“Please turn off your TV’s and explore the world as much as you can,” says musician Jalal, the brand ambassador behind fashion label Aria Noir. Jalal describes his partnership with the label — which expresses itself as “apparel by designers for designers” and an alternative to fast “McFashion” — as a fusion of his love of rap and apparel design.
That fusion has been accelerated by Aria Noir’s decision to mint non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, of both its apparel and accessories.
In case you haven’t been reading headlines over the past few months, NFTs are rapidly becoming the next major wave in digital fashion, and are typically sold only via cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or Ethereum. Their “coming out” party was the first-ever Metaverse Fashion Week, an event that revealed how major labels are already creating one-of-a-kind products for fashionista customers and their eventual metaverse avatars. Hermes, for example, launched an NFT Birkin bag at last year’s Art Basel Miami for the equivalent of about $50,000. The “MetaBirkin” made such a splash that it became the subject of an Elle article.