Digital Dreamscape artist Charlotte Taylor trades architecture for NFTs for Italian luxury brand Loro Piana
Style
With an eye towards ecology, the Italian luxury house combines blockchain technology and art with its high-end wool offerings.
- British designer Charlotte Taylor blurs the lines between real and imagined, as well as art and architecture. To scroll through her Instagram is to play a game of differentiation. It’s hard to tell which are elegant interiors and which are her stunning virtual spaces.
And ambiguity is precisely the point. Taylor’s renderings (she calls them “creative playgrounds”) often begin from photographs and sketches that she transforms into fictional spaces using Adobe and 3D modeling software. Her London-based studio, Maison de Sable, specializes in depicting tranquil interiors that appear as retreats for the ultra-rich on a distant planet (or metaverse).
Taylor, 28, now lends her nuanced vision and design sense to Italian luxury purveyor Loro Piana. Taylor minted 20 NFTs for the limited and numbered The Gift of Kings garments exclusively made for and sold only at the newly opened Palo Alto, California store. Who would have expected the historic heritage house to come up with an Aura Blockchain Consortium powered sweater?
The dream bedroom does not exist. Casa Atibaia, in collaboration with Nicholas Préaud. Courtesy of Charlotte Taylor.
Taylor’s NFT pieces are movable digital sculptures that feature a garment suspended in the changing light of a design studio or warehouse and woven from threads that extend beyond the frame, as if by a cashmere doll master.
“The airiness and simplicity of the rooms draw inspiration from architects like John Pawson and Tadao Ando,” Taylor tells Artnet News, also noting the influence of Italian modernism. “The rooms were chosen to highlight the important processes and key moments in the garment’s journey.”
British artist and designer Charlotte Taylor created 20 NFTs for the Italian luxury house. Courtesy of Loro Piana.
Loro Piana’s digital certificate, which will be accessible via a QR code on an item’s hangtag, will provide customers with information on where a product was sourced, spun, woven and sold. Taylor sees a connection between a brand’s efforts to offer transparency and the potential for NFTs to certify and protect artists’ work.
“NFTs have really been an empowering force in the art and design context from a creator’s perspective,” says Taylor. “I think they will become more and more integrated into different aspects of daily life.”
A compendium of Taylor’s digital rich interiors, Design dreams, will be released in July. But fantasy will become reality further in 2024. One of her designs will be built as part of the ongoing Paréa Zion hotel and retreat in Utah.
Charlotte Taylor’s dream will soon come true. The design is set to be realized in 2024. ‘Charlotte’s House’ for Paréa Zion, project led by Studio Andrew Trotter. Photo by Klaudia Adamiak, courtesy of Charlotte Taylor.
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