Fashion giant Dior enters China’s Metaverse

On April 28, The French owned luxury fashion label Dior partnered with Meta Media holdings to launch its first metaverse exhibition in China, “On the Street”. The exhibition showcased its Fall 2022 menswear collection. 

The exhibition was hosted on the Baidu metaverse social app XiRang. Viewers entered an interactive digital house within the “Meta Ziwu” created by Ma Yansong, an acclaimed Chinese language architect and founder of MAD Architects. 

In 2018, the Chinese language search engine big Baidu unveiled plans for its personal blockchain protocol, Xuperchain by launching its beta in January 2020. The move allowed users to create and deploy their own decentralized functions. Today, Baidu moves forward into the Metaverse by engaging with Dior.

Equipped with a handful of experiences in metaverse projects, Dior is fully prepared to keep navigating the Web3 ecosystem. In July last year, it teamed up with avatar app ZEPETO to create digital make-up looks and in September, it partnered with the metaverse platform Ready Player Me to advertise its perfume.

The label’s endeavours are all transpiring as China builds its own parallel metaverse, where pioneering enterprises are aiming to stake their presence as forerunners in the space. And under the watchful eye of the Chinese government’s regulations, such as the Personal Information Protection Law to limit internet sector companies from the amount of data they collect from users and the ban from playing online games for more than three hours per week imposed on users under 18 years old.

What’s next for China’s Metaverse and its stakeholders?

Tech giants in China, Baidu Inc, Alibaba, Tencent Holdings already made it to the top 10 companies that filed the most virtual reality / augmented reality trademark applications in the last two years. China’s VR sector made up for around 44 % of the global market, and Market experts claim the market value of China’s Metaverse to be around US$8 trillion.

Developments within the Metaverse include virtual reality, gaming and social media platforms. “Similar to the pitch we’ve seen from Meta, the Metaverse concept may at first involve VR/AR-supported games and social interactive environments,” said founder of Tech For Good Asia Charles Mok to CNBC.

Photo: Dior