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Following her dream to work in luxury fashion, Lauren Kacher has traveled all over the world, ranging from New York to London and Paris. As an experienced accessory designer with stints at St Laurent, Loewe, and Zadig & Voltaire, Lauren found herself jobless during the pandemic. With hiring on freeze, she turned to digital fashion. A short time later, Alterrage was born.
As she began to experiment with software like CLO3D and research the potential of the blockchain she recognized the massive wastage issue in the fashion industry: Sampling.
“Why are we making product just to never use it and throw it away?”
Fast forward almost a year later and Lauren is the founder of Alterrage, one of the first digitally native fashion labels. Since its launch, Alterrage has made waves within both the Web3 fashion community and the traditional fashion world. In December, Megan Kaspar wore the Alterrage x Jevels earrings during a video appearance on Yahoo! Finance. A few months later, Alterrage was featured again in the New York Times.
I sat down with Lauren to ask her a few questions around Alterrage and the future of digital fashion.
How was the idea for Alterrage born?
A big question I started to ask myself was, “How do you combine products between the physical and digital worlds?”
Alterrage began as a seasonal phygital collection: a way to take a product, make it in physical form, and digitally amplify it to the metaverse. With Alterrage, I want to use digital fashion as a way to improve what already exists in the physical world. We now have a collective of ten people working toward this goal.
What is METARALITY?
In many ways, our digital identity is already more important than our physical one. Social media is the earliest introduction to the broader metaverse. But no one will want to be digital all the time, human connection is too important. At Alterrage we envision a METARALITY — a combination of the physical, augmented, and digital worlds. As digital environments continue to become more mainstream, we’ll eventually need to have an interoperable identity across all environments.
Even from a fashion perspective, each world has different constraints.
In Real Life (IRL) – Wastage is a huge issue. We need to understand how to make a physical , sustainable product that can be made on-demand, while also having a closed-loop, circular lifestyle.
On Real Life (ORL) – How do we wear our garments through AR filters? Filters are really interesting because they are accessible, approachable, and easy to understand.
Larger Than Life (LTL) – How do we carry our fashion across different virtual environments and blockchains. Currently, this interoperability doesn’t exist and is the biggest technical bottleneck.
You mentioned you’re currently working on a DAO component. Why did you choose that model?
In fashion, transparency is key. You want to keep as few secrets as possible. During my time in Web3, I’ve been part of many DAOs and have seen the power of leveraging the community for feedback and decision-making. We are still in the early stages of building our DAO, but we plan to prioritize workflow. This means finding the right fit for the right people within specific spheres. As a member of a sphere (a micro-community within the Alterrage ecosystem), you can level up through quality work and your contribution will directly relate to your influence within the DAO. We want everyone to have the opportunity to help build a Web3 fashion label from the ground up.
What’s the end goal for Alterrage and what do you think needs to happen in the digital fashion world to reach that?
The goal for Alterrage is to leverage digital disruption to make a positive impact in the physical (IRL) world using Web3 technology. To do that, it’s very important to bridge Web2 fashion with Web3. Web2 fashion isn’t going anywhere, so we need to onboard and educate new users on how Web3 can help to amplify it, not replace it.
Two of the biggest reasons I started Alterrage were to make more self-sustaining product ecosystems and to remove the stereotype and hardship around breaking into fashion. That will never change.
To keep up with Lauren make sure to follow her on Twitter and check out Alterrage official website.