How Roksanda created a fashion week NFT

Fashion's flirtation with NFTs is building momentum. Roksanda and the Institute of Digital Fashion have created a wearable NFT for London Fashion Week.
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Photo: Courtesy of the Institute of Digital Fashion

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London Fashion Week regular Roksanda has partnered with metaverse innovation provider the Institute of Digital Fashion (IODF) and Clearpay to create a shoppable NFT of the label’s demi-couture final look. It adds a new dimension to the Roksanda Autumn/Winter 2022 show on 21 February, intended to appeal to a younger audience than her usual millennial base.

The NFT, a sculptural gown in geometric print, will be available for AR try-on via an Instagram filter and sold in various versions on Roksanda.com from the morning of the show. It also marks the first time an NFT has been shoppable on a luxury brand’s website in pounds, rather than in cryptocurrencies such as ethereum (ETH), the brand says.

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Sold in a tiered system, the NFT ranges in price from £25 for one of 500 3D garment renders, to £250 for one of 250 3D animated garment renders. Then there’s a top tier where 10 customers can purchase for £5,000 the 3D animation render, plus the software files used to create the digital version of the dress, enabling them to wear the garment in the metaverse. (Physical Roksanda pieces typically retail from around £450 to £4,000). Clearpay, a long-term show sponsor and e-commerce partner of Roksanda, sponsored the NFT.

A growing number of brands are experimenting with NFTs tied to fashion weeks to amplify their shows to a new audience. At the Eckhaus Latta show in New York over the weekend, the brand launched an EL10 NFT series of unique looks that also gives access to its "Web 3.0 paradise" called Club Eckhaus Latta, replete with invites to member-only events, exclusives and future NFTs. Hugo Boss produced an NFT jacket as a prize for winners of its #BossMoves TikTok challenge following its SS22 Russell Athletics show. Copenhagen brand (Di)vision produced an NFT alien in collaboration with Adidas at its AW22 show last week. And now, there’s Roksanda, the London-based label founded by designer Roksanda Ilinčić in 2005 and best known for refined day and evening dresses.

Lowering barrier to entry for existing customers

The brand wants to simplify the NFT purchase journey, making NFTs accessible to existing luxury consumers while also appealing to the growing community of crypto-savvy Gen Zs online, says CEO Jamie Gill. “We’ve seen many bigger luxury brands enter this space and do it well, but their NFTs are available on the specific blockchain and only available through cryptocurrency,” he says. “We're not going to say we are in any way experts — we are learning at a very fast pace as things come to market — but it felt important to make the project make sense to our existing luxury consumer.”

Roksanda has a strong following with older millennials and is known for its sophisticated aesthetic and connection to the art world. Brand fans are perhaps more familiar with Tate Modern or the Serpentine than NFT marketplaces such as Rarible or Opensea.

Leanne Elliott-Young, CEO and co-founder of IODF, declined to disclose the cost of the Roksanda project, but it took IODF’s core team of 12 specialists several weeks to build, with input from Ilinčić and her team. Elliot-Young leads strategy, while creative direction is handled by IODF co-founder and 3D designer Cattytay, the first person to showcase a 3D asset in the fashion landscape. Cattytay started out in the metaverse creating bootlegs of Off-White and Balenciaga some years before brands began to show interest.

There's lots of backend work necessary to integrate an NFT purchase system into a luxury e-commerce site, Elliot-Young says. Typically, luxury NFTs from brands such as Balmain have been sold on NFT marketplaces like Opensea or Binance or auctioned at Sotheby’s. Roksanda uses Clearpay payment solutions across its e-commerce, so Clearpay buy-now-pay-later functionality needed to be integrated into the NFT purchase journey too. “That was another layer of complexity, but we got there,” says Elliot-Young.

Helping designers understand the possibilities of virtual fashion

The NFT gown was initially based on an IRL Roksanda dress from the upcoming AW22 collection, allowing the designer to explore the design process. Ilinčić was then encouraged to draw over the design and play with the garment, going beyond the limits of physical design. “It was a real back and forth between Roksanda’s team and our team,” Elliot Young says. “We worked late into the night bouncing ideas around and pushing the possibilities.”

Roksanda's NFT is based on a physical dress from the Autumn/Winter 2022 collection.

Courtesy of the Institute of Digital Fashion

For IODF, the Roksanda project serves as a showcase of the new possibilities for fashion in the metaverse. “There’s a real vision and aesthetic for what sits in the metaverse right now,” says Elliot-Young. “You expect something much more like a cyborg, full of metal. Working with a brand like Roksanda, which is more sophisticated and elegant, seems like a perfect opportunity.”

Gill plans to carefully track NFT sales and social media impressions to gauge the response from the Roksanda fan community and new audiences online. “It will be really interesting to see: how does our world translate, as a long-standing British luxury house; and how do our loyal brand followers engage with that?”

Elliot-Young advises brands to take it slow. “Everyone's really panicked now. Like, how do we get into the metaverse. It’s ok! You don’t need to reduce your brand to a pixel and put it on a marketplace. There are really innovative ways to have a vocabulary within the metaverse.”

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