Why Karlie Kloss Thinks You Shouldn't Roll Your Eyes at the Metaverse

The model-turned-tech entrepreneur aims to democratize access to the fashion world with her latest digital venture.

Karlie Kloss may best be known for being a supermodel who's covered Vogue at least 40 times, but she's also a programmer and passionate advocate for women in STEM. In 2015, she founded Kode with Klossy, a coder camp for young women and gender non-conforming youth to help mitigate tech's gender issue. And for years, she's spoken about the ways technology and fashion can intersect. So perhaps unsurprisingly, she's ready to wholeheartedly embrace the metaverse — and maybe even convince you to do the same.

"I don't think it's a replacement," she tells Fashionista. "It's just a further deepening of the connection between physical and digital, as our lives continue to be kind of symbiotic."

Her latest tech venture is an experience in metaverse platform Roblox called Fashion Klossette, where users can create their own pieces, walk a runway that others vote on, learn about different jobs in the fashion industry and "run around" a Parisian, Grand Palais-esque digital space. Essentially, it grants access to the world of fashion to anyone who's interested.

"There's a misconception around Roblox being this kid's game," Kloss says. "But we're from the fashion industry, and this is the next generation of consumers."

Roblox has over 67 million daily active users, which is around the populations of California and Texas combined. Its goal is to reach 1 billion, and its fastest-growing demographic of users are 17-to-24 year olds, according to a 2022 company report. As Kloss puts it: "This is not just some fad."

Fashion has famously been slow to adopt new technological advancements, whether that was e-commerce and digital publishing in the early 2000s or participating in the increasing number of interactive digital spaces in recent years. McKinsey & Co. pointed to the urgency of adopting digital strategy in its pandemic-era "Now or Never" explainer.

Kloss hopes to teach the industry about how the metaverse and associated technologies can be used as a business opportunity, whether as new revenue streams for designers or as a way to crowd-source data to inform future production.

"What Klossette can be and what we're hopeful [it can be] is a platform to celebrate and elevate design talent," she says. "There's a whole generation of talent that will come out of this. It's very much influenced by my vision around Kode with Klossy and the role I believe that the evolution of this emerging intersection of technology and fashion [has]."

Fashion Klossette has been a year in the making, and is similar to Roblox's other experiences: Any user can prance around and change their avatar's appearance, but Fashion Klossette offers its own wearables and environments, created with the help of developer studio Sawhorse.

"I feel so grateful that in my career I've been able to be a fly on the wall in some of the most extraordinary exclusive spaces," Kloss says. "I wanted to create a democratized space that could spark that imagination in every player that comes into this game, to have access to this gamified version of the industry. You can be a stylist, a designer, a model on the runway — and without having to have a plane ticket to Paris or having a budget for buying fashion."

According to Kloss, this is "a thesis of how we think the fashion industry will continue to converge with the digital space."

"I want people to express themselves in this digital fashion medium," she says. "I want people to be uninhibited in how they are, using fashion to express themselves through their avatar. I want people to enjoy, to collaborate in this kind of creative medium. I want people to realize the potential in this emerging digital fashion space."

Her next goal is to amp up makeup looks in Fashion Klossette. (She plans on calling Pat McGrath.)

"I'm optimistic for the future of where we're headed and also just how all of these kind of conversations converge," she says. "At its core... I'm a girl from Missouri. Rush [Bogin, Roblox digital fashion designer] is from Colorado. It doesn't matter where you come from. Great ideas can come from anyone anywhere. We really want, in this game, to democratize access to the best of fashion experiences and the tools to be a creator."

Want the latest fashion industry news first? Sign up for our daily newsletter.