Dolce & Gabbana is releasing an NFT collection

It will be unveiled at its Alta Moda show in Venice at the end of August

A look from Dolce & Gabbana’s September 2020 Alta Moda collection, which was presented in Florence’s Villa Bardini. Courtesy Dolce & Gabbana

The Italian house of Dolce & Gabbana will unveil its first non-fungible token collection in Venice in August.

As part of its lavish Alta Moda, Alta Sartoria and Alta Gioielleria (high fashion, high tailoring and high jewellery) shows that will take place in the Italian city, Dolce & Gabbana is creating an NFT collection.

The project is in in collaboration with UNXD, a new digital marketplace that will launch on September 1. It will be powered by the Polygon Network as an exclusive platform for digital luxury.

Called collezione Genesi (Genesis collection), the NFT will, like its physical counterpart, be inspired by Venice, in what the house describes as “the rich and artistic history and traditions of the city of the Doges”.

Expected to be a series of digital looks, the first concept NFT will be a dress titled L’abito dei Sogni, or Dress from a Dream, named afterthe dreams of designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana.

Additional NFT looks are promised to be unveiled in the lead up to the Alta Moda event at the end of August, culminating in a grand online auction on the UNXD website on Wednesday, September 1.

With no hint at what any of the looks will be, or even how big the collection is, to help maintain the mystery, visitors to the UNXD website are greeted simply with a page that reads "reserve your spot in line".

Instead, the only clue Dolce & Gabbana has given is a teaser video that is filled with tantalising glimpses of the Alta Moda collection. In it, the designers and their atelier seamstresses can be seen sketching, cutting and sewing fragments of looks, over which lines of digital code have been layered. Intriguing, yet devoid of detail, it hints at things to come.

While the NFT universe may be new to the Italian designers, embracing new technology is not. It became the first major fashion brand to embrace drones in 2018, when it sent a fleet of them whirling down its autumn/winter runway, each carrying a glossy new bag.

NFTs, meanwhile, are the latest cryptocurrency add-on. Essentially a unique digital fingerprint, an NFT outlines a precise and exact provenance, and is both immutable and impossible to replicate or forge.

Such trustworthiness is instrumental in opening up new markets, including fashion and art. The art world recently triggered an NFT frenzy, when the most expensive one to date, a digital artwork by the artist Beeple, sold in March for $69.3 million.