Building Fashion Brands in the Metaverse: A Systematic Review and Integrated Framework

The metaverse presents revolutionary opportunities for fashion brand building, yet understanding how its characteristics influence consumer perceptions and brand outcomes remains fragmented. This systematic literature review analyzes 56 peer-reviewed articles to construct an integrated Stimulus-Organism-Response framework mapping consumer psychological processes in metaverse fashion branding. We address two research questions: First, how do consumer external and internal factors influence fashion brand evaluation through perceptual mechanisms? Second, what factors are uniquely important for metaverse fashion versus real-world consumption? Our framework systematically categorizes consumer perceptions into four dimensions—product/brand, experiential, social, and self/avatar perception—and identifies 22 mediating variables, each with its theoretical foundation. Self-congruence and presence were the most frequently validated mediators, confirming the centrality of immersive experiences and idealized self-expression. We identify eight critical factors distinctive to metaverse fashion: luxuriousness, phygital products, scarcity, uniqueness, social norms, social presence, avatar similarity, and trialability. These factors demonstrate notably different consumer behavior patterns, including weakened objective quality criteria, dominance of subjective uniqueness, and superiority of idealized avatars over realistic self-representation. The absence of physicality necessitates new theoretical frameworks beyond traditional consumer behavior theories. This research provides a comprehensive theoretical map for researchers and strategic guidelines for fashion brands navigating the metaverse frontier.