“People like to play with something they wouldn’t be able to wear in the real world,” said Ms. Shapovalova. “Run” is the operative word.
Right now, the metaverse is a place where you can be recognized, as you are (sort of) IRL, and a place where you can transform into the you of your dreams. It’s the ultimate opportunity for wear and a potential minefield for inadvertent self-disclosure. Just because a virtual space is free from some of the constraints of real life does not mean that it is free from the preconceptions that everyone brings to character analysis.
In fact, in the absence of other guides, such as occupation, virtual space makes clothing more important. “What you wear becomes your visual identity,” Ms. Green said in the cross section. Ripped jeans and sci-fi priest robes or branded irises may be all the users your avatar interacts with – hence the first signs of common tastes.
Which could lead, as Mr. Rogers pointed out, to “tribalism,” just as they do in the real world.
If the two worlds became closer — as Mr. Chalmers said, they became worlds that “coexist” — “I think the way we use clothes to express identity would be more comparable to the clothes we wear in real life,” he said.
But Paula Selo, co-founder of Auroboros, hopes the trend goes the other way, as creativity in dressing for the distressed is trickling down and promoting more creative apparel in the physical world.
All that means what? Boldly go where Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t gone before. But don’t fool yourself into thinking it doesn’t matter. Clothing, said Amber Jae Slooten, co-founder of The Fabricant, “affects how you feel about yourself.” Even in the virtual world. That could have “implications that we haven’t even begun to grasp yet,” Mr. Rogers said.
How do you separate your physical self from your unknown self? Asked. “can you?”