How NFTs Give Access to Fashion Week Shows – WWD

Prada, Jason Wu and Gucci too. Major luxury brands offer special access to fashion shows and events to holders of their NFTs – a practice called “token gating” – which can change the front row and serve as a new velvet rope.

“More and more, token-gated experiences are going to be the thing for 2023,” said Arianee CEO Pierre-Nicolas Hurstel.

In recent seasons, Arianee has handled the NFTs for Paris Fashion Week, linking them to official accreditations.

Prada and Jason Wu have already added September Fashion Week tickets to their tokens; Gucci held a private cocktail party in New York last June for the holders of their SuperGucci and Gucci Grail NFT.

Arianee has previously worked with IWC watches and YSL, and is currently working with several other brands to create specialized experiences that will take place during the upcoming fashion weeks in September or January.

Brands are looking at what they can do during PFW using the official NFTs. “It’s going to open up an incredible array of possibilities, and then it creates a foundation, a resource, for the brand to build experiences,” Hurstel said.

As PFW attendees build their wallets from season to season, and all the years of check-ins that come with it, brands can select communities of people and give them access to token-gated experiences – otherwise known as “parties” in common parlance. Brands can also see the social graph of who has attended previous events, and guests have proof that they were there.

The data can help brands grow their NFT programs quickly as they figure out how to bridge the Internet and IRL. Plus, pairing an NFT to an event is a way to “cut through the noise” when it feels like a new collection or collaboration is being announced every day, Hurstel said.

“Brands need to navigate the journey between the current market hype, the actual utility and the purpose and integrity of NFT. Because jpeg images on the internet is one thing, but if it leads to a physical item, that’s where there’s an opportunity,” said Sean Pattwell, CEO of CW8 Communications, which advises luxury brads on NFT and Web3 strategy, Coveted items are one value adder, and Coveted invitations are another.

“If you have an NFT and it gives you some level of access to experiences and a community, that’s pretty amazing,” Pattwell said.

Traditionally, the fashion industry has been exclusive, with shows only open to insiders, although a massive shift in the guest list has already taken place. Hurstel said the brands he works with have noticed that shows used to be 10 percent consumer-driven, and now they’re 80 percent consumer-driven as the number of industry buyers has dropped. They have been replaced by influencers and celebrities who live stream, and the runways are purpose-built for Instagram.

NFT access is likely the next step in that evolution.

“These kinds of unlockable experiences are what’s really exciting. It’s a way to create something meaningful for your key consumers and actually build relationships with new audiences,” said Pattwell. “A lot of people who are in the crypto world, they’re a new network and they have new resources and want to be able to use them. Being able to learn about the fashion industry, whether it’s attending a party or going to a fashion show or even being invited to a digital experience – it’s very cool and innovative and completely different.”

Brands will focus on building community and value for the users who buy in.

“There’s going to be a race between different brands to articulate what their community is, what their community stands for and what the purpose and intent of it is. You’re going to see that over the next couple of months, more and more brands come out and explain the benefits of holding one of their NFTs.”

Token gating may be the new normal — at least until NFTs are widely adopted and have their own value as collectibles, Hurstel said. “This is a great way to provide value, and you have to compensate for the fact that you can’t get maximum value from an NFT today because the infrastructure and user agent are not fully built and deployed. So you have to compensate by providing benefits.”

Hurstel predicts that will change just as quickly as the market has moved, from cumbersome crypto wallets to something accessible to the average shopper. “What’s going to change massively over the next 24 months is the level of user interface for anyone to be able to own an NFT,” he said.

While this summer has been the “crypto winter” of falling prices, disappearing value and well-publicized wallet thefts, luxury brands are still betting on the future.

“Fashion brands are not looking at this from the crypto price speculation, they are looking at this purely as a new way to engage with new audiences and what type of community they want to build,” Pattwell said. “You can focus on NFT, but it’s not actually about NFT, it’s about the community and the community is where everything happens.”

“If you don’t nurture and build a digital community and keep communicating with them, bringing them things they’re interested in, they’ll lose interest and abandon ship,” he added. “So it’s very important for any brand to think about the sustainability of it. It can’t be done.”