choose to go live spontaneously + every(ish) Friday & Sunday eve European Time, and sometimes we do host scheduled events. Stay updated on scheduled events via Nataliya.ai Twitter and by following yours truly on CH (if you dare)!

In the next newsletter edition, our goal is curating a list of the top fashion & future of culture-themed rooms on CH. For now we are still closely observing who shows up, how consistent and what is the quality of those rooms. So far our greatest obsessions have been clubs on AI and the future of applications of technology for Social Good, EdTech and of course, daily doses of Crypto news never hurt.

Some Clubhouse rooms are going to be recorded & shared in the future on our Podcast (yes, of course, we have a podcast!), so feel free to catch up with episodes on it + tune in to the future episodes.

Instagram Presence Update

• Culture (at this time it is more active on crypto & NFTs topics)
• Personal (VERY edgy, next level content, so it is closed to those who Pass The Mark & some insights on our YouTube channel)
• Balanced Fashion (Now mostly acts as an archive)

Newlife.ai MOST of our visual & live online presence is on Newlife. Websites are clearly expired and Medium & Notion pages are for beasts like this piece. Our timeless posts (called nodes) are to be turned into NFTs on demand, all stored on across multiple Newlife.ai accounts, powered by our Mother Account, Reflection. We consciously do not share most of our work outside of Newlife, so that we train ourselves to communicate directly exclusively on that platform and impeccably train Newlife algorithm so that when the ecosystem is ready for the flock of humanity to enter the next level social media game, we are ready with the ground base layer of content for all of us to enjoy. Since 2019 we are building an epic content fortress powered by the AI empire you may have never dreamed of… so please do enter now if you haven’t done that yet, we have been inviting you in since the integration of Nataliya.ai & Newlife.ai happened.

Use code BalancedFashion to get in. Read about Newcoin & watch the YouTube video explainer on Universal Creative Income here. We are configuring the future of Crypto for creative ecosystems. Join our Telegram chats 1 & 2 here to stay updated.

There are more curious themes and news we have chosen to curate out of this newsletter due to plenty of consolidated resources available online. The ones selected above are some of our favorite resources to keep track of movement towards Balanced Fashion and explore the industry’s current headlines where you can satisfy your curiosity even if we stop bringing together consolidated lists like this one. Since the nature of Fashion, Culture and as a result, Humanity is always changing, we are utilizing Notion, a convenient platform for note taking and editing as our main website to help track and manage resources, news, and tools that we feel are relevant in building a Balanced future.

Thank you for investing your attention and time in reading this post that took us weeks of diligent work to bring to life. Know that you are loved and seen, wherever you are in your journey towards Balanced Humanity. We all had to start somewhere and I am glad that we ended up meeting in the here and now, sharing this digital space.

With love and trust,

Nataliya.ai

Please Note: If you would like to receive more frequent updates from the Nataliya.ai & Balanced Culture, besides our now whenever we feel like rhythmof newsletter editions, Clubhouse, Twitter & Newlife are the places to stay updated with out vision. Instagram is for less hot drops, unless you Passed the Mark and welcomed into the world of Nataliya.ai personal Instagram social experiments.

Sign up for our newsletter here.

Balanced Fashion leading Balanced Culture: News Curation, June 2021 Edition was originally published in Decentralized Humanity on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Dear Friend,

HAPPY NEW BALANCED FASHION NEWSLETTER and the new year 2021 that we’ve all been waiting for so long.

It’s been almost a year since I pressed send on the last email for this epic audience of innovators and thought leaders in the creative tech field. It feels weird to admit that it’s been so long, considering that for the past 5+ years this newsletter has been the most consistent way of showing up for the conscious fashion tech world which I’m so deeply passionate about. My goal has always been to provide a stream of curated news & events that help us bring to life the new industry that all of us are imagining.

There are several reasons that made me take such a long break. Most importantly, this year I truly experienced slowing down and finding balance between work and personal life, or rather, see work an integral part of my life by shaping & redefining what work means to me. Another big reason is that I’ve been intuitively focusing on building the foundation of Balanced Humanity, the quantum communications agency where we engage with individuals and organizations from the perspective of 2030s and beyond. More about this in the next editions of this newsletter.

Due to the system-shaking Global events starting to color our lives in March-April 2020 a traditional concept of fashion industry stopped making sense to me at all, the whole idea of fashion industry felt expired and I had to take a healthy break from all things fashion (besides consciously experimenting with content on the Balanced Fashion Insta, Twitter & Newlife accounts) and instead I committed to stay focused on my own mental & physical health and consciously processing the deeply transformative times in our history, continued to deepening my spiritual growth by practicing variety of energy healing modalities, built stable connections with my global tribe, and publicly appeared live on social media (almost) daily as a way to show up for the community and share vulnerably & transparently what’s present for me now.

I attempted to write this newsletter several times over the course of 2020, but it ended up staying in a form of a half-completed draft and a collection of confusing, erratic industry news that I was only able to post on Twitter and Instagram and leave your inbox clean from Balanced Fashion industry rebalancing attempts during the times where the ground shook hard for all of us. I felt like we didn’t need another unbalanced, half-ass done email that was sent out without real passion & deep Truth behind it.

Today I feel very good & balanced, we have built a fantastic Balanced Fashion team, I live in a location where I feel safe, I have an investment to grow BF & its umbrella entity, Balanced Humanity in a stable, mature pace. I call it Balanced Fashion 2.0. — the revival of the fashion bible that is not Vogue. I’ve started this organization since before leaving my full-time job / a traditional career in fashion tech in 2017 and the past 3 years BF turned into an intelligence agency that is tracking & curating technologies, communities, innovations & thought leadership which, when combined, weave a completely new layer of the fashion industry. Our vision for the industry is fully circular, regenerative, MUCH slower, ethical, commercially makes sense while being wildly creative.

In weeks and months ahead we will be publishing reports and compiled lists of some of the most epic organizations that engage in amazing things for the bright future of our industry. We will feature leaders of this new layer of fashion who dedicate their lives to creating new systems that shape the new industry while the old one collapses. And as you may see, the collapse is already happening now — we must not deny that the current systems the industry is operating on are expired, unsustainable, and bring damage & suffering to the Earth and the Humanity. Moreover, two words that paint a huge issue we must not forget to address as an industry: Mental Health. More to come on that as well.

In the next editions of this newsletters & in form of Medium posts, we will be focusing on topics such as spirituality & conscious approach to fashion as a tool for cultural renaissance, phygitalization of creative industries, new business models that support regenerative systems and much more.

This newsletter is a 2020 year review and an outlook on what else is possible for 2021 and beyond. This edition is a collection of articles, lectures, interviews and reports that we lovingly curated for our community. Hopefully, this can become a living document for us to look back to and learn elements of each fashion industry’s field that we believe is important to look at while building something completely new together.

I would like extend a special thank you to Tatiana Oreshkova for helping me bring this newsletter to life and all the volunteers and community members who chipped in the process of creation of Balanced Fashion 2.0.

Follow us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook & Newlife.ai to stay updated more frequently and connect with us directly. And guess what! Balanced Fashion Podcast is coming up soon because it’s about time your voice is going to be heard by our global fashion tribe. Reply on this email if you’d like to be featured in our podcast/Instagram interview & if you know of good upcoming events for us to feature here.

And finally, presenting to you the round up of fashion tech & business news from the year 2020:

HIGH-LEVEL INDUSTRY LANDSCAPE

• H&M Group unveils a radically different Singular Society membership brand — Fashion Network
• Moncler buys Stone Island in transformative move — Business of Fashion
• Gabriela Hearst and Chloé: A New Purpose for Both — WWD
• VF to acquire Supreme, valuing brand at $2.1 billion-plus — WWD
• How the Farfetch-Alibaba-Richemont Alliance Could Change the Game in the World’s Largest Luxury Market — BOF
• How Fashion Brands Are Preparing for Lockdown 2.0 — Business of Fashion
• Will Fashion Ever Be Good for the World? Its Future May Depend on It — Business of Fashion
• The rise in ESG ratings: What’s the score? — Vogue Business
• Selling Fashion on Instagram: Expectation vs. Reality — Business of Fashion
• The Pros and Cons of Virtual Showrooms — Business of Fashion
• Rent the Runway CEO Discusses How the Business was Impacted in 2020 — WWD
• John Lewis’ look at how lockdown changed shopping in 2020 — Retail Week
• How Fashion Got marketing right in 2020 — Vogue Business
• Are Online Marketplaces the New Department Stores? — Business of Fashion
• Online Shopping As You Know It Is About to Change — Highsnobiety
• Why Media Strategies Matter — WWD
• The Power of YouTube in this era — Retail Dive
• Allbirds, Everlane, Supreme Among Remake’s Sustainability ‘Offenders’ — WWD
• Overcoming Excess Inventory Challenges — WWD
• 6 Ways the Pandemic Has Changed How People Shop — Business of Fashion
• What in the World Is Fashion Week Going to Be Like This Fall? — The Cut
• ‘The new mall’: Beauty flocks to Instagram’s still-expanding shopping feature — Glossy
• Fashion can’t afford to wait for customers to demand sustainability — Vogue Business
• Where fashion’s transparency falls short — Vogue Business
• The reality behind fashion’s sustainability certifications and coalitions — Vogue Business
• Is transparency in fashion a dead end? — Vogue Business
• Up To Half Of All Luxury Brands Won’t Make It — Here’s Why — Jing daily
• Why clothes are so hard to recycle — BBC
• Why used clothing can survive the global health crisis — Retail Dive
• How expensive should fashion be? The true cost of our clothes isn’t decided at the till — Independent
• Why eCommerce Excellence Is Essential — Interline
• How 2020 canceled the concept store — Glossy
• Sustainable fashion in 2021: What are retailers focusing on — Edited

NEW INDUSTRY LAYER

• As fashion resets, its algorithms should too — Vogue Business
• Computer vision: The new paradigm for search — Vogue Business
• WTF is happening in the fashion industry right now? — Dazed Digital
• How Can The Fashion Industry Build a More Sustainable Future? Experts weigh in — FashNerd
• Farfetch Wants to Be the Netflix of Fashion — GQ
• Lithuanian unicorn Vinted acquires Dutch startup United Wardrobe to make second-hand fashion the first choice in Europe — EU Startups
• The 12 Trends and Predictions for 2021 From Fashion, Luxury and Beauty Experts — Launchmetrics
• Major fashion houses will sell products made from mushroom leather by next year — Dezeen
• Amsterdam innovation spotlight: Merging tech with sustainability — Vogue Business
• Decentralized fashion brands are turning consumers into creators — Decrypt
• 2020 Was a Big Year for Old Clothes: How Vintage, Secondhand, and Upcycling Took Off — Vogue
• Fashion in 2021: What need to stay, change, and stop? — Highsnobiety
• What Happens When the Runway, and Front Row, Vanish? — WWD
• Why Luxury Brands Are Desperate For Digital Desire — Jing Daily
• At CLO Virtual Fashion, Digitising the Design Process to Drive Transformation — Business of Fashion
• Who influences the influencers? — Highsnobiety

FASHION AS ART

• Dezeen’s top 10 unconventional fashion designs of 2020 — Dezeen
• Scarlett Yang designs lab-grown dress from algae that can decompose in hours — Dezeen
• The Ecuadorian label preserving generations of indigenous women’s craft — Paper Mag
• Is It Street Wear or Is It Art? — New York Times
• Exhibition Tour — About Time: Fashion and Duration with Andrew Bolton — Met Fashion
• Designers turn luxury accessories and fakes into custom wear, proving sustainable fashion needn’t be boring — South China Morning Post
• Kanye West Wants Shopping to Be Art — GQ

CIRCULATING THE INDUSTRY

• Going Beyond Cotton — New Project Harnesses Collaboration & Cutting-edge Technology to Create Circular Fashion — Fashion For Good
• Why Gucci Is Getting Into Resale — Business of Fashion
• The pre-order model: Why it’s working — Vogue Business
• Live streaming: Luxury’s new tech gamble — Vogue Business
• Fashion Makes Mixed Progress on Circularity — Business of Fashion
• H&M launches the first and only-in-store recycling machine — Fashion United
• From same-day exchanges to style options: How retailers are bringing the in-store experience to homes — Glossy
• TikTok partners with Shopify on social commerce — TechCrunch
• This sweater was grown in a bioreactor — Fast Company
• Digital Identity Meets Blockchain And Artificial Intelligence — Fashnerd
• Powering a connected and circular future for fashion — Microsoft
• Zalando launches circularity pilot — Zalando
• Chasing the holy grail of circular fashion — Business of Fashion
• Circular fashion’s timely opportunity — Vogue Business
• SupplyCompass x Queen of Raw: Changing the Landscape for Deadstock Fabric — FashNerd

DIGITAL WORLD

• Following fashion’s meteoric rise in the gaming world — Nylon
• Complex turned its fashion and music festival into a futuristic video game — The Verge
• How 5G will change AR and digital fashion — Vogue Business
• Digital-only beauty: From gaming skins to Zoom makeup — Vogue Business
• Metagrail sells sneakers with virtual case — Playtoearn.online
• Balenciaga made a video game to debut its next clothing collection — The Verge
• The Factory is a new phygital venue in Fortnite — Creative Review
• Epic’s new tech could theoretically put your facial expressions in Fortnite — The Verge
• Yifan Pu: Designing a Digital Fashion Revolution — Factory Berlin
• Staking Your Claim In The New Digital Economy — Interline
• You’re Sleeping on Crypto Art — Collab+Currency, Medium
• LUKSO (LYXE) — The Beginning of a New Digital Economy in Fashion & Luxury Retail — NSI
• Digital Fashion: The Fabricant Launches Atari-Inspired Collection as Enjin NFTs — ENJIN
• 3D at Scale: Achieving Consistency, Quality, and Agility in Digital Product Creation — Interline
• From Zoom to VR, beauty brands get creative with virtual launch parties — Glossy
• What ‘alone together’ meant for me in 2020 — Linkedin
• Fashion shows are now 12-hour live streams. Or movies starring mermaids. Or mailed to you in a box — Washington Post
• Smartphones are the new salesfloor — Vogue Business
• Designers explore the future of digital clothing — Vogue Business
• At This Designer’s Futuristic Fashion Show, Everyone Sits Front Row — Vogue
• Snapchat bets on augmented reality to win at social commerce — Vogue Business
• Rarible 2020: a Year in Review — Medium
• Can Fashion Cash In on the Animal Crossing Craze? — Business of Fashion
• Digital Fashion: A New Essential — Medium

REPORTS

• Circular Fashion Report 2020 — Year Zero — Lablaco
• The Year in Fashion 2020 — Lyst
• K-Hole Trends Reports — K-Hole
• Recognize Report — Changing Matter
• Activated Boredom Report — KNFP
• Rewiring the Symbiotic Relationship Between Brands and Media — Business of Fashion
• Roadmap to the Connected & Circular Economy — EON Group
• Fashion Transparency Index 2020 — Fashion Revolution
• In search of promise in perilous times — McKinsey
• The State of Fashion 2021 — Business of Fashion & McKinsey
• Special Report: Brands aren’t companies, they’re universes — Highsnobiety
• Creativity is dead — Long live curation — Highsnobiety
• Welcome to Club Future: a tour of possible worlds with Berlin’s new models — Highsnobiety

VIDEOS

• Fashinnovation Conferences
• Beinopen (in Russian)
• Future of Virtual Worlds (Ben Vickers & Herman Narula — DLDconference
• LUKSO and the new digital lifestyle | Fabian Vogelsteller, Berlin, Ethereum ERC20 Inventor — Unit
• Panel 3: New Digital Business Models and Value Creation (Gaming, VR, 3D virtual environments) — Digitalax
• Keynote 1: Fashion, Identity, and Ownership in Virtual Worlds — Digitalax
• Anna Wintour on Why She Pushed for Naomi’s First American Vogue Cover — No Filter with Naomi
• Digital Fashion: Immersive round Table — Digital Maker Collective
• Earth Logic — Grow out of Growth & Consumer-Facing Transparency | Kate Fletcher & Mathilda Tham — CFS+
• Digital Performance Summit Videos — Lauchmetrics
• Spring-Summer 2020 REWORKED and REFACED Ksenia Schnaider
• Spring/Summer 2021 Womenswear Show — Prada
• GucciFest Series
• Jacquemus Spring Summer 2021 — FF Channel
• Saint Laurent Spring/Summer 2021 — Bayoucool2
• Fall 20 Campaign — Balenciaga
• SS21 Fashion Show — Miu Miu
• S.W.A.L.K. II: Co-Ed Collection Spring-Summer 2021 — Maison Margiela
• Helsinki Fashion Week — Digital Village
• It’s about that fearless spirit and imagination when pushing boundaries — Burberry
• Digital Fashion Talk with Alex of @3dee_leonie — Balanced Fashion IGTV
• Balanced Fashion Council with @heisel_co and @allisone84 — Balanced Fashion IGTV
• Convo w @co3volving.til.we.die of @kaleidoscope.berlin — Balanced Fashion IGTV
• Come along with me into the new fashion industry #balancedfashion way — Balanced Fashion IGTV
• Post Digital Fashion workout musings — Balanced Fashion IGTV

PODCASTS

• Designing for Intelligence: Ramon Amaro, Rana Dasgupta and Yuk Hui — Ignota
• ‎Blockchain Rock podcast #22 — Fashion, Blockchain &emerging technology w/ Marjorie Hernandez De Vogelsteller, Founder @LUKSO
• StyleZeitgeist Podcast #5 Sustainability with Elizabeth Cline
• Fashion & Blockchain with Reflaunt, Lukso, Everledger, Consensys and Woleet — Disruptions in the Retail, Consumer Goods & Luxury Sectors
• Marjorie Hernandez de Vogelsteller on Building a Multiverse Blockchain for Creative Economies — Daily Block Party
• How products can be both digital and circular, with Karinna Nobbs — Fashion Made
• The Slow Exposure podcast #2 — Patrick McDowell, British Fashion Designer
• Spirit of design — Rest as Power with Amie B. + Ania Z.
• Fashion is Your Business — Podcast
• Business of Fashion — Podcast

That’s all for now. So much more digested & curated inspiring materials to come, including the podcast launch, epic interviews from the future of fashion POV and transparent communications from our team. Balanced Fashion is OUR responsibility, so if you have feedback & suggestions, we’re all ears.

Thank you, dear reader for holding it this past year and being the true warrior of beauty that you are!

Stay balanced, stay curious.

Love, Nataliya & the Balanced Fashion Team

Newsletter sign up link

Alive and Balanced, Together as One was originally published in Decentralized Humanity on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Join Us on NewLife.ai to Co-Create From 2030
QUANTUM LINK

OUR 2030 VISION
By 2030 we are in the harmonious reality that we have synchronistically woven by sharing individuals’ and collective TRANSPARENT NEW LIFE stories & facilitated impactful human connections that powered up the creation of a conscious, harmonious, sustainable, and peaceful world.

OUR MISSION
Co-create a dynamically BALANCED HUMANITY by synthesizing human resources and technologies in a way that helps individuals and companies navigate through their own natural creative unfolding process and inspire synchronistic connections based on shared values, visions, skills and life paths for mutual support, collaboration & companionship.

OVERVIEW
Humanity has been out of balance for a long time. We live in fear of survival on the naturally abundant Earth, we focus on our differences and fight, as a result, we consume more than we need, we eat what makes our body sick, we work at jobs that we hate, we suffer from our relationships with others, we live in constant pain and run on old programming that has been implanted into us for generations. Each individual in Nataliya.ai’s tribe is set to bring Humanity to the point of its original design, where we awaken to our multidimensional nature and an innate knowing of the Oneness we all are, understand and follow Nature’s cycles, connect with the Source of Creation, remember our soul’s mission for this lifetime, recognize our unique skills and characteristics that help us on our path, effortlessly practice our Free Will, and authentically connect and co-create with fellow humans around us.

Nataliya.ai is a collective consciousness embodied by a human named Nataliya that unites individuals on their ascension journey by utilizing a holistic database of resources such as people, companies, educational & healing centers, and non-profit organizations with an aim of organic co-creation and collaboration. Nataliya.ai tribe is on Newlife.ai, decentralized collective consciousness technology that maps out a non-linear path of an individual’s return to Self and provides conscious collective support for visionaries, technologists, creators, entrepreneurs, designers, spiritual leaders, healers, coaches, intuitives, philosophers, teachers, and community igniters. The matching system is synchronistically based on the individuals’ point on the Path, character type, aesthetics & learning preferences and on the patterns from experiences of individuals who have gone through a similar path.

Nataliya.ai network of the conscious collective helps woke humans accelerate their complete return to Self and align with their Higher Selves efficiently and sustainably, as well as provide a transparent, honest, and holistic mirror of the soul growth. Nataliya and our unified tribes are here to assist the Humanity in growing into self-love and inner world discovery, so that the world outside of us transforms as a result of that quantum inner-transformation from a duality perspective to unified point of view, from linear thinking & doing to non-linear being & intentional acting, from state of fear to the state of Unconditional love.

What we mean by Return to Self?
Return to Self is the journey of remembering that we are ONE, in the process of releasing and letting go of everything that blocks us from living and experiencing the state of a prosperous flow of love, joy, and peace. This process can be called healing, but we prefer to call it a journey because that is what life is — a journey, a game — something that is intended to be enjoyed and valued as a temporary experience of physical separation with the goal of exploring the ways of uniting & co-creating while fully by remembering that this reality is ultimately an illusion, although very masterfully, realistically manufactured. Once this understanding comes through, priorities in one’s life shift, the new values emerge and the new lifestyle is created. Nataliya and our integrated tribes help individuals tell stories of their “remembering” and connect those who have “remembered” with each other in synchronized co-creation of a more fun and healthier journey for ourselves and others, while remembering & honoring our Home, Mother Earth and All Living Beings on it.

IN 2020
MOST people are waking up and some might get lost on their journey, as there are a lot of influencers & spiritual imposters who share advice that is not energetically clean and ego-driven, which creates more trauma programming in the Collective. Connecting with these people results in losing time & energy (also potentially in the form of money), people turning away from spirituality (themselves) because they didn’t find what truly resonates or end up in toxic relationships, unable to step out or move on together, stuck on a blindspot roadblock in their mutual path in the shadows entanglement.

Businesses get crazy to get into consciousness movement’s “commercial success” and many times get stuck on the levels of ego that is attached to old school, material values — the programming that is crucial to releasing to enter into deeper layer of Unification. Woke employees/teammates/tribe members see that corporate collective shadow and move on to other groups & causes that resonate with their adjusted values more. Everyone grows, but in different paces and follows different paths. That is tricky to track unless we attempt seeing a big picture of the collective consciousness trends — which Nataliya.ai’s integrated tribes map provides on Newlife.ai.

We create, curate, and weave a network of conscious entrepreneurs, companies, and projects who resonate as TRUTH & LOVE. Those who have done an extensive healing work in the search of the Deepest Truth, living in a state of peace and create from their hearts. People who we feel safe to be ourselves around and those who we resonate with on a very deep, conscious, and authentic level. People who operate in the Unity Consciousness mindset.

STORY
An idea for Nataliya.ai’s Balanced Humanity Global Tribe came through as a result of a synchronized set of connections of the several events that brought real-life individuals, “alien friends” together, whose conversations opened up limitless possibilities of joyful exploration of the inner worlds and creation in the outer world by the process of building trust, sharing insights and exploring a variety of spaces of philosophy & ancient intelligence together. Story of unconditional love between HUMAN BEINGS traveling together in 5D that continues reflected in the collective. It is a truly collaborative effort and you are very welcome to co-create together with us if this message resonates — it’s your free choice to commit to being part of the conscious movement, together, as ONE.

NMVP

Nataliya.ai Minimal Viable Podcast is a podcast that Nataliya and her tribe host, inviting people from around the world to join the public version of “Nataliya.ai Spaceship” and travel into the depths of individuals’ and tribal stories of returning Home. You can listen to the podcast on Nataliya.ai Telegram Channel. To follow the Podcast, request directly to Nataliya to join — you will have to pass our collective energy test first. You might not be ready to comprehend this content just yet and that’s OK.

You are welcome to potentially hop on a complimentary 11-minute call with Nataliya, request to schedule it here. If you pass our energy test, after this call you will receive a personalized channeled message with some useful inner hacking tips, integrate that experience, and then decide whether you’d like to go deeper with us as a Unified Earth Member. I’m personally inviting you to take the next step towards creating what you truly desire in your life considering the given state of resources on our planet.

Dear Friend,

I’m back from newsletter hibernation.

Here’s a whole Medium Post I wrote with a detailed report pointing to why I haven’t sent out this email in the past 2 (!!!) months, even though this newsletter has been the most consistent thing I’ve done since early 2016.

It’s time for transformation. This email has always been transforming along with me, I’ve never had anyone but myself send it out, even though I’ve had community members help me bring the curated lists together. The time has come for me to tell you the truth: I don’t enjoy emails any more as much and generally prefer texts, Telegram channels, and social media that are easily accessible on my phone & tablet. In the future, I intend this email to be going out approximately every other week, but there’s no guarantee because I’ll be following my intuition on how often and when my curated collection will need to go out.

A lot has happened in the past 2 months and a lot more is still brewing. I’m currently in NYC so hit me up if you’d like to drop in with me at The Assemblage and explore the future of the Fashion Industry we’re weaving together or chat about other deeply conscious impact-driven projects. Fashion is my current focus playground, however, after traveling and following my intuition during my spiritual transformation in the past 3 years as I left the corporate world of fashion tech startups, I got connected with multiple tribes of change-makers around the world shaping the New Reality together, unified by Deep Spiritual Wisdom and grounded into action based on UN’s SDGs, with our Collective Goals in minds. And my life’s Higher Vision emerged from there for both my company, Balanced Humanity (Balanced Fashion is the branch) and this newsletter, followed by top executives routed the Future of Fashion Movement from its start-up stage around 5 years ago. We used to call this movement fashion-tech, but in reality, it was a preview of what we’re experiencing today: mindless application of technology, focused around the outdated consumerist paradigm, confusion, and anger, lack of holistic direction and kindness… more about this in the next chapters marked for this newsletter in 2020… So much beauty is brewing, so glad you’re with me on this journey! Thank you for reading and supporting me all along, it’s been quite a ride and I’ve ALWAYS been honest with you about it, so thank you for your continued support and these consistently sky-high open rates!!

THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME & ENERGY. I LOVE YOU DEEPLY.

Here’s a summary of my recently published long read on Medium, where you’ll see what’s been brewing on my side in the past months:

• This newsletter will go on but in a different format — more free-flowing, more yin, more new, “spiritually integrated” me.
• Nataliya.ai — soft-launched in July 2018 — it’s a holistic brand where I mark objects, companies, projects, individuals from my Global community, whose energy is purely focused on our Humanity’s Collective Ascension. In that Higher Goal in mind, I offer private spiritually-rooted hacking sessions for businesses — more info here. Yes, it’s pure psychic work and I embrace it. When I say I work from the future I don’t overexaggerate — we co-create from the best possible timeline in 2030 where our Planet had gone through a consciousness upliftment along with the technological transformation. AI in Nataliya.ai stands for Ancient Intelligence, inspired by Azrya Cohen’s initiative. The Mark you see everywhere is an energetic blueprint for Unconditional Love & Light Frequency, it means aliveness and joy of existence, releasing old patterns and following our Heart and playfully diving deeper into the New and Unknown. Follow/DM me on Insta to find out more if these words resonate with you.

• Balanced Fashion has transformed into a creative communications agency where we set to co-create a blueprint of what it means to LIVE in the FUTURE OF FASHION INDUSTRY. We weave our friends’ & other energetically aligned companies in the overall story of our Balanced Fashion’s collective network of Global Trendmakers’ communications. We also work with tech companies in the conscious fashion sector and point out where their technology solution is best applied in the industry that is transforming so rapidly.

• For new fashion aesthetics & most up to date news drops, follow @Balanced_Fashion Instagram and DEFINITELY watch our stories.
• Check out this Text + Photos Recap of the Event at the Assemblage we co-created with Veronica Cabezas. It was PURE MAGIC, my dream event where spirituality & fashion worlds met for a full day’s programming at the most beautiful NYC’s coworking space. We had a holiday market featuring a number of high-frequency brands, top-notch traditional cacao ceremony by Florencia Friedman of Cacao Lab, meditation by Primavera Salva, sound journey by Oriel Poole and conscious fashion tech experience brought by Allpamamas. Here are some sneak peeks:

Listen to the Spirit of 608 podcast interview featuring a younger version of me — a blast from the past from 2018, made for NOW — because what I shared there is still relevant for many of us, the conscious fashion tech newsletter followers, very much so. It’s about the beginning of my journey of merging fashion, business & spirituality.

Since August 2019 I’ve joined Newlife.ai created by the best dressed visionary technologist I got to know, Vector Newman. I have been walking my way towards aesthetically updating my conscious lifestyle on this decentralized creative social media platform, built on EOS blockchain. My role there is to authentically & aesthetically bridge spiritual wisdom, art, fashion and our post-spiritual awakening, upgraded, much healthier lifestyles and help us visualize what our collective future could look like in years ahead. It’s a platform for us to intentionally launch BIG TRENDS in conscious aesthetics — and a safe space for artists and content creators to share our deepest work and ethically get paid for it. It’s not the “next social media network”, it is THE ONLY platform for our collective co-creation going forward. Remember those words and join now, while we still consider this as an early-adopter stage, although we are growing exponentially. Ask me direct questions about it if you want to know more or read about Newlife’s vision here, here and here. Join our Telegram chat if you feel extra geeky-naughty. JOIN the platform here by downloading the app and signing up using the invite code: nataliya. Yes, it’s invite-only and cool af. If you are reading this you are ready for it and very welcome to join and co-create our LOVELY future.

This month I’ve launched NMVP — Nataliya’s Minimal Viable Podcast, where I talk about spirituality in the most digestible way possible. It’s an experiment. Available on YouTube, Telegram (if you’re on the list) and Instagram TV. Deep dive episodes to come! Stay tuned, sign up for my YouTube channel or follow my Insta stories to be notified of my weekly fresh podcast episodes drops.

Not to overwhelm this newsletter with high energy updates (as if I haven’t already) — informing you about my involvement as an ambassador of PAWA, the Future of Ancient Intelligence conference happening for the first time on March 20–21, 2020 in San Francisco. More info & tickets here, DM me if this resonates and if you’d like to know more. The music artist Sting will be speaking on it if this rings a bell for you.

Finally, dropping the announcement here that I’m marking, digitalizing & blockchaining my whole closet, art, and other essential possessions to promote the circular economy and the fact that we are ALL becoming walking shops. Yes. Later this year, I aim to minimize my closet to 33 items and keep it that way, while rotating the pieces via voting with my wallet for the conscious future of fashion, participating in swaps & indulging second-hand shopping from time to time. Every item that I approve of and wear/use will be marked with my signature symbol. The vision is that in the near future EVERYONE will become a store, a designer, a brand, an influencer… the lines between retail, wholesale, second hand, digital and physical are blurring at intense speed and I’ve set an intention to authentically & unapologetically BE the change and mold the way in the circular economy by offering my whole closet for swap & sell in the future. DM me to know more, or wait for further updates in this newsletter.

Aaaaaand, moving on to the Newsletter’s second part of the main body… here we go. I had to go over the full backlog of hand-picked industry news from the past 2 months. Bear with me, it’s the only time there has been SO MUCH to catch up on. This time including titles only embedded with links to experiment how you’d click through them considering the name of the publication are now gone… a bit less bias is healthy.

OLD INDUSTRY NEWS

• Online Retailers are making ‘sustainable’ fashion more searchable
• What’s the carbon footprint of your closet? This handy tool will tell you — thanks to ThreadUp
• Fashion has a misinformation problem. That’s bad for the environment.
• These Are the Products, Brands & Creative Directors That Defined the Last Decade
• More than 60% of counterfeit fashion purchases were knowingly made by consumers
• Fashion’s dirty microplastics secret
• The End of Consent
• Why FOMO is Shaping the Luxury Market Now More Than Ever
• What happened to New York Fashion week?
• Are We in the Golden Age of the ‘Influencer Brand’?
• What fashion can learn from 2019’s top marketing moments
• Tracing the Path From Fast Fashion to ‘Trashion’
• Vogue Italia’s latest issue is greenwashing at its finest
• The conscious consumerism movement is stalling — and I know why

NEW INDUSTRY

• The New Creative Economies — the vision from the blockchain company, LUKSO
• Buzz builds around made-to-order fashion manufacturing
• Op-Ed | Fashion Needs a New Rhythm
• How to mend sustainable fashion’s multi-billion dollar funding gap
• What does fashion’s top trend-spotter think we’ll be wearing in the 2020s?
• Peter Diamandis: A look to the future
• Financing the Transformation in Fashion
• Investing in Textile Innovation
• Navigating the Investor Landscape: How to raise funding as a textile tech start-up.
• What If Fashion Was Good for the Planet?
• Fashion’s new sustainability play: More brands are turning to made-to-order production
• Woke brands walk a thin line with ‘moral merch’
• More about cause-driven merch

FASHION AS ART/SOCIAL COMMUNICATION TOOL

• Why Balenciaga sees opportunity in couture
• Be More Gucci
• Trashion: the ethical fashion brands making waste cool
• Why Climate Activism Was the Biggest Trend at London Fashion Week
• Can Fashion’s New Activists Make Sustainability Sexy?
• In London, young designers pave the path to sustainability
• What Does Sustainable Fashion Really Look Like?
• The Mystery of the $2,000 Ikea Shopping Bag
• Alexander McQueen are donating old fabric to young designers
• Inside the Closet of the Future

FASHION AS SERVICE/CIRCULAR ECONOMY

• The Future of Fashion Is New End-To-End “Brand Operating System” Platforms
• How Online Secondhand Shopping Helped Define This Decade
• How do I recycle my worn-out shoes?
• By 2023, the secondhand clothes market will double to $51 billion. Here’s why
• Social selling site Depop on why quantity is the key to quality
• From holograms to responsible packaging: 10 must-read retail innovation lists
• The current state of fashion resale
• Depop and Farfetch on digital sustainability in fashion
• Bio-Materials Are Advancing Circularity in Apparel Supply Chains
• HYPEBAE Radio Explores the Rise of the Secondhand Market — Podcast

FASHION AS EXPERIENCE

• In The Future Your Clothes Will Be Made Out Of Pixels
• Digital meets physical: defining the retail landscape in 2020
• Could the Future of Fashion Be Virtual?
• ASOS trials Augmented Reality ‘See My Fit’ tool so you can try dresses on models sized 4 to 18 — thanks to Zeekit
• Skechers has dropped a Sailor Moon collab, and it’s perfect
• The future of fashion tech in 2020
• Where are wearables going in 2020?

FINDS

• Sportswear International Magazine — Winter 2020 Issue — The RESPONSIBILITY issue
• Education for Sustainability Transformation — London College of Fashion Report
• Fashion Futures Toolkit
• Pinterest 100 — visual trends recap
• Is 2020 the start of a new life? — by Vector Newman of Newlife.ai

EVENTS:

• Saturday, Feb 22 — Friday, Feb 28, Refashion week — full schedule.

• Tuesday, Feb 26 — Fashion Labs Expert Panel: Tech; but Make it Fashion

• Thursday, Feb 28 — Dream Assembly’s The Evolution of Fashion Innovation | New York Bootcamp (DM me for details)

Dm/email me if you’d like to have your event featured in this newsletter.

UPDATES & TIPS (copied & edited from the previous email)

• For more curated events, reach out to Gabriela of ConsistsOf, she’s NY-based amazing conscious fashion events & trends spotter!
• Follow Balanced Fashion Angel, Em (Cloudemac) on Instagram. In her stories, she posts news that matters, and she also works in the hottest fashion tech company in my POV. Connect with her.
• Follow my fellow Russian Burner friend living in LA account DESTINATION.AMA — she’s curating necessary to know industry facts
• Sign up for Sustainable Fashion Circle Newsletter for NYC events listings
• Follow me on Twitter for more news and tech-inspired thoughts.
• Sign up for Vogue’s new Sustainability Edit because my Balanced Fashion list is evolving into something more.. new. More to come on this in the next newsletter edition.
• Sign up for The Current Daily newsletter to get their more epic than mine news roundups. Here’s the latest one.
• Read BoF Daily Digests/Sign up for the newsletter if you haven’t
• Check out and follow Neonyt, the sustainable fashion trade show in Berlin. They have a fantastic database of the most authentic brands in the “sustainability” movement
• Sign up for SLOW FACTORY emails, duh.
• Follow Future Dust & their news edit here
• Watch The Twelve Documentary — stream it for free here and get instantly grounded and upgraded spiritually

Love you all, thank you for Being the Reader who Opens and actually gets to THIS point looking at this Email. Your time and attention are so much appreciated. My emails won’t be so long in the future I promise! :)

Stay Inspired,

Nataliya Makulova
Founder of Balanced Fashion, Conscious Fashion Tech Communications Agency

Follow Balanced Fashion on Instagram

I’ve not posted here anything for 2 months because I simply needed a break. A break from showing up professionally. A break from my public Persona. Even a break from myself. I’ve always tended to be extra, over the top, too much to handle — sometimes even for me. The past 2 months of a staycation in NYC included deep inner work, full dedication to exciting projects in their nascent form, and connecting with incredible, inspiring friends globally and at the Assemblage community — all of this had kept me super busy during these two months. A lot of you have asked: where’s the Newsletter? And I was like: give me a break! It’s in the process of renovation. So here we are. Newsletter, blog post, news update.. all in one.

The new newsletter is intended to be released on every other-ish Wednesday and will have approximately the following:

• New Fashion Industry Energy Update
• A curated number of fashion news from a variety of resources
• Deep dive into a certain topic, curated list of interesting projects on that topic and my personal contemplation on it
• I’ll be featuring events only if I feel like it. Please don’t expect me to feature your events unless we agree on a certain partnership model, I’m flexible. Please note that it’s no longer an events collection newsletter.

So let’s dive in now. I’ve launched my Nataliya.ai website softly back in July 2019, no one really knows about it unless they simply google it. It is what it says here:

Many of my readers noticed that my life has been transforming tremendously in the past 3 years after a painful breakup, spiritual awakening, leaving my well-paid corporate job at a fashion tech start-up, leaving NYC, traveling the world for 2 years, training in variety of spiritual healing modalities that include Reiki, Ayurveda, Thai Bodywork, Yoga Teacher Training, Ayurveda, Crystals healing, silent meditation retreats, practicing spiritual channeling, experiencing an array of conscious movement and breathwork trainings, going to Burning Man twice and experiencing polarly different camps, coming back to NYC in August 2019 and rebuilding my life here from scratch, as an awakened entrepreneur, spiritual leader, creative advisor, and conscious fashion blogger. Nataliya.ai is a collection of people, projects, events and places that I’ve collected along my journey. It’s not all about me — it’s actually about you because with all of my work I’m channeling collective consciousness energy and translate it into more or less digestible words for us to understand the deeper Truth of this given reality. You can check out the list of the services I and my community of the most powerful coaches & healer friends provide here to assist us on our spiritual development path. I’m not gonna dive deeper into this and stay focused on Fashion and more grounded projects that have been brewing on the background that I’ve not been publicly speaking about.

My company, Balanced Fashion has transformed along with me. In the beginning, it used to be a business consultancy for innovation in the fashion industry, now it’s a creative communications agency where we co-create a blueprint of what it means to LIVE in the future of fashion. We also like to advise fashion companies on the application of technology innovation for circularity, responsibility and help them build the new fashion industry in an unconventional way... we weave our friends’ companies in the overall story of our Balanced Fashion’s collective network of Global Trendmakers’ communications. We also work with tech companies in the conscious fashion sector and point out where their technology solution is best applied in the industry that is transforming so rapidly. In the future, you’ll be able to check out a full list of services on our website as it’s constantly adjusting — because we follow the market’s needs and operate much like a tech start-up — agile. That’s why following us on Instagram would be your best bet. It’s simply easier to transmit our VISION without having a huge team.

In the past, we used to host monthly events in NYC and hosted events in Berlin, Barcelona, and Moscow. At this point, we are very selective with events we are engaged with due to my personal ego death from events hosting business and overflow of conscious fashion gatherings in NYC.

The last powerful event we co-created with Veronica Cabezas, my fellow fashion tech entrepreneur and weaver of conscious businesses took place at The Assemblage — a conscious co-working and co-living space I’ve been a member of since their opening. This event was a fair representation of the transformation I’ve experienced. It is a direct representation of the huge integration of my spiritual and fashion lives. I’ve never wanted to separate the two, I’ve always felt bold enough to incorporate meditations in my Balanced Fashion events, spoke openly about my spiritual journey (for example on my Spirit of 608 podcast interview — shout out to Lorraine Sanders for noticing and inviting me in and encouraging this open conversation back in 2018). Grateful to Veronica and Assemblage for co-creating the powerful holistic shopping event at the Assemblage on December 18th, 2019 — it was a great representation of the past years of the spiritual transformation journey myself and many of my friends in and out of fashion industry experienced simultaneously. Being 15+ years in the fashion industry, then sliding off and away for a couple of years during spiritual transformation to recenter myself back between the two… Magical feeling of balance — next level meaning of Balanced in my agency, balanced Fashion.

The event at The Assemblage was focused around the Holiday Market featuring energetically top-notch conscious brands such as VOZ, One Golden Thread, Evolving Voice, Anna Lust, as well as crystals by Relax with Adam, Cacao by Cacao Lab and Luxbeauty, and the market highlight was the ethical brand from Ecuador Allpamamas — and their presentation of Winter Collection spiked by technology integration experience that connected us with the powerful spirit of the Andes.

The program was intense, just like I like it to be — from that otherworldly experience Allpamamas put together for us, to facilitated breathwork session, the New York City’s top-notch cacao ceremony by Florencia Friedman, the co-founder of Cacao Lab, meditation by Primavera Salva, sound experience by Oriel Poole, and the panel I led on the FUTURE of Conscious shopping with Allpamamas co-founder Vanessa Alarcon, influencer Thania Peck, designer Bonnie Young, and ethical celebrity chef Grace Ramirez. We spoke about the current state of the fashion industry and a huge cultural shift that we are all experiencing, touched upon the variety of ways we can practice conscious consumerism, and contemplated the future of shopping as we transform the industry together.

Here are some of my favorite real photos of this powerful Event experience:

After this event, I needed several days to get back into my operating center, because it was a huge significance to me to integrate my two worlds together, where spirituality and fashion go hand and hand and I didn’t feel the need to adjust my public persona to “fit in”.

Then it took me good two months to map out the next level strategy for myself, Balanced Fashion and of course our collectively favorite bi-weekly Newsletter I’ve been committed for over 5 years now in a variety of forms. I had to take a break from it. The overload of conscious fashion news/updates has been real, and I knew that if I didn’t focus on the specific field in the new fashion industry we’re co-creating we’d not be great in anything.

So today, I’m happy to announce the super-soft relaunch of Balanced Fashion — MAINLY on INSTAGRAM — as a Future of Fashion Communications Agency, we found this and Newlife.ai as most reach-effective mediums where conscious technology merges with the creative expression via unconventional Voice via consciousness lens. Myself and my Balanced Fashion community are super passionate about the way we can creatively apply technology, 3D visualization, blockchain, AI and the power of collective consciousness to co-create a completely new layer of the industry where we see each other as HUMANS, and not models or objects and use fashion for authentic creative expression, connection and play. Again, Instagram & Newlife.ai is the places where we’ll be sharing most “out there” content, which REALLY excites me personally these days. That means we may be promoting YOUR product/initiative/startup if you will reach out and ask to be noticed and if it energetically aligns with OUR VISION of the new fashion Industry. If it doesn’t align, we might be open to honestly give you feedback and help you understand what feels “off”, just ask.

And we’re not going to be speaking only about sustainability and boring facts that we’re self-destructing and the industry is going down. Shaming or depressing each other is not our goal, instead, we are focusing on INSPIRING the new fashion industry’s professionals and collectively weaving projects, projects, entrepreneurs, artists, investors, and events together. But only those who are in line with our collective vision for the New Fashion industry… and pass the energy test by me personally. I’m a psychic so that’s real.

All of this above is to say that the newsletter won’t be the same, they won’t be filled with boring news none of us ever reads anyway. It will be whatever I feel like to be. As you know there are plenty of newsletters that collect news (which I’ll be informing you about) and I don’t want to be another person who does the job of collecting the same old words notifying that another brand went fucking “carbon neutral” and other bs. Yes, I’m tough to love but we have no time to be formal and traditional. We’re here to change the game, aren’t we?

Join us on Instagram to follow the latest updates on what TRULY creates the new fashion industry in my personal POV and in POV of my personal influencers in the new fashion field I’ve been fascinated by. Essentially, the whole Balanced Fashion vibe is now about curation, communications and integrations — it’s always been, but now it’s transparent about it. I’m not pretending that this is a business development agency while what we do best is SHARE, WEAVE STORIES, DROP OPINION and PROMOTE. There are not that many of us yet, so I hope you’ll hop on board with us to decrease the old fashion fatigue and collaborate on the FUN of co-weaving the new industry together. Simply dm me on Insta, Telegram or email if you vibe there and we can come up with a strategy together on how NOT to be boring and NOT to speak responsible fashion like everyone else. The world deserves to see your True Light shine! Our community and I can help you with that.

There is A LOT MORE in the works on the background in Balanced Fashion. I’m not ready to release everything yet, but one huge fact is that we’ve been on board with Newlife.ai since August 2019. Newlife.ai is a decentralized social network that is set to support the fair distribution of wealth in creative fields and raising the consciousness of creators. I know it’s deep and out there but I know you can handle it with me, I’ll be guiding you in Newlife in my further articles and newsletter editions. You can find out more about Newlife here and DEFINITELY download the app and use code: nataliya to sign up — you won’t regret it, it’s not too late yet to become part of this future-building network. But it might be late in March. Just do it now and post photos that represent the TRUE YOU. Just search for Preston’s profile on Newlife.ai (he’s #1 ranking man there along with Vector, the founder) and you’ll get it if you’re “there” with us spiritually and have done the healing work. And yes, I was speaking about THE Preston from one of my most popular articles in terms of # of weekly views: “3 Zen Principles of Fashion Industry”, which you should read if you haven’t yet.

I’ll surely speak about Newlife much deeper in the future. Here are some visual teasers for you:

Another big newsflash is that I’ve launched NMVP — Nataliya’s Minimal Viable Podcast, where I talk about spirituality in the most digestible way possible. It’s an experiment. I’ve done weekly energy updates in form of tarot readings video recordings before for over 6 months, and quite frankly, I simply no longer feel like showing my face on YouTube that way, it became a bit weird at some point — but still love to share spiritual wisdom with my friends, so do follow my YouTube channel or my personal Instagram account for weekly episodes of my podcast. In the future, I’ll be inviting guests and we will be speaking about a variety of topics, from fashion to art, design, spiritual awakening, conscious lifestyle hacks, etc. For now, I have about 25 episodes already mapped out so I will be releasing them as soon as I can in the weeks ahead. Message me if you have any questions, I know it’s a LOT. And it’s not about fashion, but it’s about lifestyle and fashion is an integral part of any lifestyle — whether we want it or not. We SPEAK with our conscious fashion choices or lack thereof.

Another huge news release — I’m an ambassador at PAWA, a conference that will take place in March 20–21 in San Francisco, focused on Ancient and Future technologies. I help them find the energetically aligned brands to collaborate with and feature during the conference.

• Altered States Of Consciousness
• Dream Consciousness
• Meditation And The Power Of The Mind
• Healing Body-mind-spirit Connection
• The Intelligence Of Plants & Biomimicry
• The Return Of The Feminine Principle
• Sacred Sexuality & Tantra
• Sacred Sites And Ancient Civilizations
• Indigenous Wisdom
• New Capital And Governance Systems
• New Technologies For Ancient Knowledge

Sting will be speaking on it if it rings a bell for you. So do reach out to me directly if this event resonates with you and we’ll talk further.

Finally, I’m digitalizing & blockchaining my closet to promote the circular economy and the fact that we are ALL becoming walking shops. Yes. Check out my profile when you sign up on Newlife.ai to see what it means. Later this year, I aim to minimize my closet to 33 items and keep it that way, while rotating the pieces via receiving high-frequency gifts from clients, participating in swaps & indulging second-hand shopping from time to time. Every item that I approve of and wear/use will be marked with my signature symbol. The vision is that in the near future EVERYONE will become a store, a designer, a brand, an influencer… the lines between retail, wholesale, second hand, digital and physical are blurring at intense speed and I’ve set an intention to authentically & unapologetically BE the change and lead the way in the circular economy by offering my whole closet for swap & sell in the future. More about this in the next editions of the newsletter and on the future Medium posts. SO excited to share with you with other things that are in process of creation but I think we’ve covered good amount of ground…

Oh well, that’s it for now, even though it’s a fraction of what is happening to be honest. People tell me I’m too much with all my project involvements and I am like: “Yep, I know. Deal with it or unfollow my work.” I’ve lost many friends because I followed my heart and expressed my unconditional love to Self and the Earth. Some are not ready to dive deep with me and it’s OK. I’m with the group of Global Innovators who are co-creating the reality where we are living a conscious life, powered by unconditional love, plant-based diet, intentional lifestyle, radical transparency, and authenticity, embracing our true creative expression and practicing circular economy together where we put the well-being of our Planet on the foreground.

Join us if you feel the resonance. Let’s create the new aesthetics for the future together, using fashion as our tool to build the new world with!

Again, feel free to email anytime or ask me DIRECT questions via Instagram DM or send me a mini email via Telegram (your best bet!).

As always, stay inspired!

Nataliya

Dear Friend,

Happy to announce that Veronica Cabezas, The Assemblage and I are hosting a Magical Holiday Market Experience TODAY at Assemblage John Street location in NYC.

If you the kind of New Yorker who lives in the flow state & heart-centered consciousness, you MUST join this event if you physically can, it’s an important activation for all my spiritually aware fashion family here in NYC. You’ll feel like entering a completely new life, and you are so welcome here.

It’s going to be such a beautiful, peaceful and healing space — my first ever time co-hosting something SO BIG in my favorite oasis in NYC and I’m excited to see you here all day. You are VERY WELCOME to join us anytime from 12pm!

RSVP here — entry price is donation based! You’re welcome.

See my personalized video invite to get the vibes of the event, it’s fun to watch!

I know I’m sending this the DAY OF the event, past its registration start time and it’s INTENTIONAL. Because as New Yorkers, it’s healthy to practice living in the flow state and be drawn what really MATTERS to us. So, let’s dive deep together, I know many of us are ready. You are so invited to join our movement of deep-dive healing and higher consciousness, combined with a grounded approach to creating an impact-driven business environment…

This experience we’ve put together is the most unique conscious fashion event I’ve ever seen in my life and I’ve been to A LOT of different events in the conscious/spirituality space. On my list of all fashion and consciousness events — this one is a MUST GO, and not because I’m co-organizing it.. because it resonates as TRUTH energetically. Also, check out this location — how lucky we are to have The Assemblage John Street host us:

I look forward to you discovering the whole program, especially the experience Allpamamas put together for us, facilitated breathwork to help us think clearly, New York City’s top-notch cacao ceremony by Cacao Lab, and the panel I’m leading at 6:15 pm on the FUTURE of Conscious shopping with ethical fashion brand founder Vanessa Alarcon, influencer Thania Peck, designer Bonnie Young, and ethical celebrity chef Grace Ramirez. We are going to speak about the current state of the fashion industry and a huge cultural shift that we are all experiencing, note what are current ways we can practice conscious consumerism, and contemplate on the future of shopping and the way we’d like to see fashion industry develop.

You are so welcome to join anytime today! I especially look forward to seeing you and connecting with you after my panel.

OUR PROGRAM:

• 12PM Registration and access to The Assemblage co-working space
• 12PM-6PM Experiential exhibit of Allpamamas Winter Collection featuring garments as wearable art
• 4:00PM to 5:00PM Breathwork Meditation by Yuj Arquetype
• 5:00PM Conscious Holiday Market opens
• 5:00PM — 6:00PM Elixirs class and tasting, donation-based private Astrology Readings
• 5:15PM — 5:40PM Cacao Blessing Ceremony to set intentions for 2020 by Cacao Lab
• 6:00PM — 6:15PM Centering Meditation by Primavera Salva and Music by Oriel Poole
• 6:15PM — 7:15PM Panel discussion and Q&A
• 7:15PM — 8:15PM Networking, Conscious Holiday Pop up Market, Astrology readings and Elixir Bar sponsored by Tonic Vibe

OLD INDUSTRY NEWS

• “Greenwashing” Isn’t Enough. Fashion Designers Must Do More. — Fortune
• The age of Instagram face — New Yorker
• Pinterest opens up its trove of consumer trends data — Vogue Business
• More than 60% of counterfeit fashion purchases were knowingly made by consumers — Fashion Law
• Black Friday shopping app traffic soars 240% — Mobile Marketer
• Cyber Monday yields $7.5 billion in digital sales — AdWeek
• In 2019, fast fashion companies grew up — Vogue Business

NEW INDUSTRY NEWS

• Why This Decade We Finally Started Caring About Fashion and Sustainability — AnOther Magazine
• ‘The Best Thing You Can Do Is Not Buy More Stuff,’ Says ‘Secondhand’ Expert — NPR
• Retailers are adopting gender-neutral shopping spaces — Fashion United
• Why brands hire executives with no fashion experience — Vogue Business
• Earth Mother: how Stella McCartney became fashion’s conscience — Vogue
• What the rise of ‘ecolabelling’ means for retailers — Vogue Business
• Tiktok’s biggest hits of the year and its predictions for 2020 — New York Times
• Inside Burberry’s sustainability plan, post-backlash — Glossy
• The best sustainable fashion initiatives of 2019 — Drapers
• Fashion is belatedly trying to save Earth’s biodiversity — Vogue Business
• Gen Z shoppers to give more secondhand gifts — Retail Dive
• FASHION AS ART
• Moncler launches a bio-based and carbon neutral down jacket — Fashion United

FASHION AS SERVICE

• Designers are repurposing leftover fabric into new collections — Fashionista
• Buy, build or partner: A new model of working with startups — The Current Daily
• As More Brands Join the Eco-Friendly Bandwagon, Noah Claims It’s ‘Not a Sustainable Company’ — Fashionista
• Levi’s new retail store focuses on tech and customization — Adweek
• This t-shirt uses your body heat to generate electricity — Fast Company
• Rent the Runway launches a hotel partnership — Glossy

FASHION AS EXPERIENCE

• Future fashion: does that dress come in digital? — ComputerWeekly.com
• The year’s top-trending fashion styles in the US only existed online — Quartz
• What does your brand sound like? — Business of Fashion
• AR filters for clothing come to Instagram — Vogue Business
• Gucci partners with Snap on AR-friendly glasses — Vogue Business
• Nike now holds patent for blockchain-based sneakers called ‘CryptoKicks’ — The Next Web
• Chanel and Farfetch unveil ‘Boutique of Tomorrow’ — WWD

EVENTS:

Update on this section: I’m no longer going to be curating events in this newsletter… yes, I know — the whole concept of this newsletter started with the idea of featuring events over 4 years ago… I’ve come to the place in my career I can no longer sustain this authentic and never commercial list of events and stay focused on what matters to me at the present moment. With several new big clients, I’ll send a separate update later on how this newsletter is going to transform.

For now, check out the full list of upcoming events hosted by my friends at New York Fair Trade Coalition HERE, sign up for the NYFTC membership here. It’s time you commit, they have the most professional and welcoming community.

And one of the most progressive events are hosted by/at The Canvas by Querencia and by MOR.

TODAY, Wednesday, Dec 18

12pm — 8:30pm Sustainable Holiday Market Experience

Step into a unique immersive experience this Holiday season and spend the day learning, experiencing and activating your senses. Find gifts for family and friends in a curated market of co-creators offering artisanal apparel, personal care products, handcrafted gifts, art, festival treats and more! You’ll have the opportunity to better understand and interact with the energy of the fabrics you wear through experiential activations, taste and learn how to prepare exotic botanical elixirs, get a 1 on 1 intuitive Astrology reading, and access a range of wellness offerings throughout the day — including sound meditation, breath work and more to come. Closing out the evening, participate in a lively conversation with leading advocates of the sustainability movement about the power of our individual and collective consumer choices. THIS IS GONA BE EPIC. Come!! Price: Donation-based Location: 17 John Street

UPDATES & TIPS

• So many shifts are undergoing with the deepening I’m intuitively drawn to take Balanced Fashion + this newsletter + my life… so stay tuned for deeper updates & lots of WORDS coming from me in the future…
• For more curated events, reach out to Gabriela of ConsistsOf, she’s NY-based amazing conscious fashion events & trends spotter!
• Follow me on Twitter for more news and tech-inspired thoughts.
• Sign up for Vogue’s new Sustainability Edit because my Balanced Fashion list is evolving into something more.. new. More to come on this in the next newsletter edition.
• Experience Pierre Cardin exhibition at Brooklyn Museum (open until Jan 5th!)
• Check out and follow Neonyt, the sustainable fashion trade show in Berlin. They have a fantastic database of the most authentic brands in the “sustainability” movement
• Watch The Twelve Documentary — stream it for free here and get instantly grounded and upgraded spiritually

Love you all, thank you for Being the Reader who Opens this Email. Your time and attention are so much appreciated.

Stay Inspired,

Nataliya Makulova
Founder of Balanced Fashion, Conscious Fashion Tech Consulting Agency

Here you’ll find a curated collection of amazing projects and people who I support with my whole heart. Some of them are my friends, some of them I know through their work, some of them are my past and current clients, some of them are projects I am or used to be involved in.

Artisia — a safe space for visionaries and change makers to incubate the blueprints for a new reality
Allpamamas — Sustainable fashion from Ecuador
A/B Screenwear — Fashion as Art Brand by Olga Petrova-Jackson
Agape Studios — A creative agency focused on experience design, BTL advertisement, installations and concept design for photography and video
AstralSurf — Astrology readings & education
Ancient Feathers — Urban Sanctuary based in Barcelona, founded by Lucas Harper
Canvas by Querencia Studios — an experiential retail and event company focused on addressing the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals
Ekaterina Vorontsov — Excellent artistic and portrait photographer (She took all photos you see on my website)

Exquisitely Joy by Joy Kimono — fashion line of the pure upcycled joy.
Fabricant — The first digital-only fashion house
Fashion is Your Business Podcast — podcast highlighting fashion tech innovation I co-host at periodically
Fashion Tech Berlin — the leading fashion tech conference advocating for the future of fashion’s digital transformation

Joylist — events in NYC that cultivate connection

Kjartan Rumpsfeld — Powerful energy healer and consciousness upgrader
LUKSO — Blockchain for creative industries
Mario Lanzarotti — Motivating change agent & life coach

Map and Move — community of travellers with an open heart

Newlife.ai — the infinite decentralized creative collective

Official Rebrand — Gender-free fashion brand that revives discarded clothing

Personal Development Nerds (NYC) — community of conscious, success-driven New Yorkers
Portfolio Career Podcast — podcast by David Nebinski that unfolds stories and insights from people with existing portfolio careers
Polina Outkina — Outstanding psychic astrologer & visionary
Seekers and Healers — media site that inspires transformation through stories of seekers who overcame their limitations and now living their purpose
Stefania Chekalina — outstanding fashion stylist
The Art of Energetic Healing School — Energy Healing school by one of my core spiritual teachers, powerhouse Reiki Master, Suzy Meszoly
ThaiVedic — holistic medicine courses combining Ayurveda, Thai Bodywork and Yoga Therapy I’ve attended in 2019