Haute Couture goes NFT: Digitalization at the Paris Fashion Week

For luxury brands, usual business and marketing practices work upside down. While other businesses aim to scale, optimize and become accessible — luxury brands are supposed to be a cold and beautiful dream, causing admiration and (rarely fulfilled) desires of ownership. Building a luxury brand takes generations of storytelling, and the skill of maintaining a fragile balance between making profits and remaining exclusive is one-of-a-kind perfection. This paradigm has shifted with the trends of the modern era, in which a successful business should be data-driven and community-driven. Digitalization aims to democratize everything from finance to art, and luxury brands need to follow this ever-changing reality and embrace innovation in their way.

Paris Fashion Week, Haute Couture and innovation

The Haute Couture Paris Fashion Week is a 150 years old exhibition of fashion trends and forecasts, where a strict and hand-picked number of designers decide on the future of fashion and celebrate its glory. It’s Davos and Pizza Day of the fashion world. Haute Couture creations — wearable pieces of art in one-of-a-kind editions — are presented during one week in Paris, semi-annually in January and July.

The necessity to embrace innovation is described even in the definition of Haute Couture, proclaimed by La Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode (FHCM) — the governing body of the French fashion industry established in 1868, which also organizes Paris Fashion Week. The term Haute Couture is described as “tremendously modern,” and serving as a “permanent gateway” between tradition, know-how and craft “at the cutting edge of innovation.”

The “cutting edge of innovation” of today is manufacturing digital clothes and experiences using augmented reality (AR), virtual fashion shows, decentralized communities and blockchain-enabled ownership. All of those things have emerged lately in the fashion industry, but accelerated even more with the outbreak of the global COVID-19 pandemic, which urged all fashion brands to move their shows online for 2020.

The nonfungible token (NFT) boom happened alongside enabled blockchain-related experiments. Dapper Labs x Fabricant x Johanna Jaskowska sold an NFT, which includes a model in a digital outfit, at the Ethereum Summit as early as 2019.

This year, we saw plenty of successful fashion NFTs appearing. In February, the virtual brand Rtfkt, in collaboration with emerging 18-year-old transgender digital and visual artist Fewocious, sold 621 pairs of sneakers in just seven minutes for $3.1 million. Furthermore, Fewocious also recently sold five of their artworks through Christie’s for $2.16 million.

The news didn’t go unnoticed by the luxury fashion brands. It is rumored that Gucci will mint some NFTs for the collection of their digital sneakers which they have recently launched on their application using AR. Moreover, Gucci sold its first-ever NFT called “Aria” for $25,000 through Christie’s in the form of digital art and a video clip of a runway show by Gucci’s creative director Alessandro Michele. Finally, Mason Rothschild and Eric Ramirez claimed that they sold a pregnant Birkin for $23,500, “despite the NFT borrowing the iconic Birkin name and style, Hermès had no affiliation with — and saw no revenue from — the sale.” If that sale took place, it painfully signals that luxury brands should take back the control over any user-generated content and embrace NFTs.

Paris Fashion Week just ended, and it appears to be the first event where traditional high fashion brands made NFT-related announcements. In fact, some NFTs were launched by the Fashion Week organization itself.

FHCM to gift NFTs to Fashion Week guests

FHCM announced that it teamed up with French NFT platform Arianee to give away NFTs to selected attendees, buyers and journalists during Paris Fashion Week Men and Haute…