Gucci Collaborates with Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs in New Metaverse Project

Gucci and Yuga Labs, the company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Collection, announced a collaboration on Monday.

“Continuing to explore the Metaverse, the House comes together with @yugalabs,” Gucci Tweeted out. “Stay tuned as a new narrative takes shape, blurring the boundaries between the physical and digital.”

Though there aren’t many details yet, Business of Fashion reported that the two companies have signed a multi-year partnership that will involved Gucci creating clothing for Yuga Labs’s metaverse project, the Otherside, and in 10KTF, an NFT collection created by Beeple and bought by Yuga Labs.

“We are excited to unveil this multifaceted partnership with Yuga Labs, a leader and creative pioneer in web3,” Robert Triefus, Gucci’s senior executive vice president, corporate and brand strategy, and chief executive of Gucci Vault & Metaverse Ventures, said in a statement to BoF. “This will give us an active role in Otherside and 10KTF’s continuing narrative, unfolding in multiple forms.”

Gucci has previously collaborated both with Yuga Labs and the 10KTF collection.

The collaboration follows several developments for the NFT company. Yuga Labs recently released an NFT collection on the Bitcoin blockchain and they helped organize an exhibition at a shopping center near the Louvre, the Carrousel du Louvre (this is sometimes mistaken to have a connection to the museum, it does not).

Wylie Aronow, one of the founders of Yuga Labs also announced news recently, though of a more personal nature. In February, Aronow released a letter, published on CoinDesk, announcing that he was recently diagnosed with a serious heart condition and is thus stepping back from some responsibilities at the company. In the letter, Aronow addressed a theory, popularized by artist Ryder Ripps, who is currently in the middle of a court battle with Yuga Labs, that the BAYC collection is threaded with alt-right imagery.

“If you think I’m a deeply left-leaning person, deeply into Hinduism and Buddhism for years, but somehow would want to troll people with obscure and fringe alt/far-right secret coded messages, I think you have a f**cking screw loose,” Aronow wrote.