The term “Metaverse” first appeared in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 science-fiction novel Snow Crash to describe a virtual world in which characters roam as avatars. Rooted in sci-fi, the concept of the Metaverse remains highly speculative today — seemingly within reach, but not yet fully formed. It encompasses several aspects: the advancement of augmented and virtual reality technology, the possibility of accessing these worlds through wearable tech, and the existence of digital selves to navigate these environments. “The Metaverse is the Metaverse, not a metaverse because it must expand everywhere we are digitally connected,” Eric Ravenscraft wrote when he explained the phenomenon in Wired Magazine. In the Metaverse, time doesn’t stop when you log off. Its horizons and spaces are expansive and connected.

When we think of digital avatars, we often imagine the video games of our adolescence, where we attempted to construct a little twin, a toy version of ourselves to either crush enemies or reside in a house that we designed. They were fully under our control, waiting frozen for their creators to log in again. But the digital avatars of the future iteration of the internet are going to be much more complex, encompassing a decade of social media history. Today, we already inhabit fragmented digital personas, but in the future we will become more intricately linked with them. As we shape our digital avatars, they are likely to shape us in return, in a phenomenon known as the Proteus effect.

Named after the ancient shape-shifting Greek god, the Proteus effect is the tendency for people to be influenced by their digital representations. If your avatar is attractive, confident, or otherworldly and creative, it’s not long till you start feeling these qualities finding an embodiment in your real life.

A paper titled “The Proteus Effect: The Effect of Transformed Self-Representation on Behavior”, published by Stanford University, documents two studies tracing the relationship between the two. “The attractiveness of their avatars impacted how intimate participants were willing to be with a stranger. […]” it reads. “Participants who had taller avatars were more willing to make unfair splits in negotiation tasks than those who had shorter avatars, whereas participants with shorter avatars were more willing to accept unfair offers than those who had taller avatars. Thus, the height of their avatars impacted how confident participants became.”

Digital avatars promise new pleasures, fears and revelations, with the potential to completely rewire our sense of selves. But the truth is, technology has been integral to the contemporary notion of identity for far longer than we usually remember.

FASHION AND THE BOUNDARIES OF SELF
In the coming decade, digital avatars will be the key to our existence in the Metaverse. An avatar is a version of yourself which will be able to interact with experiences and objects which only exist digitally. Companies like Ready Player Me, which describes itself as a “one-stop-shop for all your avatar needs”, already offer making one based on a photograph. But ordering a digital copy of yourself is not the only option.

Digital fashion is an integral part of avatars’ future development. In a much-memed moment from the Meta presentation in October 2021 (the pivotal moment of Facebook rebranding as Meta and announcing that the company was entering Web 3.0), we saw Mark Zuckerberg flicking through digital outfits: an astronaut’s hazmat suit, a creepy-cute skeleton onesie and his signature navy long-sleeve. But before we accept this austere selection as the general direction where things are going, it’s worth looking into how we use fashion to form our identities offline, and how it relates to both standing out and blending in with our communities.

In conversations about digital fashion, there is frequently a sense of confusion caused by the absence of a core object of desire — an actual physical garment. But truly, we very rarely buy into fashion for the garments themselves. We buy into fashion for a sense of belonging, to be part of a tribe, for the story, for the image, for the emotion, for the idea of our future selves.

Fashion, despite being marketed and perceived as a pinnacle of individual expression, is a deeply collective experience. Exactitudes, a project conceived by photographer Ari Versluis and stylist Ellie Uyttenbroek in 1994, perfectly exposes the paradox of uniformity and individuality at its core. Versluis and Uyttenbroek started a project in Rotterdam, which at the time was rich with urban tribes and subcultures. They scouted their models on the streets for a stunning exercise of pattern recognition: they isolated and distilled every social clique they encountered on the streets by grouping similarly dressed subjects together. The resulting grids of 3×4 photographs are truly mesmerising in capturing the similarities and nuances of style as part of social consciousness. The grids are powerfully revealing of the fact that in our quest to stand out we often end up blending in with our kin.

Exactitudes is firmly rooted in the pre-digital meaning of subcultures. The style tribes of today are much more hybrid and fluid, drawing from the vast pool of references the digital space provides. Our style trajectories are often collaged from references and memories – some of which are our own, some of which are randomly picked up or suggested by algorithms. When musing on fashion and identity, it’s always worth asking: when does wearing something truly change the meaning of who we are?

When we transcend the boundary of self through clothes – be it a crisp white shirt, a latex catsuit, a Supreme long sleeve – it can be an ecstatic experience that changes us. It has potential to unlock the layers of our personality which we were not previously in touch with. It makes us question what is possible. It brings joy and freedom. But could digital fashion and the development of avatars offer something equally as visceral? And when we have an infinite choice of digital selves and skins — which ones will we ultimately pick?

THE TRANSFORMATIVE POWER OF DIGITAL AVATARS
Digital fashion is still an evolving medium. With no fabric and no body to drape, it has potential to be free from endearing yet limiting physicality. As The Fabricant’s head of creative strategy and communications Michaela Larosse wrote in her piece Curating Identity In the Metaverse, “Digital fashion will allow us to try on new bodies, new experiences, new ideas, and new lives.”

The full potential of self-expression through avatars is not limited to creating one – the effect is likely to impact our sense of self beyond the Metaverse. In an interview on the Design Notes podcast, one of The Fabricant’s co-founders, Kerry Murphy, remembers how seeing his own avatar had a powerful psychological impact — it allowed him not only to consider his fashion choices, but to look at himself through a more body-positive lens and even try out moves he never dared to in real life. Seeing yourself from the outside in 3D potentially offers a new level of self-knowledge — it has many more dimensions than just trying on digital clothes.

Over the next decade, we’ll spend more time in digital realms — both professionally and personally — with more control over our digital representations. We’ll have a whole new language of self-expression to learn, with its own ethical and creative challenges. But it’s important to remember that when we change our self-representation, it changes us in turn — meaning that we’ll become only more closely interlinked with our digital personas.