Luxury fashion house Gucci is diving deeper into Web3 and the metaverse—and it's doing so in collaboration with Bored Ape Yacht Club creator Yuga Labs.
Gucci today teased out an alliance on Twitter, using an image (above) that shows Gucci and Yuga Labs branding on a bottle that was previously seen in the trailer for Otherside, Yuga's upcoming Bored Ape-themed metaverse game.
"Continuing to explore the Metaverse, the House comes together with Yuga Labs," tweeted Gucci. "Stay tuned as a new narrative takes shape, blurring the boundaries between the physical and digital."
gm: Meet the Bored Ape Yacht Club Founders
Bored Ape Yacht Club co-founders Wylie Aronow ("Gordon Goner") and Greg Solano ("Garga") joined Dan Roberts and Kate Irwin on the gm podcast to talk about BAYC parent company Yuga Labs and its size and influence in the space, Ape haters, NFT haters, the SEC investigating Yuga, Buzzfeed "doxxing" Aronow and Solano earlier this year, their vision for the Otherside metaverse realm, and much more. Watch and make sure to subscribe to the gm podcast on Apple or Spotify.
Details of the deal are relatively scarce, with the CEO of Gucci Vault and metaverse ventures Robert Triefus telling The Business of Fashion that the tie-up will give the fashion label "an active role in Otherside and 10KTF's continuing narrative."
A Yuga Labs representative told Decrypt that it's a "multi-year partnership designed to extend the engagement between their respective communities, by exploring the intersection between fashion and entertainment in the metaverse."
The Yuga rep also confirmed that the "first chapter" of the tie-up begins this week.
Yuga TwelveFold Bitcoin NFT Auction Raises $16.5 Million
Yuga Labs’ buzzy and controversial auction of its debut Bitcoin NFT collection concluded Monday, with 288 successful bidders nabbing as many pieces in the limited series, spending a combined $16.49 million worth of BTC. The collection, TwelveFold, garnered 3,246 total bids during the 24-hour auction, which began Sunday, according to a Yuga spokesperson. Of those, the highest bid was 7.1159 BTC, or roughly $159,500. The lowest successful bid was 2.2501 BTC, or just over $50,000. The top 288 bidd...
Gucci has already made a number of moves around the metaverse, including a previous collaboration with 10KTF, a digital fashion startup that Yuga Labs acquired last fall. 10KTF and the fashion giant created Gucci-branded digital apparel that owners of certain NFT collections could overlay onto their avatars.
Gucci also bought virtual land plots last year to develop in another Web3 metaverse game, The Sandbox, and enabled in-store payments with ApeCoin—an Ethereum-based crypto token tied to the Bored Ape ecosystem.
The Otherside metaverse game opened its doors for a "first trip" demo in July 2022 to users who held digital plots of land called Otherdeeds. This past weekend, the firm took users on a "second trip" to explore the Otherside digital world, with over 7,200 users playing together in the same game world.
