Is customisation the future of fashion?

It seems that fashion has found a solution to the frenetic acceleration of the trend lifecycle: customisation. While the frequency of style succession increases dramatically due to the rhythms of social media and the latest clothes appear dated a few months after release, fashion houses have for years been trying to open an alternative path to trend maximalism. One example is Prada, which recently included on its website the possibility of customising the belt you want to buy by selecting the colour and shape of the logo. This initiative is not entirely new for the brand, which in the past had already made it possible for customers to customise the iconic red line model, the 'Prada America's Cup' trainer, choosing from a wide range of materials and colours and adding your initials. 

Personalised products are certainly not new on the market: Tesla allows customers to design their own cars, brands such as Dresshirt and The Mighty Company allow customers to upload personalised prints on shirts and jackets, Nike By You has been allowing customers to create their dream trainer on the site for years. The rise of individualism in the last decade has brought to light one priority: stand out. Of course everyone can have the same iPhone, but each individual customer would like to be able to choose the size, colour, storage capacity and case colour. 

With the advent of Web 3, customisation has reached the peak of its importance: a bit like subcultures, owning a certain skin, asset or more generally an nft leads the individual to stand out from the crowd by owning a unique and irreproducible token and at the same time binds him to an exclusive digital community of people who own a similar declination of the same product, as in the case of CryptoPunk and the Bored Ape. Among the brands that have grasped the potential of the fashion costume made in the digital world, Gucci has certainly acted as a business model with its latest initiative, in which the avatar of Gucci's creative director Alessandro Michele travels through the Metaverse of New Tokyo, invited by the "digital craftsman" Wagmi-san to his virtual shop to create outfits inspired by the Aria and Love Parade collections. Gucci is taking personalisation to a new level, designing digital identities in an alternative virtual world generated through the brand's codes in the experimental Gucci Vault space.