iWorld
Blenders Pride Glassware Fashion Tour enters the metaverse with borderless fashion & lifestyle experience
Mumbai: Powered by the Fashion Design Council of India, the 16th edition of the Blenders Pride Glassware Fashion Tour has reimagined its iconic legacy to bring a more youthful, inclusive, and innovative edition this year. In its cutting-edge new avatar, the fashion tour steps into the metaverse to create a first-of-its-kind amalgamation of fashion and technology for young audiences to experience like never before.
The fashion tour has launched ‘Blenders Pride Glassware Fashion Tour Park’ in decentraland, a global web3 platform where only renowned global brands have created an immersive metaverse experience for their fans. The fashion tour park features multiple interactive areas, gamified zones and showcase areas, with several engaging activities in store for users to interact with throughout the duration of the tour.
Users can start at the lounge, a zone that houses all the information about Blenders Pride Glassware Fashion Park, where they can claim a free ‘Proof of Attendance NFT’ from the POAPBooth. Users can then head to the ramp, where they can strike a pose, walk like a showstopper, or watch the live streams of the ultra-glamorous fashion shows from the fashion tour itself. Then at the designer & trial zone, users can try on and buy wearable NFTs from renowned designers on the tour, including Shantanu and Nikhil, Amit Aggarwal, Falguni Shane Peacock, and Kunal Rawal. There are also numerous and one-of-a-kind selfie spots throughout the fashion tour park where users can take a selfie and share it on social media with the hashtags #BlendersPrideGlasswareFashionTour #MadeOfPride #MyLifeMyPride for a chance to win exclusive passes to the tour’s stellar shows.
And then, there’s the metaverse treasure hunt, an engaging activity where users must collect clues from across the fashion tour park arena to stand a chance to get their hands on an iPhone 13, stylish bluetooth earphones worth Rs 15,000 or online shopping vouchers worth Rs 5,000. The hunt begins on 1 December.
But the most exciting attraction is India’s first metaverse-exclusive fashion show, set to take place at the fashion tour park on 10 December. This metaverse fashion show will feature outfits from the ‘Style Gallery’ exhibit of the fashion tour called “This is not a t-shirt” project. These unique t-shirt outfits are designed by 60 designers & homegrown fashion labels, who have embellished or even deconstructed the basic t-shirt into a design celebrating their authentic interpretation of the four themes of the fashion tour.
Guests attending the exclusive shows of the fashion tour at the four city editions will also have the opportunity to step into the metaverse – an experience zone that extends various elements from the fashion tour park’s metaverse platform. Guests can interact with a smart mirror, where they can try on unique wearable NFTs designed by the fashion tour designers, take selfies in the outfits, and even get their hands on the outfits by buying these one-of-a-kind wearable NFTs—an incredibly new experience for the fashion & lifestyle elite.
Speaking about the exciting new metaverse experience, Pernod Ricard India chief marketing officer Kartik Mohindra said, “The 16th edition of Blenders Pride Glassware Fashion Tour will lay the foundation for a new era in fashion & lifestyle. The fashion world is ever evolving, and the fashion tour has always led this wave of evolution in India. Taking the fashion tour to the metaverse is not just a first-of-its-kind initiative for the industry; it’s also our interpretation of how to make the tour more inclusive, accessible, and futuristic by allowing young audiences to experience the fashion tour in an immersive way like they have never before. It is a part of our journey of celebrating the pride of today’s youth with newfound vigour and vision.”
Gaming
India’s broadcasters say no to Fifa World Cup 2026
Fifa has slashed its asking price by 65 per cent but India’s broadcasters are still not buying
MUMBAI: The world’s biggest sporting event cannot find a single taker in the world’s most sports-mad nation. Fifa’s television rights for the 2026 World Cup remain unsold in India, and the clock is ticking loudly.
To shift the property, world football’s governing body has already swallowed hard and cut its asking price from $100m to $35m, bundling in the 2030 edition as a sweetener. It has not worked. Indian broadcasters have looked at the offer, done the sums and quietly walked away.
The reasons are brutally simple. The 2026 tournament, co-hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico, kicks off in a time zone that turns India’s primetime into a graveyard shift. Most matches will air between midnight and 7am IST, a scheduling catastrophe for advertisers chasing mass reach. The 2022 Qatar edition was a gift by comparison, with matches dropping neatly into Indian evenings. North America offers no such luxury.
The market itself has also changed beyond recognition. The merger of Star India and Viacom18 into JioStar has gutted the competitive tension that once sent sports rights prices soaring. Where rival bidders once slugged it out, there is now a single dominant buyer, and it is in no hurry. JioStar has valued the rights at roughly $25m, a full $10m below Fifa’s already-discounted floor price. That gap has so far proved unbridgeable.
Broadcasters are also nursing a ferocious cricket hangover. Between 2022 and 2023, Indian media houses committed well over $10bn to cricket rights alone, covering IPL, ICC events and BCCI domestic fixtures combined. After a binge of that scale, appetite for a football package that delivers a fraction of the ratings, in the dead of night, is close to zero.
The economics of football broadcasting make the maths even harder. Cricket, with its natural breaks every few overs, is an advertiser’s paradise. Football offers a 15-minute halftime and precious little else. Recovering a nine-figure rights fee from a single half-hour ad window is a stretch at the best of times. These are not the best of times: the Indian government’s tightening grip on real-money gaming and gambling advertising has vaporised a category that once underwrote the economics of big sporting events.
Nor is the World Cup an anomaly. Indian Super League valuations have cratered. English Premier League rights have softened across successive cycles. The cooling of football as a broadcast commodity in India is structural, not cyclical.
With the tournament opening on 11th June, Fifa is running out of road. It may yet blink and meet JioStar at $25m. Or it may go direct, streaming the entire tournament on its own platform, Fifa+, or cutting a digital deal with YouTube, and hoping that a generation of Indian football fans finds its way there without a broadcaster to guide them.
Either way, the beautiful game’s Indian chapter is looking decidedly ugly.
