Gucci and Bored Ape Creator Want to Take High Fashion to the Metaverse

Gucci is venturing deeper into the metaverse, and it’s teamed up with Bored Ape Yacht Club creator Yuga Labs.

The luxury fashion house tweeted an image on Monday (seen below) of a bottle emblazoned with Gucci and Yuga Labs branding. The image was also seen in the trailer of Otherside, Yuga’s upcoming Bored Ape-themed metaverse game designed for PC and mobile browsers.

“Continuing to explore the metaverse, the House comes together with YugaLabs,” the tweet read. “Stay tuned as a new narrative takes shape, blurring the boundaries between the physical and digital.”

Details on the specifics of the partnership remain scarce, but a Business of Fashion report says the multifaceted deal is “meant to extend engagement between each company’s communities ‘by exploring the intersection between fashion and entertainment in the metaverse.'”

Yuga Labs is the biggest NFT company in the world. NFTs, or nonfungible tokens, are blockchain tokens that certify ownership of a digital good. Their proposed purpose is to grant digital goods the same property rights as physical items: An NFT allows you to sell an in-game costume, for instance, just as you’d be able to sell a real-life costume once you’re done with it. 

In recent years, luxury fashion brands have strengthened their Web3 ties. Luxury fashion houses, including Louis Vuitton, Prada and Gucci, have created NFT collections and immersive experiences in the metaverse. This underscores a willingness to experiment with the metaverse, which proponents tout for its business potential as an entirely new platform on which to sell digital goods and services.

Gucci’s participation in Otherside is set to begin this week.