Neo Dlx: “These New Technologies Are Here to Stay So Let’s Enjoy Them”
“What worked last week, might not work this week”. With great success, Spanish 3D studio Pleid St. catapulted themselves into the crypto art market with their punk futuristic fashion brand Neo Dlx. But it’s a highly unpredictable market moving at rapid speed.
You guys just entered the digital fashion scene. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got into NFT fashion?
– We’ve been working in the digital scene for more than 15 years, during all this time we’ve been inspired by current culture, music, tech, and fashion. The idea of bringing all these things together in a new personal project away from clients is something that has been on our minds for a long time ago. Finally, we found the time to start experimenting from our roots and passions and see what happened. Suddenly we realized that we were totally on our playground with these creations. At the same time, the blockchain and metaverse culture was growing so fast, and as good tech lovers and geeks, we wanted to jump into it to explore all the possibilities of this new era.
– The first collection we did was about creating a brand for the metaverse, dropping five characters with their own personality reflected in their scenarios and way of acting. We are very happy with the results, but also with the community feedback and we saw that people wanted to collect them because they like them, and that was an incredible feeling. Ah wait! I’d like to mention that we also created the music for all the scenes! So, we finally blend most of our passions in Neo Dlx, our new metaverse brand.
Where have your creations gained the most traction so far?
– As young kids on the scene we still can’t tell as much as we would like to. But we’ve felt an extremely warm welcome in all the social networks, the feeling of many people saying they love our creations, the mood, the colors, the energy… These are very grateful inputs because they come from anyone, not only from colleagues asking about how we had done it in a technical way. Even some people who work in traditional fashion were fascinated with our collection and totally understood the inspo and the intention behind the designs. So we realized that we’ve engaged with a new audience who really liked what we are doing.
The NFT market seems to have cooled off in the last few months. How do you look at the future of the crypto art market? What would you like to see happen?
–The crypto-art market concept is something that gives us a bit of anxiety, we need to keep in mind that there is a lot of speculation and strange movements in this space, and of course, it’s affected by the global economic state. Definitely, it’s something to be worried about in terms of making a living. But as digital designers that believe in blockchain technology and web3, we think there is a lot to keep exploring around, and the market will be evolving, and it does extremely fast! What worked last week, may not work this week. We need to keep calm and continue doing what we are passionate about, all this new technology is here to stay, so let’s enjoy it, we believe this is the way.
Building up a digital fashion business, what things have you learned so far?
– We are still learning how to expand our brand culture beyond high-end video creation, and we are exploring AR assets and digital wearables. One of the trickiest things for us is how to adapt our high-definition assets and detailed and complex materials to the low resolutions required by real-time technology. We usually invest in more memory and graphic cards to get better results and now it’s totally the opposite. But being able to share our creations with anyone that wants to use them, and show them on their social and get feedback from other people in other parts of the world… That means connections, and that’s an amazing thing.
What projects are you working on right now?
– We are working on a second volume for the Neo Dlx characters, but we can’t say more at this point! Also exploring real-time, AR, and VR to try to expand our creations to new boundaries.
Who would your dream collaborator be?
– We don’t have names, but from the beginning, we’ve believed in the power of collaborations. There are some digital creators around our minds that will be awesome to join forces with, mixing our aesthetics and enjoying the process when new but totally different inputs appear on the scene. We think about music, tech, poetry, handcraft, AR, VR… mixing totally different disciplines to get a totally new thing, something unexpected, and a lot of learnings.
What digital creator in new technologies should we keep our eyes on in 2022?
– The h_u_m_x_n project looks promising, it blends high-end digital fashion with outstanding art direction and also allows the user to interact with it, it’s definitely a project that inspires us. RTFKT is one to keep the eyes on as OGs on the scene. Artists like HelloPlayful, the ARs of Johana Jaskowska or Ines Alpha, and of course Mintamintae, the Spanish artist collective we are part of.
