For the owner of Bored Ape Yacht Club, the metaverse looks Gucci

Yuga Labs is diving into the world of metaverse fashion. The parent company of the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection has inked a partnership with Italian fashion house Gucci.

Gucci announced the partnership with a tweet. The luxury brand said that its metaverse presence would take the form of a “new narrative” capable of “blurring the boundaries between the physical and digital.”

The partnership will target the intersection of high fashion and digital collectibles, which is familiar terrain for both Gucci and Yuga Labs. Gucci is one of several fashion houses that has dropped official NFT collections, while the Bored Apes owner has used a $450 million investment to build a metaverse world called Otherside. The trailer for that venture included a potion that resembles the one in Gucci’s tweet.

Yuga Labs has continued to establish its metaverse presence despite turbulent conditions in the crypto industry. The first crashes that triggered the current “crypto winter” began just a few months

after Yuga announced its $450 million funding round. The interceding months have been filled with exchange collapses and numerous lawsuits, but Yuga has persevered. Through court battles and racism allegations, the Web3 company has maintained strong NFT sales figures.

With its push into fashion, Yuga will expand into an industry that has embraced NFTs. Fashion houses big and small have hosted metaverse fashion shows, where real-life threads are replaced with digital collectibles. The team behind the Metaverse Fashion Week recently announced that they would host the event across multiple metaverse-based platforms. That decision is a sign of an industry undergoing consolidation, and Yuga’s Gucci deal will continue to bring together Web3’s biggest players.