What: The metaverse is being promised as a place to increase fashion sustainability by reducing physical clothing samples or travel to experience a fashion show, but many have doubts as to if the metaverse is truly sustainable.

Why it is important: Many people assume that the metaverse and Web3 are free of any physical-world impact, but the energy consumption of cryptocurrencies and the blockchains that underpin the ecosystem is huge.

The metaverse’s problems are threefold: the fact that technologies are not automatically sustainable; the assumption that consumers will switch to digital goods, especially in fashion, while reducing their consumption of physical ones; and the diversion of resources away from solving problems like workers’ rights, inclusivity or textile-to-textile circularity.

In the end, when people go out on the streets, their clothing can’t be digital and must be physical. While digital products can replace some physical items, there is no proof that people who have disposable income to spend on digital clothes will stop buying real clothes. Some even see the metaverse as a distraction from the issues happening in the physical world.

Metaverse as a magic sustainability bullet? Think again, say experts