Luxury Outerwear Brand Cape de Coeur Moves into the Metaverse with 1st NFTs In Partnership with Digital Artist Tony Murray & Creative Director Isabelita Virtual
New York, NY | January 06, 2022 09:01 AM Eastern Standard Time
Vancouver-based elevated, technical outerwear brand Cape de Coeur, in tandem with digital artist Tony Murray & renowned creative director Isabel Martinez (Isabelita Virtual), is excited to announce the launch of their capsule collection of three, one-of-one edition NFTs, linked to three of their Guardian capes - their signature cape design. Cape de Coeur, Murray, and Martinez worked together to visualize, design and produce a special digital artwork video, titled “The Guardian”, that they then used to create the unique non-fungible tokens.
Bettina Mueller Reichl - Founder and Creative director of Cape de Coeur - met Isabelita Virtual during the last months of 2020. Bettina had been a dedicated follower of Isabelita's work, admiring different projects and partnerships Isabelita had participated in with some of Bettina’s favorite brands and publications, such as Delpozo, Viktor & Rolf, and Vogue Italia. Bettina reached out to Isabelita in hopes of partnering on a digital activation that could introduce Cape de Coeur to the world and build awareness around it.
Isabel loved the concept, innovation, technology, and creativity behind Cape de Coeur. She understood what Cape de Coeur is at its core: a high fashion luxury brand, designing waterproof capes. She wanted to produce a piece of digital art that would break boundaries, as the product does itself - through technology. She suggested contacting Tony Murray, a digital creator with specific expertise working in the fashion industry, to design a ‘universe’ that represents all that is Cape de Coeur. Murray’s efforts resulted in a surprising piece, complete with a surreal outdoors built into a futuristic world, where even among the 3D ‘women’ featured in the video, the rain remains the main character. It starts raining - but the rain doesn’t touch the women, as if they are protected by invisible, unseen umbrellas.
“The first thing that struck me about Cape de Coeur was the striking silhouettes of the capes. I wanted to model the capes in the realm of the unreal, but in a virtual environment that highlighted and didn’t distract from or compete with the capes...The design of the environments was quite minimal, letting the reflective materials and the dynamic skies do the work of spotlighting and quite literally reflecting the capes. The Cape de Coeur pieces are truly the merging of fashion and function with waterproof performance fabric, so the images of water droplets beading up on ther surface sparked the use of orbs throughout the scenes. And of course, rain became an important graphic element." - Tony Murray, Digital Creator
Cape de Coeur, Tony Murray and Isabelita Virtual’s digital art video aims to ‘conquer’ the weather in an experimental way. The characters in the work are identifiably ‘women’ but remain ambiguous in all other characteristics - a purposeful choice to help build a connection between the brand and the viewers. ‘The Guardian’ is a futuristic and romantic universe, a unique piece of artwork linked to an exclusive product - Cape de Coeur’s first NFTs.
“Cape de Coeur is a perfect example of a contemporary brand that talks to its audience in a contemporary way. Today’s most advanced brands are fully engaged through technology. Most of them use it to develop new products, but some also to build culture and share values with their audiences. Cape de Coeur is a disruptive label that brings fresh air to the rainwear landscape, merging reason and emotion.” - Isabelita Virtual, Creative Director
The values of the Cape de Coeur brand - innovation, creativity, romanticism, technology, futurism - immediately aligned with the values of Tony and Isabelita’s respective worlds. Bettina, Tony and Isabelita wanted to create a piece of ‘communication’- but also a piece of digital art, one that would make a long-lasting impact. All three creatives share the same ambition - to break boundaries in their work through technology.
All Cape de Coeur pieces are available to purchase online, directly from the brand’s website. Prices range from $995-$2,195
Click HERE for more information on ‘The Guardian’ NFTs
For more information on Cape de Coeur, please visit https://capedecoeur.com and @capedecoeur
ABOUT Cape de Coeur: Cape de Coeur is luxury technical outerwear designed to redefine your wardrobe and your lifestyle. The brand is the brainchild of Austrian-born designer Bettina Mueller Reichl, who has lived and breathed European design culture, having worked in the luxury design industry there for most of her life. She has more than 20 years of experience in technical apparel design, working with the most renowned international design teams of technical performance wear. Crafted in the brand’s proprietary wind, rain, and snow-proof CoeurTex™ fabric, Cape de Coeur capes blend functional freedom with uncompromising beauty. The focus on the cape silhouette comes from the brand’s emphasis on fashion meeting function – as capes allow the wearer to shield handbags from rain and snow, and wear statement sleeves, boxy silhouettes, and easy-to-wrinkle pieces underneath their outerwear.
ABOUT Isabel Martinez / @IsabelitaVirtual – Creative Director: Isabel Martinez is a Creative Director with over 12 years helping brands to establish meaningful relationships with their audiences by explaining stories that connect with them. She has collaborated with brands and cultural institutions such as Tiffany & Co, Delpozo, Hermès, Coach, Apple, Sony, Vogue, Other Stories, Tous, Viktor&Rolf, Dior, Inditex, Louis Vuitton Foundation and The Moscow Ballet. In 2015 she moved to NYC to try new things in digital environments, such as blending VR with Photography & developing digital content for luxury brands in collaboration with W Magazine. In 2018 she was named the WEBBY AWARD HONOREE for BEST SOCIAL CONTENT in ART & CULTURE on Instagram. She was the only individual to achieve this recognition along with two of the biggest cultural institutions in the world, The Metropolitan Museum and LACMA Museum. Isabel is the first Spanish woman featured in the Times Square Midnight Moment - the longest and largest public digital exhibition, synchronized on electronic billboards throughout Times Square. Other names featured in the past years were Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono, Björk, JR or Alex Prager. She is part of the new creator’s economy- she is a featured artist on Superrare and Foundation NFTs Marketplaces. In 2021 she joined Meta (Facebook) to work in the luxury vertical at Creative Shop Paris.
ABOUT Tony Murray / @to.mu.lab – Digital Creator, 3D Artist: Tony Murray is a San Francisco-based designer, digital creator and fashion vet who’s creating some of the most vital and vibrant 3D style available, pointing the way forward for a new discipline that borrows from the past but is never backward. Rooted in physical garments, Murray’s latest work shows that the most open-minded among the traditional fashion community are finding fertile new ground in software, creatively and commercially.
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