On August 9th, Oases hosted the first AMA with a digital artist, Dan Meng, to showcase her artwork and her take on virtual fashion as a creator. The discussion of the AMA has been summarized in this recap for your reference.
Introduction
Moderator: GM everyone, welcome to the Twitter Space of Oases. It's a great pleasure to be here with you! We are very happy to have our guest — Wang Danmeng, fashion brand manager and digital art creator. Hello Danmeng, thank you for joining us!
Danmeng: Thank you for the invitation from Oases, and I am so excited to be with everyone here today~
Moderator: Awesome, Danmeng is an excellent creator. I am actually a fan of hers and I have been following her virtual fashion works for a long time, so I am very happy to be here with Danmeng to introduce the concept of virtual fashion and the process of creation to more users and discuss the future development of this area. Before we start, I’d like to take this opportunity to introduce Oases more.
Oases represents the Metaverse, a new oasis for human beings, which also has the meaning of NFT as a niche collection, bringing new life to the art market. Our vision is to become a vibrant and creative platform in the NFT market. Our team has always focused on promoting user experiences and encouraging artists to create. We hope to develop and unlock new possibilities for the community based on the existing functions of the traditional Top NFT marketplaces, to provide creators with a more comfortable and friendly creative space and maintain their rights and interests while providing users with more types of NFTs. Recently, Oases held a series of testnet events, which also attracted lots of attention from the community, and we were more than happy to receive feedback and valuable suggestions from you guys. The long-awaited Oases mainnet will be launched soon along with more prize-giving activities, so stay tuned and participate!
For today's AMA, we will randomly select 5 lucky participants to get Danmeng's virtual fashion NFT pieces. I have pinned some of Danmeng's work on our Twitter page, feel free to check them out! The winners will be announced through our Twitter page after the AMA, and the NFTs will be minted and distributed after the the launch of Oasis mainnet, so remember to stay updated with our tweets. Considering that we have both English and Mandarin speakers in the community, we will conduct this AMA and share the recap in both languages. My colleague Sophia will be translating, thank you Sophia! Okay, let's go back to today's topic: the virtual fashion.
About Danmeng
Q1: Danmeng, could you please introduce yourself?
Danmeng: Hello everyone, I’m Danmeng Wang. I graduated from Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology. I am the head of the fashion brand "Su Zi / IN DDDM", and I am also a digital art creator.
Throughout my career, I have won awards including the "Chinese Fashion Design Award", "China Fashion Design New Talent Award", and my works have been permanently collected by the China National Silk Museum.
After graduation, I worked for KARL LAGERFELD, the eponymous brand of Galeries Lafayette. In 2020, I founded the designer brand URAMON as a co-founder and participated in Fashionllaabb X Sina Global Designer Discovery Program.
In 2021, I created my personal brand "Su Zi/IN DDDM", a multi-fashion brand combining physical and virtual clothing. In 2022, I was shortlisted for the "Kaleidoverse" Global Metaverse Design Competition. And the work was selected for Prada's "Year of the Tiger Action" special project.
About Virtual Fashion
Q2: By being deeply involved in the field of fashion design for many years with many awards, I believe that Danmeng also has very professional insights about virtual fashion. Virtual fashion may be a relatively new concept for the community, so could you please introduce the concept to it? And what prompted you to get into this field?
Danmeng: In my opinion, virtual fashion is a new fashion culture industry, the visual representation of clothing constructed from the combination of technologies and 3D software. It is a new type of digital art.
It can digitally design and model real-world fashion clothing, or it can be a fully virtualized piece that only exists in the virtual world. Some of them are available for sale as NFTs, some are bought as collections, or as digital clothing rendered over live-action photos.
It's been a year or two I think since I stepped into virtual fashion. One of the reasons is that the traditional apparel industry has been greatly affected by the pandemic in recent years. As a designer, it is important for me to constantly look for new opportunities. On the other hand, with the help of digital technology, the design and creation of clothing will be more unrestricted, which is beneficial for me to complete imaginative designs and create the clothing/scenes of my dreams. It is more possible to create works that cannot be done in the real world.
Q3: Yes, Sometimes realistic factors can be obstacles to artistic creation, especially for fashion design, so some wild ideas can only be realized in the metaverse and virtual space. I think this is also one of the reasons for the existence of the metaverse, which is to help people expand their imagination space, makes it no longer limited to the world in front of us, and create more possibilities at the same time. Could you tell us about your work? For example, the Feitian series and the Infinite series, about the concepts of the creation of these works, the stories behind them, and so on.
Danmeng: I would like to introduce the Feitian Series and Infinite Series that I created.
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The Feitian Series
This series has not been completed yet. I will continuously update it in my process of creation. It has released four images so far. One of the main reasons for creating this is that my hometown is in Gansu, which is only about 2 or 3 hours away from Dunhuang, which is famous for its cultural site and murals. I have seen Mogao Caves, murals, and Feitian since I was a child, which naturally has a great impact on me. Most of the time they inspire my designs, whether the physical clothes I designed before, or the virtual clothing now. Therefore, the prototypes of this series are Feitian of Dunhuang murals. It combines mechanical aesthetics and the cyborg's "human-machine" concept on the basis of Feitian art. It utilizes a lot of patterns in murals, similar to the traditional winter honeysuckle pattern, a plant that has the meaning of rebirth. I express it in a more modern way, merging it with the cyborg style after deformation to enter the metaverse more reasonably, as if connecting ancient times and the future, traveling through time and space. Utilize the great art of thousands of years ago to link the future world of metaverse art.
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The Infinite Series
This series was completed at home during the pandemic lockdown in March. There are a total of five female figures, namely fox/yao/yueluo/pregnancy/photon. Their clothing shows the beauty of the curves of the female body, with branches of silver plums growing from the skirts, or the surface of the skirts studded with diamonds, connected into a piece of hard scales.Silver Ruyi jade button loops can be connected at the hollows on both sides, exposing a bit of skin. Yao: metal lace ornaments form a gentle petal thread by thread, transcendent but like embroidery. Fox: as if transformed from a fox from the future, the skirt that seems to be soft and flowing like water is actually hard like jade, becoming the armor to protect her, and the huge furry hem is like a flexible fox tail, soft as a cloud, etc. These details show that the protective shell as hard as a future female warrior created by using the most gentle female characteristics is not only beautiful but also strong and chic. The special material spans virtual and reality, and the infinite in the metaverse enables us to realize our uniqueness on this wild planet.
Q4: I became a fan after seeing Danmeng's Feitian series at first. When I learned about the works of the infinite series, my interest in virtual fashion was even more stimulated. I made up my mind to contact Danmeng to exchange ideas about virtual fashion creation. And I am very happy to introduce these two series to more users today! So, what are your sources of inspiration when creating? Did you encounter any difficulties during the creative process? And how did you break through the bottleneck?
Danmeng: Most of the inspiration comes from the things affecting me, or the people around me. I try to express these things attracting me with digital models or images.
There were indeed some creative bottlenecks, and I always had entanglements when creating, but it seems that there is no way to solve this because they exist all the time.
Q5: In your opinion, what are the similarities and differences between virtual fashion and other types of NFT digital collections?
Danmeng: From my perspective, as one of the NFT digital collections, the most obvious difference between virtual clothing and other NFT digital collections is that virtual clothing is not only a collection, but also has more added value. As clothing, it can be "worn", which provides some new solutions for the sustainable development of the fashion industry, such as reducing the consumption and waste of material energy through digitization and contributing to the reduction of carbon emissions. The existence of virtual clothes may reduce these types of waste, such as some people buying new clothes just to show on social media, the sample cost in the production process of clothes and so on.
However, there have been many challenges in practicing sustainable development so far, which have not been able to easily overcome even by relying on Web 3.0 technology, but it may be a little easier when telling a story, such as the release of a branded virtual show and so on.
Meanwhile, I think it will become an important category of fashion. Each era has its own fashion trend and style. In this era, I think it is the combination of digital technology and fashion, which has changed the forms of creation, visual representation, and others to a greater extent.
Q6: Yes, each era has its own unique style and characteristics. I believe that in the near future, virtual fashion will become a vital part of the fashion industry. So for the future development of virtual fashion, what kind of vision and opinion do you have as an artist?
Danmeng: As an artist, I am very much looking forward to the future development of digital clothing. I hope that with the development of 3D technology and the better interaction of virtual clothing, it will not limit to the current photosynthesis, but can jump from reality to another unfettered free window.
The perspective and aesthetics of the metaverse just allow fashion in two dimensions to be more fully expressed. The development of virtual fashion is an important manifestation of the lower threshold of digital technology for users, which means that in the future, everyone can use virtual clothing as a form of expression of their fashion attitude, and the traditional fashion industry can also rely on it to enrich their forms of expression.
Summary
Moderator: I agree that virtual fashion and traditional fashion are both independent and complementary. We hope to see more excellent works that reflect the designer's fashion attitude in the future! Thank you very much Danmeng for participating in our AMA today. We also hope that more users can learn about virtual fashion and the stories behind the creators through this AMA. And we welcome everyone to participate in the world of virtual fashion and NFT to unlock more possibilities for themselves！
Danmeng: Thank you everyone, I had a great time chatting today, and feel free to learn more and stay updated with virtual fashion and my works!
Moderator: Our 5 winners have been selected. The list will be announced on the Twitter homepage of Oases later. Remember to check it in time! Thanks again, Danmeng. We hope that we can have more opportunities to work together in the future. See you next time!
About Oases
Oases represent the Metaverse, the new oasis of humanity. It also indicates that NFTs, starting as niche collectibles are rejuvenating the art market. Oases, as its name implies, is an open, innovative, and vibrant community. We are committed to providing trendy, engaging, and distinctive products and functions to meet the demands of our users.
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