Digital artwork in the form of non-fungible tokens is becoming more popular by the day, and Givenchy is putting 15 NFTs by graphic artist Chito up for auction.
Matthew Williams, Givenchy’s creative director, had conscripted Chito for his resort 2022 collection and now his unique air-brushed characters — a suspicious-looking dog, a boy in a horned cap, a frowning girl — have become NFTs, the latest fashion craze amid heated talk of the metaverse’s potential.
Williams said he’s been eager to explore NFTs and “the fact that Chito is already active in the ecosystem made it feel even more natural to collaborate on this limited-edition series.”
All proceeds from the auction — with bidding starting Nov. 23 on OpenSea — will go to The Ocean Cleanup, a nonprofit aiming to clean up 90 percent of floating ocean plastic pollution.
Chito and Williams teamed up on the characters, reprising the prints featured in the pre-collection and incorporating the French house’s 4G logo as an offbeat mouth on a hockey mask, for example.
Born in Seattle and based in Mexico, Chito has collaborated with brands including Supreme, and is known for individually customizing outerwear such as Arc’teryx jackets.
The Givenchy resort range saw Chito’s signature characters, including a sad clown, applied on items ranging from denim jackets to hoodies, backpacks, sneakers, masks and a handful of one-of-a-kind customized Rimowa suitcases.
Givenchy partnered with an array of tech companies to realize the project: the Aura Blockchain Consortium for the smart contracts for this NFT drop; Ledger to ensure the provenance of the NFTs, and the Polygon network, prized for its minimal energy consumption.
Williams and Givenchy touted the power of NFTs to broadcast the work of artists like Chito, and to conceptualize fashion’s role in physical and digital realms.