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In partnership with Adidas, Prada is releasing its first NFT.
According to reports from Vogue Business, the non-fungible token (a non-interchangeable unit of data stored on a blockchain) will be a crowd-sourced digital artwork in a Beeple-style collage.
Beginning on January 24, anyone can register to submit a photograph using a specially-designed filter that will manipulate, scramble, and remove 40 percent of the image. Three thousand of the individual photographs will be selected by raffle, and minted by Adidas as unique NFTs for free. The individual who submitted the artwork will remain the owner, able to sell their NFT on the secondary market.
Then, the selected images will be combined as tiles into one mass patchwork NFT, designed by digital artist and creative coder Zach Lieberman. That one-of-one NFT will be auctioned online on digital art marketplace SuperRare, and displayed as a large-scale installation in Prada and Adidas flagship stores. This patchwork style is similar to Beeple’s $69 million “Everydays: The First 5000 Days,” which ended up setting a record for a digital artwork at Christie’s auction.
While this is the first NFT for the luxury brand, it’s not for Adidas. The sportswear company launched its first NFT with Bored Ape Yacht Club, NFT influencer Gmoney, and comics series Punks Comic in December. Even though that project had a community-driven ethos, this NFT with Prada--which crowdsources submissions from Prada and Adidas’s audiences--is a shift away from the typical top-down relationship of luxury brands.
The project, named “re-source”, is linked to Prada and Adidas Originals recurring Re-Nylon collection, which uses regenerated nylon yarn in select handbags and accessories, and will inspire the final large-scale artwork.
The third Re-Nylon collection launched this week. The majority of the proceeds from the primary sale and all secondary sales go to Slow Factory, a nonprofit organisation and institute working to create climate-positive solutions and inclusive communities.
According to Lorenzo Bertelli, who is expected to succeed his father as CEO of the luxury brand, entering the metaverse was “unavoidable” for Prada.
“If Prada does something, there has to be a meaningful reason behind it,” he told Vogue Business. “It’s not just about putting a logo on something. As a brand, you need to understand and have a reason for joining a new channel or an emerging trend.”
He continued, “Many people in luxury made this mistake in the past thinking that it was not so relevant. Like social media, I don’t think that NFTs are good or bad, but they are a digital tool and it depends on how you use them.”
“Our intent is to help people participate in these new emergent spaces that they feel like they don’t have access to,” Erika Wykes-Sneyd, VP of brand communications at Adidas Originals, told the publication. The brand’s goal is to remove obstacles to entry into the NFT space, which is being made accessible in this case via a digital art format.”