Giovanna Graziosi Casimiro on Producing Metaverse Fashion Week | Unreleased NFTS.WTF Interview

Previously unreleased: this interview is published here for the first time.Giovanna "Gigi" Graziosi Casimiro, lead producer of Decentraland's Metaverse Fashion Week, on producing the event fully remote and why it gave everyone a front-row seat.Interviewed by David Cash. Book David to host, moderate, or speak: https://davidcash.ca

Gigi works at Decentraland and was the lead producer of the first Metaverse Fashion Week, which David Cash curated. Recorded live in April 2022 at NFC Lisbon, days after the event, she talks with David about her start in digital art, hacking arts, and physical computing, her academic research on augmented reality, and her PhD work on open source XR and cultural heritage. They discuss who gets to own the story in heritage projects, how DAOs change collective decision-making, and what Metaverse Fashion Week showed about tangible digital fashion: buying in the metaverse and receiving the item in real life through Boson Protocol, a global front row, voice chat with designers, and metaverse creators building experiences for major fashion brands.

Watch on YouTube

Chapters

1. 00:00 Intro: Gigi of Decentraland, lead producer of Metaverse Fashion Week
2. 0:47 From digital art and physical computing to XR
3. 1:57 Augmented reality research and a PhD in XR and heritage
4. 2:25 Cultural heritage and who owns the story
5. 3:32 Restoring erased history with augmented reality
6. 4:28 DAOs, heritage, and collective decisions
7. 5:06 Metaverse Fashion Week and making digital fashion tangible
8. 6:15 A global front row, produced fully remote
9. 7:58 Removing the intermediaries between brands and buyers
10. 9:13 Metaverse creators working with major brands
11. 10:55 Producing Metaverse Fashion Week one day at a time
12. 11:49 What's next at Decentraland
13. 12:24 Where to find Gigi

Speakers

• David Cash, interviewer and editor-in-chief, NFTS.WTF; curator, Metaverse Fashion Week 2022
• Giovanna "Gigi" Graziosi Casimiro, lead producer of Metaverse Fashion Week, Decentraland

Key topics

• Producing Decentraland's Metaverse Fashion Week
• Digital art, hacking arts, and physical computing
• Augmented reality and open source XR in cultural heritage
• Using AR to restore figures erased from history
• DAOs and collective decision-making
• Phygital commerce: buy in the metaverse, receive it in real life
• A global front row and direct contact with designers
• Community, belonging, and brands online
• Metaverse wearable creators collaborating with fashion brands
• Running a large virtual event with a fully remote team

In their words

"We produced the Metaverse Fashion Week fully remote." Gigi Graziosi Casimiro

"If you start thinking about the overall massive work, then you don't do the work." Gigi Graziosi Casimiro

How to cite

APA: Cash, D. (2022). Giovanna Graziosi Casimiro on producing Metaverse Fashion Week [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/4y1dkiG3zCk

Chicago: Cash, David. "Giovanna Graziosi Casimiro on Producing Metaverse Fashion Week." Recorded April 2022, Lisbon. YouTube video, 12:53. https://youtu.be/4y1dkiG3zCk.

About NFTS.WTF

NFTS.WTF was a Web3 culture publication and interview series edited by David Cash. It covered artists, collectors, and builders during the 2021–2022 NFT boom. It ran for two years and closed after a board decision by the NFTS DAO, which left many of its interviews unpublished.

Recording details

Recorded April 2022 at NFC Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal. Previously unreleased. Published 2026 with chapters and captions.

Transcript

Machine-transcribed and reviewed. Timestamps link to the moment in the video.

[0:05] Hello everybody. Welcome back to NFTS.WTF. My name is David Cash, your editor-in-chief, and we're here today with one of my people, Giovanna Casimiro. Yes. Or Gigi. Or you can call me Gigi. From Decentraland. Gigi helped produce and was the lead producer for Metaverse Fashion Week, the head of Metaverse Fashion Week, and closely over the past couple months. And yeah, created what I call a really beautiful event and, you know, I'm super proud of what we managed to pull off. But you do so much more. You know, you have a background in XR, AR, PhD. You've worked on all different levels in this space. And yeah, I just want to, you know, let our DAO members get to know you a little bit better and yeah, also let people know a little bit more about Fashion Week and everything that happened. Amazing. And I can't give you a background for anybody who might not be here. Of course, of course. Thank you.

[0:49] So thank you everyone. So David is an amazing special person, so I'm super happy to be here. And definitely I think my background is very like multimedia because I started more into the digital art world, hacking arts, a lot of hacking arts. Actually, I was a judge in MIT arts hackathon. Thank you for me. You got schooled by Gigi if you went to MIT. Yeah, obviously. And then that's when I was really working with like physical computing and tech more into the physical sense, you know, like doing wearables. So were you doing coding and stuff yourself and everything? I was working for Arduino and Raspberry Pi, which are like... Yeah, like sensory press things and then they blink. A little bit, yeah. I was part of my studio in like early 2000s that was focused on that. But of course I had a big research ongoing in the academic part of my career that was more focused in immersive installations.

[1:45] Like I had video mapping work when I was working as an artist. I am more like producing now. The fact that you did that I feel like really helps probably now. To understand and empathize, I think, as well with whoever creator we work with. And then I started researching XR in general. So then I started doing my masters on augmented reality and eventually my PhD in the field of open source technologies and XR and heritage, which is... I actually love this tie-in though. I feel like we should talk about this maybe a little bit. We should, yeah. Well, that is a long... Well, maybe just for some folks. I mean, obviously you're very international. You're in a whole bunch of different countries. Yes, I live. And you've studied in a bunch of different countries and worked. I think that it's really important to consider the importance of cultural heritage to a lot of countries. Especially if you look at Italy, France, any European

[2:31] country. It's very important to Italy and there's huge infrastructure and funding. And this is all for things that have been, for the most part, forgotten. And how can we revitalize spaces like this? And the only real way is XR, augmented reality. Yeah, and I think that my question started when I finished my masters. I was trying to understand how urban art was being benefited by tools like Google tools. And then I started understanding that maybe they're not being benefited actually. Because maybe we are reproducing the same models we had before, where the heritage is owned by a group of people. And then when you see the digital tools that are not open source, they're still doing that. They're defining... And it's owned by the winners in history or whatever. So is that the kind of model we want to keep producing in heritage? And that's what I did pretty much.

[3:25] I was really critical in analyzing what I have today and what are the other projects. How else could we do this? And there are so many cool projects out there. Remember there's this Black Monument project that was made in 2017. And they were inserting with augmented reality African-American characters that were erased by history as with these digital monuments in 3D. So you could see this additional layer that was intentionally erased. So I think that this is an example of how there's a lot of things going on in the metaverse inside our computers. But you can expand all those disruptive narratives and open source and community -owned projects to the physical space. And I think heritage is an important part of life. The reason I wanted to touch upon it is because I think a lot of people don't consider that. But when we talk about the metaverse or AR, VR, any of these additive reality elements, it's additive.

[4:15] It's what can we add? What can we add to the value of the experience? And that goes across all forms, whether it's on a computer or whether it's in an environment. And if that environment is thousands of years old, it's almost cooler that you're able to augment that and have a play. And see, the idea of DAOs today, they may be totally associated with the metaverses. But they actually change the mindset on how we're going to make decisions in the future. It doesn't matter, including heritage. It doesn't have to be centralized. It doesn't have to be one gatekeeper telling you what to do. Yes, and we will learn that it's all about exercising the politics, which is not being a politician. It's like exercising your thoughts, your ideas in a collective space. Removing bureaucracy. And I think that that's why it's so important. DAOs are super related to heritage and memory and creative. Well, it's all committees. It's very similar to the structure, actually.

[5:00] It's amazing. That's an endless topic. We'll take a leap. I think this is very interesting also for people watching. We'll take a leap. I want to bring us into the metaverse. And I want to chat a little bit about what we're doing with the central end. You can see our talk. We did a talk here. You can see a little bit about what we do, some of the stats. It was amazing. I'm sure you can give the people the numbers if we want. But I feel like the more interesting part of it for me is really trying to make the metaverse more accessible and make this idea of digital fashion or digital identity or digital ownership more tangible for people. And the word tangible came up a lot in our conversations in terms of how do we take something digital, how do we take something artificial that's being manufactured and make it something that's accessible and relatable to people. We were able to conduct things like people being able to, through Boson protocol,

[5:45] being able to buy something in the metaverse and receive it in real life. That's really tangible. That's really physical. But even more so, we also had digital-centric brands, The Fabricant, Charlie Cohen, Ouroboros, a ton of different people on all different levels showing us how we can explore tangible experiences. A Grimes concert, Beau and Claire, these like people in person. You did the Phillip Blaine show also. Phillip Blaine was there. You got to meet and experience in some way. He's amazing. It's crazy. How do you feel about that? I'd love to hear your thoughts on the tangibility in making this concept more accessible with Fashion Week. I think it was beautiful really to be able to be with people. If we were in a physical space, it would be not possible. I think that first of all, to study in the same space and meet people from different magazines around the world as well.

[6:33] So I think first of all, it's accessible in a global scale that you can be with people. It doesn't matter where they are. You can achieve results. When I think that we produced the metaverse Fashion Week fully remote, and we were so used to it. If we talked to somebody in five years, I would say it's impossible to do that. We did it. Everybody delivered it. The experience was there and it was amazing. And of course, we need to deliver things that anyone can access. And there's a lot of technical limitations. This is the first one. Like in Toronto Fashion Week, I'm sure it was like 100 people. Isn't it a great experience? You're there and the designer is there. Like you were watching Philip Lane and Philip Lane is there. Yeah, it's there. He's there. And then you can even have a call, like a voice. This is really nice. And this will change how people see fashion.

[7:28] I think there is a preconception. We have that in museums. We have that in culture. We have that in fashion. But it isn't amazing that when you have a buyer that buys your products, he can talk to you. He can be with you all the time. It's beautiful. There's no separation. And then you start feeling super connected to the brand. And then there is a belonging. And I think that's what we need more and more. People, they lost the sense of belonging on the internet. They just don't even know what they're doing. You know, it's funny because we have this a lot in the art world, considering that the art world hasn't changed in a long time. You know, I think it's interesting because people kind of disregard fashion in that same context because the fashion world changed because of e-commerce. But e-commerce is still, you know, it's been very much the same for the past 20, 30 years. You know, not very much has changed, even longer, honestly.

[8:16] So I think it's really interesting when people start considering bringing an industry of that to the metaverse. What do we keep and what do we take away? What we're taking away is the intermediaries, the extra steps, the, you know, the consumer having to go through like 10 different levels, you know, people to even talk to the brand and having this like, how we're supposed to feel like we're separated from the product. But at the end of the day, I think via the metaverse, and I get from you and all these things, but I think via the metaverse, yes, we're making things accessible, but we're allowing things that they would never ever be able to experience. Like you said, Front Row at a Runway Show. Up until literally this event, I think that allowing everybody to be Front Row at a Runway Show, that's impossible, especially if it's somewhere like Paris or Berlin or London. So, you know, with somebody being a VIP, it was very important,

[9:10] but we'd love to hear some of your thoughts on that, you know, taking that to the next level in terms of what's possible. Yeah, I think that it's a concept that is very strong because I think it enhances the idea of community. And I feel that there are two sides of that. One is definitely whoever was watching was VIP, but all the creators, it's another very VIP. That is the VIP if you did it. People that were doing experiences with the brands, they were creating those experiences. That is fantastic. Like how many creators were working with Nicholas Kirk, people that probably will never have a chance to be working with those names. They're metaverse creators, so this is their native environment. That's the bond. We created this first year, now they are connected. Those creatives, they are connected with these brands. And I love how Decentraland took the artists and the creators in the community who

[9:57] are already doing activation and harnessed them. Yeah, it's beautiful. And this is beautiful because honestly that is already an economy that was there before and those creators were already connected to creating wearables. They had their own for years. And then this was, I think, an amazing opportunity for brands to learn with creators and creators to provide their vision to the brands and their result is actually a mix of both, right? And that's really nice. So I hope from here we can expand that and I want to see things happen organically, that brands already know those creators and they go for them and keep creating a relationship. I think they opened the door with this and I think a lot of people were not considering what's possible up until now. But now that they see that it's been done and they see that a big brand can do it and do it successfully, it's a little bit easier, it's a little bit more

[10:40] empowering, it's a little bit more possible. And it will be a relation of trust. I think that the more we do, the more they will trust and then... Yeah, because this was the first one. Exactly. I think the brands that actually joined this took a big leap of faith and very much trusted in the process and how this was going to happen. Correct. And it was a very great result, but obviously you have to pull this off in your own hands as well. I was a little numb, I think, because I was always like... And they were like, how are you not freaking out? I said, I don't know, one day after the... That's it. You stay secret. But the thing is that you just take one day ahead of... You don't think... If you restart thinking about the overall massive work, then you don't do the work. So I was just like, today, what do we have today? What is the problem today? Gigi, I think, exemplifies having a very big vision,

[11:30] but incredibly detail-oriented. Oh, really? No. Very specific. This and this. David, this and that. This event wouldn't have gone wrong without Gigi. She's incredible. I know that you're going to be doing so much with the foundation. Yes. All the people helping with Music Week and some of these other activations. We have. We have a bunch of others coming up, so maybe you want to mention just for people watching. Yes, we have. We have some other events. Yeah, there's some. We have Pride Month coming. It's the next event. And I think it's going to be... So it's going to be special activations and then it's going to be the week that this year, I think, is going to be bombastic. And we're going to have everything. I don't know yet. Can't confirm. And we'll be right along. You can see everything. So, Gigi, such a pleasure. Such a pleasure. I know you're now...

[12:21] I think you've jumped into public figure status. Where can people follow you on social media? Obviously, I think everybody here follows Decentraland, so where can people find you? So you can find me on LinkedIn if you're business-oriented, but if you just want to know if I'm in Cancun or not, you can follow me on Instagram. Amazing. And Twitter. Twitter, yeah. I'm trying to get better. We'll link everything here as well. Make sure to follow Gigi. She's doing beautiful, beautiful work. Thank you so much for taking the time. Thank you. We're here...