Also this month, Vogue Arabia publisher Nervora will introduce a Dolce & Gabbana NFT collection on luxury NFT marketplace, Unxd, to coincide with the brand’s Venice couture show. While this specific project is not linked to the Vogue brand, there are future NFT projects for the publication in the works. “The best way to describe the role that Vogue and powerful media plays in the world, is as cultural creation and curation,” says Shashi Menon, founder of Unxd and founder and CEO of Nervora. “The opportunity around NFTs is an extension of that. It’s a new canvas for storytelling and culture creation and consumer experience, which happens to be enabled by tech.”
NFT and fashion magazine tie-ups can help translate the value of non-fungible tokens for the fashion crowd as well as give print media a new angle of relevance. Fashion NFT marketplace Neuno, set to launch in October, says that it is in talks with at least four publications to digitise magazine covers. “We wanted it to be palatable to people who read Vogue or shop Net-a-Porter,” says Duncan Woods, creative director at Neuno.
Fashion magazine publishers also have a unique perspective on what luxury brands, and their customers, respond to, giving them an advantage compared to tech companies who try to appeal to fashion, Menon says. Outside of fashion, this is already being tested by other media titles. Fortune recently auctioned off some limited NFT covers and raised $1.3 million, while Time’s NFT covers sold at auction for $435,000 in March. In May, Cybr Magazine released an entire NFT magazine for the equivalent of $150, which included holograms, animated ads and try-on digital fashion. “Magazines have been struggling for a long time. The magazines are really excited about the opportunity for a new revenue stream,” says Woods. One long-standing British magazine, he says, is considering selling some of its best covers as a collection, in addition to potentially creating new content such as a film that corresponds with content or an alternate NFT cover. Another approach he is seeing includes buying an NFT to receive the physical magazine.
“We need to live on, and there’s a cultural conversation that we have to own,” says Bettina von Schlippe, publisher of Vogue Singapore. “Vogue has done this throughout history. It’s never been irrelevant to what is happening in society, and was always a representation of what was happening. It’s just part of the responsibility that we have as media to give guidance, to educate, to inform and to entertain people.”
More than buzz
Vogue Singapore is not new to tech. Launched in 2020 during the pandemic, it began with a 360-degree digital experience in place of a launch gala, and soon after introduced augmented reality “holograms” that enable readers to see 360-degree, moving models in their own space by scanning a QR code. The September print cover is also a QR code that, when scanned, introduces multiple digital covers.
