Sedona Legge is a 5-foot-9 model with brown hair and blue eyes. She wears a size nine shoe. She has a 22 inch waist. And recently, she is everywhere: on the cover of The angels magazine, sitting next to Snoop Dogg in Gucci’s Love Parade ad campaign in February. And starting this week, luxury brands will have the option to choose whether they want to work with the real Legge or her photorealistic avatar.
Legge is one of 12 avatars debuted as part of the metaverse division of Photogenics — the Los Angeles-based art-directed modeling agency founded by former model Nicole Bordeaux and Smashbox co-founders Dean and David Factor. According to their website, the Photogenics Metaverse Division will soon be the beating heart of the agency. None of their avatar talents are purely computer generated, as they say “Avatars have a voice, unique style, direction and personality derived from the real world that will keep these ‘digital twins’ alive and developing.”
The industry-wide push towards photorealistic avatars, virtual influencers and AI-generated human bodies to model clothing by fashion retailers has been slowly building since 2016 when Trevor McFedries co-founder of tech startup Brud created Lil Miquela – a teenage CGI model on Instagram. from Downey, California. Since then, Lil Miquela has been featured with every celebrity, from Bella Hadid to Millie Bobby Brown. She appeared on the cover of High sensitivity in April 2018.
For luxury brands specifically, the introduction of photorealistic avatars means they won’t have to spend as much of their advertising budget. According to Gartner – the world’s leading information technology research and advisory company – luxury brands in 2021 spent approximately 33 percent of advertising cost on digital marketing. That number is likely to grow as Gen Z and millennial luxury purchases outpace spending by Gen X and baby boomers.
In China, synthetic humans are already a booming industry. According to data from iiMedia Research, China’s virtual idol industry was worth $487 million in 2020, up 70 percent year-on-year, and is forecast to reach $875.9 million in 2021. To that end, in April , we reported that virtual avatar startup Genies announced a $150 million Series C funding round led by Silicon Valley private equity firm Silver Lake. And according to one estimate, the size of the virtual human market in China could reach $42.4 billion by 2030.
For e-commerce companies that spend about three to five percent of their annual gross merchandise value on photo shoots, avatars offer a new solution to high costs. ZMO.ai — a China-based startup that creates AI-generated human bodies to model clothing from fashion retailers — aims to bring that figure down to 1 percent, according to co-founder Roger Yin.
So how does working with a photorealistic avatar of a high fashion model work?
According to our report on Genies, creators will have “full ownership and commercialization rights” of their Genie avatar creations, according to the company, and collect a 5 percent transaction fee every time an NFT avatar is sold. But photorealistic avatars are a little different.
According to Vogue, brands would pay to license avatar designs for metaverse campaigns for a set period of time. “Photogenics transfers an NFT with a built-in burn-in period, at the end of which the license validation expires,” according to their report. “The client’s license agreement specifies fees and usage, however, Photogenics has not disclosed how the profits will be split, or how the models will be paid, only that the split is a partnership between all parties and may depend on the project. “
As for what this portends for the models themselves, it’s hard to say. Photogenic said Forbes that, “Avatar reward rates are similar to IRL models depending on project and usage.” But there’s certainly little stopping brands from creating or requiring synthetic, photorealistic avatars based on an amalgamation of different human personalities that don’t require such a profit-share with IRL models. After all, Lil Miquela is not based on any specific human being. In other words, as is the case with so many metaverse devices, the only way to know what this brave new world of photorealistic avatars has in store is to wait and see.— Andrew Fiouzi
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