Mowalola Ogunlesi, the Lagos-born fashion designer, is set to drop an extensive range of NFTs as part of a collab with LA fashion retailer Terminal27.

Ogunlesi, who is responsible for the design direction of Kanye West’s YeezyxGap collection, as well as her own viral namesake brand Mowalola, took to Instagram to tease athe collaboration in a series of posts featuring digital anime-style cyborg characters decked out in all their Mowalola drip.

The collection is comprised of 1000 NFTs including 600 bots, 100 baby bots, 200 motorcycles 50 rare bots and 50 rare motorcycles. Alongside these there will also be will be physical merch, and the whole range of digital and IRL garb is set to drop on Terminal 27’s website this spring, which will mark both collaborators’ first venture into the NFT market.

This comes following enormous growth in digital commerce, with crypto transactions increasing over 400 times in a year, according to a study by Shopify, which revealed they have scaled up from 106 million in 2020 to 44 billion in 2021. Combined with Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement of his VR Metaverse last year, it is no surprise that the fashion industry is hungry for a piece of the virtual pie.

For many, these figures are a sign that we are heading for a new, digital phase in which we can all live out our wildest fantasies through a combination of AR and VR – and for brands like Mowalola, which rose to internet fame after being worn in an Instagram photo by Kim Kardashian and her family, it is the perfect way to keep the attention of a chronically online customer base. 

Today, under 20% of Vogue’s Business Index have delved into NFTs in any form, so for pioneering brands like Ogunlesi’s this may represent an opportunity to profit if they can make it stick.