Leading luxury brands have incorporated technologies to recreate brand images and reinvent consumer experience. The fashion industry is experiencing a historic transformation thanks to emerging technologies such as blockchain and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) along with impactful technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and virtual reality (VR). With metaverse as a new social platform around the corner, academics and industry alike are querying how these new technologies might reshape luxury brands, reinvent consumer experience, and alter consumer behavior. This research charts new academic territory by investigating how newly evolved technologies affect the fashion industry. With practical examples of luxury brands, this article has theorized the irreversible trend of digital fashion: the attraction of NFT collectibles. It then proposes intriguing questions for scholars and practitioners to ponder, such as will young consumers, essentially living online, buy more fashion products in the digital world than in the real world? How can the fashion industry strategize for the coexistence of digital collections and physical goods?

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This research examines to what extent and in what ways two distinct groups of wine experts differ in their assessments of the same set of wines. Whereas previous research focused on selected wine panels whose members were in some cases trained for a specific tasting, we implemented a blind wine tasting among two distinct groups of wine experts: local wine experts and influencers in two socioculturally different locations in the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia and Montreal in Quebec in Canada. Our findings suggest significant differences in how certain wine sensory attributes are evaluated. This article provides insights into how quality and taste are constructed by two distinct groups of wine experts. Our research results further shed light on how different types of wines might be perceived differently based on the locales in which they are marketed.