Italian fashion label Gucci auctioned off a newly minted NFT inspired by its Fall/Winter 2021 collection in an online auction hosted by Christie’s with a final sale price of $25,000. The NFT draws from Aria, a four-minute film produced by filmmaker Floria Sigismondi and Gucci’s creative director Alessandro Michele to accompany a runway show.
The work was offered as part of “Proof of Sovereignty,” a Christie’s-curated NFT sale. The sale proceeds will be donated to UNICEF USA to support the nonprofit’s COVAX initiative, which supports global access to Covid-19 vaccines.
“Gucci Aria” was launched in honor of the Italian brand’s 100-year anniversary. The 15-and-a-half minute video that inspired the NFT features a dream-like, post-COVID clubbing experience. The show features the many aspects and layers of Gucci’s legacy, establishing it as a perfect basis for Gucci’s first NFT.
Multiple luxury brands have turned to non-fungible tokens (NFTs). The new, buzzy tech creates a non-interchangeable receipt for any digital artwork, video, piece of music or rendering, marking each digital asset as unique and verifiable. NFTs allow other forms of creative digital work to be fused into the world of fashion, surpassing the limitations of the physical world by existing in a digital space.
Christie’s has bee a pioneer auction house to facilitate NFTs sales. The house’s sale of Beeple’s Everydays: the First 5000 Days (2008–21) for $69 million in March was an unprecedented landmark that made Beeple the third-most-expensive living artist.
Since then, Christie’s has rolled out other NFT sales to attract an emerging class of crypto-wealthy buyers. As the former sales have been presented in collaboration with artists and estates, Christie’s collaboration with the luxury brand Gucci marks a new kind of offering in the crypto-art space at auction.
The “Proof of Sovereignty” sale, which is curated by anonymous digital artist Lady PheOnix with Christie’s contemporary art specialist Noah Davis, also includes digital offerings by formidable media artists such as Jenny Holzer, Urs Fischer, Gerald Laing, and Nam June Paik. For this sale, Davis is placing stock in the potential for NFTs to further disrupt the art world. In a statement, Davis said, “It’s going to change the way artists make art, and the way every creative industry operates, by democratizing access to information, diminishing opacity in favor of transparency, and empowering creative people everywhere.”
