TL;DR ⧝ Fashion runs on an outmoded operating system, which is why MetaFactory’s first upgrades are aimed at its physical/backend processes. Dedicated development in the areas below will open up entirely new dimensions for creative contributions, beyond the cyclically cosmetic.
The Hard-Wear
Innovation in garment construction spiked during the Renaissance and has been plateauing ever since. For one, the components that make up our garments—yarn, fabric, buttons, trims—remain largely the same. In addition, how they’re configured feels artificially axiomatic. What if we applied approaches that have radically unbundled and revitalized other design fields to fashion? Modularity, Size Flexibility, and Zero Waste are Fashion-native initiatives that stand to revolutionize how we exchange, wear, and build our clothes.
Size Flexibility
Size flexible, ergonomic garment design is ubiquitous in sportswear, but has yet to cross over into casual/formal attire. The work of Rickard Lindqvist, PHD, bridges the gap through a proprietary system of garment construction which achieves exactly that: tailored clothes that accommodate our ever-moving and ever-changing bodies.
We’re lucky to count Rickard as a partner, and will be releasing more styles based on his design principles.
Additionally, we’re leaning into unisex garment shapes with innovative adjustment hardware for our evergreen styles, drawing inspiration from workwear and utility gear.
You can explore our current developments, roadmap, and collaborators on the topic’s dedicated page:
Zero Waste
Fabric, whether it’s knitted or woven, generally comes flat and rectangular. When clothes with curved seams—which constitute all our wardrobe stapes—are cut from rectangular fabric, 15% of the fabric on average is wasted.
Zero Waste is a garment design approach that repositions and aligns seams for total fabric utilization, without noticeably distorting the shape of the garment. It takes serious puzzle work, which we leave to our partner (and co-leasee) Danielle Elsener/DECODE, a master of the craft.
Click through to our Library entry on Zero Waste, where we cover the topic and our current Zero Waste offerings in more detail:
Modularity
We're bent on making Modularity more than a gimmick: its stylistic and environmental implications are just too generative to ignore. Upgradeable parts/plugins are expected of other "-wares", but on clothing we're basically limited to zip-off hoods and arms that are not interoperable with other garments. What a missed opportunity!
Why should whole garments get tossed if it’s just the print that’s outmoded, or the cuff that’s worn out? Imagine a collection, or better yet a marketplace, of interchangeable graphics & parts put out by different brands or artists. In the face of safe and expected collabs, we initiate the unexpected. How would that essentialize & revitalize our closets? What kind of mash-ups would you set off by remixing Gucci with grandma?
As with all of our areas of research and development, Modularity will be incorporated into MetaFactory’s drops in stages, outlined in the topic’s dedicated page:
⬆ MetaFactory’s flagship drops are canvases for collaborative innovation: this varsity jacket, designed and produced by DECODE, is constructed according to the first zero waste pattern of its kind, and comes embedded with today’s most advanced blockchain-enabled hardware chip (invented and produced by Kong.Land)
The Soft-Wear
Most clothes just don't need to exist. Conflating expression with production leads to overproduction, when all we meant to do was communicate. So we're taking a metamodern approach to impact, disentangling it from scale, and instead focusing on clarity of communication. MetaFactory isn't selling a fantasy—it's a procedural open book—and in 2022 that just so happens to be a trending look 🔮
Open Source
Customization is the other side of making clothes that people keep. Proper fit is the baseline, then comes the interplay of material, trims, and graphics. Our current microfactory setup makes this kind of co-creative retail a real possibility. [a]industri, our partner in Sweden, is building out a pipeline to custom fit anything from their style library to the end user (measurements taken from a single photo) and allow for unrestricted print placement, no MOQ.
Click through to explore what Open Source means in the context of Fashion Design and Production:
Reverse Retail
We're running our sales on preorder. We're opting for transparent content over opaque advertising. We don't want to sit on inventory, or design toward trends, or play the low-margin-high-quantity game. Through our content streams, we'll surface designs before they're produced for community input and feedback. Curation becomes a role with real rewards, especially when our Curation Game (in development) introduces $ROBOT staking and rev share.
Click through to explore our current implementation and longer-term goal of Reverse Retail:
Metadata
Clothes have incredible stories to tell, but no ways to tell them. The value add of provable, selective provenance—meaning that information is programmed rather than tracked—is astronomical in our content-hungry but privacy-sensitive age. MetaFactory has been embedding KONG chips into its premier garments since the very beginning, and we’ve only brushed the surface of what’s possible when physical garments also live as on-chain entities.
Click through to dive deeper into the analogy of Clothing is Metadata:
MetaFactory as a Platform
“You are not a drop in the ocean, you are the ocean in a drop.”
MetaFactory’s compensation model already turns every (apparel) drop into a platform. Project managers, designers, brands, producers, and distributors agree beforehand on what % of the retail sales they receive, which is groundbreaking in an industry known for supply chain opacity and labor abuse. Premier drops like the zero waste varsity jacket take this one step further through vertical collaboration: levels of the supply chain that are normally segregated are brought into the same conversations for creative cross-pollination.
Tooling that helps facilitate vertical collaboration on the front and back ends will streamline this process even further. MetaFactory is building out a dashboard, and also leverages web3 org and project management tools like Coordinape, Sobol, and DeWork.
"If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
MetaFactory makes it easy for web3 projects to collab, and the result has been consistent revenue-generating throughput. Onboarding for producers and builders, however, has been stop and go, without a clear overview of what’s happening, and who’s needed where.
The intention behind WSC.FYI—the fashion R&D spinoff from MetaFactory—is to openly map what we’re doing, so that potential contributors who share our vision and possess relevant skills can meet us at the right junctures.
Most of the designers we want to collab with still operate at the web1/web2 level. Our accessibility determines our impact. If we can’t provide consistent work to producers, or if potential contributors find themselves navigating a labyrinth of tools and concepts to get to us, we’re not moving the needle.
MetaFactory is ultimately an experiment in net-positive collaboration through tech-assisted human coordination. Value compounds through community, network, web3 participation, self-discovery through emergence, and holistic education. Personally I (Wes) am excited every time I talk to a designer or brand who struggles to surface in the old world of top-down control and value siphoning. I’ve already seen that message manifest new life opportunities. Now we make the process reliable, repeatable, and more accessible than ever.
Mentions
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