It’s the sixth week of the Designer Weekly Spotlight and for this edition we are featuring Paola!
Paola studied traditional fashion before moving into digital fashion and web3 full time, both through her tertiary studies and selling NFTs directly in the market. She is a connective force within the GDN, guiding in new designers, collaborations and always at the forefront of the latest experimental projects. If you are a LOOK holder, you would have received an amazing animated NFT material print that she made in collaboration with Stella. It was airdropped to all holders last week!
Treasury Web3 Fashion Vault Purchases
Under the designer spotlight, both the DIGITALAX + GDN Treasuries have purchased one each of Paola’s live pieces from the DIGITALAX web3 fashion marketplace which will be held in the treasury vaults.
DIGITALAX Vault Purchase
Item: Transition through Emotion
GDN Vault Purchase
Item: Stella
Autobiographical Entry from Paola
Hey everyone, my name is Paola Andrea Olaguivel and I was born in Tarija, which is the most southern city of Bolivia, known for its wine and great parties :D
I moved to Germany when I was 9 years old and right now I am based in Berlin trying to survive these extremely cold winter months. I remember when I was a child, I used to imagine computer games and draw characters for them. One day I found a book about fashion illustration and that is when I decided to become a fashion designer. I think was probably 14 years old.
After years of fighting with my parents they finally allowed me to go to South Africa for a year so that I could prepare my portfolio for my college submission in Germany. When I finished my Bachelor in Fashion, I worked for a few movies as a costume designer, did internships in fashion companies and found my passion for leather harnesses working as an assistant for a leather label.
Over the years I became more and more fascinated with 3D printing and Virtual Reality. My favorite daydream was to think about an app where we could take a photo of ourselves and change the color and print of our clothes instantly. And, those prints could be bought by anyone from a library that would be added to and maintained by artists. So, imagine my excitement when Emma told me about the open source Fractional Garment Ownership on-chain library 😊
Anyways, I think that my waking up moment for digital fashion was when in May 2019 the Fabricant sold the first digital couture dress. I knew that I had to start as soon as possible with digital fashion so that I could dive into the next phase of my life. So, I started to work on myself, learned to live in the now and decided to start my masters degree to become a digital fashion designer.
In March 2020 I started with my degree and luckily for me the pandemic hit Germany. So since then, I was able to study entirely from home and didn’t have to leave Berlin, since my college is on the other side of Germany. With everyone having to stay at home it was incredibly easy to get in contact with a lot of digital fashion designers and thanks to the Fabricant twitch streams, I had people that I could follow and see what possibilities where out there. I even published my first digital garments on Dressx, which is something that would never have been possible in the physical fashion world.
During my first semesters I fulfilled my dream and bought myself a 3D printer. I developed a fabric that I could print from home to make a suit. And that was how I entered the DIGITALAX and the web3 world. I listened to Emma in a call and joined a fashion competition that was going on in the discord server. Since then, I am loving every step of it, even though everything moves 10 times faster now and I am often experiencing web3 anxiety 😄
Thanks to the structure that DIGITALAX gives us, I can monetize my student work, which is something incredibly valuable, since most students have to work as bartenders instead of utilizing their own work to sustain themselves. Imagine if all fashion schools would create their own realms and would finally start to work and support each other. Right now, I am finishing up my master thesis, where I ask myself the question: “How can we show our emotions in the digital world?”
Wouldn’t it be cool to walk around in a VR world and with a click of a button you could show if you’re surprised or sad? I am specially enjoying working with all the GDN members, to help each other improve and create an entire world around fashion. I don’t know what I am going to do once I hand in my thesis, but I for sure know that everything is going to fall in the right place and that I am not dependent on any web2 fashion company to be successful!
Web3 Renaissance Patronage
Any patronage of the Weekly Designer Spotlight goes directly to the Global Designer Network Treasury, Spotlighted Designer and Core Writer (50/35/15), for further growing out the infrastructure, community and market of web3 fashion, the open metaverse and more. For this week, the core writer was GDN member Emma-Jane MacKinnon-Lee.