A Vault Project Dedicated to Customising 11 PFP NFTs with Looks Inspired by Alessandro Michele’s Collections
A crystal ball heralds its arrival. Mysterious and fascinating, the magical globe is the gift the digital avatar of Alessandro Michele, Gucci‘s Creative Director, offers Wagmi-san, world renowned digital artisan who has invited the designer — already on a journey towards new paradigms and forms of creativity– to his virtual shop in New Tokyo.
We cannot resist using the lexicon of fairy tales to describe ‘10KTF Gucci Grail’, the new initiative happening in Vault’s experimental space. In collaboration with digital accessory shop 10KTF, Gucci has created ad hoc digital outfits designed by Alessandro Michele and created by Wagmi-san to dress PFPs from eleven selected NFT collections including Bored Ape, World of Women, Cool Cats and many others. The “PFP” acronym stands for ‘Picture For Proof’, a NFT version of a profile photo, used by collectors both as their portrait and as extreme expressions of artistic and technological talent. The encounter between Wagmi-san and Alessandro Michele generates two custom Gucci looks, available in different colors, inspired respectively by the Aria and Love Parade collections, for those who aspire to express their individuality through fashion in the parallel digital worlds.
The House is already present in the realm of NFTs, the ‘Non-Fungible Tokens’ that have transformed our experience of art, sublimating it into immaterial digital works. Acquiring personalised virtual garments also involves several steps, not unlike the actual process of securing a designer creation (which requires several fittings).
Over the past few days, the crystal ball has been accessible to three groups of people – those who already own a PFP; those who are members of the Gucci Vault community on the Discord server, and those who already ‘inhabit’ New Tokyo, where artisan Wagmi-san lives. Those who redeemed their crystal ball were able to choose between the different Gucci looks artfully tailored by Wagmi-san and receive their customized digital avatar.
With only a limited number of users involved, this project has the feel of a unique work: “10KTF Gucci Grail” not only highlights the individuality of each person, but it also unveils the huge, spectacular potential of virtual realities, enabling us to design a digital identity in an alternative world. To be dressed for the metaverse is to have another self that Vault allows us to generate through the codes of Gucci.
