Zuckerberg Wants You to Buy Digital Clothes for Your Avatar

pcmag.com:

Mark Zuckerberg’s latest effort to pave the way for a metaverse is all about selling digital items from real fashion brands so you can customize a virtual version of yourself. 

Meta announced its "Avatar Store" with a virtual fashion show(Opens in a new window) featuring Instagram Director of Fashion Partnerships Eva Chen and Zuckerberg, during which their avatars dressed up in digital outfits from designer brands including Balenciaga, Prada, and Thom Browne.

Buying clothes or custom skins for your avatar is nothing new to gamers. But Meta wants to bring the concept to social media. “Digital goods will be an important way to express yourself in the metaverse and a big driver of the creative economy,” Zuckerberg wrote(Opens in a new window) in an announcement.

The store seems to be laying the groundwork for Zuckerberg's ultimate goal of creating a sprawling virtual reality world to replace the internet. If he succeeds, then avatar appearances will become far more important, as they already are for games.

But in the meantime, not everyone may know about the existing avatar function on Facebook and Instagram since both social media platforms revolve around real-life photos and videos of people. Create an avatar by going into the settings(Opens in a new window) panel, and it’ll allow you to customize a virtual version of yourself, which you can post in Instagram Stories or in the comments of Facebook posts. 

The function also includes free outfits you can use to customize the avatar. But Zuckerberg already sees an opportunity to build an entire marketplace devoted to selling digital clothing from the top fashion brands. 

“It’s all about people expressing themselves and connecting, and a huge part of how people express