Digital Dreamscape Artist Charlotte Taylor Trades Architecture for NFTs for Italian Luxury Brand Loro Piana

1. The British designer Charlotte Taylor blurs the boundaries of real and imagined, as well as art and architecture. To scroll through her Instagram is to play a game of differentiation. It’s hard to tell which sleek interiors exist and which are her fantastical virtual spaces.

And ambiguity is precisely the point. Taylor’s renderings (she calls them “creative playgrounds”) often begin from photographs and sketches that she morphs into fictitious spaces using Adobe and 3D modeling software. Her London-based studio, Maison de Sable, specializes in depicting serene interiors that appear like refuges for the ultra-wealthy on some distant planet (or the metaverse).

Taylor, 28, is now lending her nuanced vision and design sense to the Italian luxury purveyors Loro Piana. Taylor minted 20 NFTs for limited and numbered The Gift of Kings garments exclusively created for and sold only at the newly-opened Palo Alto, California boutique. Who would have expected the storied heritage house to come up with an Aura Blockchain Consortium powered sweater? 

Taylor’s NFT pieces are moving digital sculptures which feature a garment suspended in the shifting light of a design studio or warehouse being woven by threads that reach beyond the frame, as though by some cashmere puppet master.

“The airiness and simplicity of the spaces draw inspiration from architects such as John Pawson and Tadao Ando,” Taylor tells Artnet News, also noting the influence of Italian modernism. “The spaces were chosen to highlight the important processes and key moments of the journey of the garment.”

Loro Piana’s digital certificate, which will be accessible via a QR code on an item’s hangtag, will provide customers information on where a product was sourced, spun, woven, and sold. Taylor sees a connection between the efforts of a brand to offer transparency and the potential for NFTs to certify and protect the work of artists.

“NFTs have really been an empowering force in the art and design context from a creator perspective,” Taylor says. “I believe they will become more and more integrated into different aspects of daily life.”

A compendium of Taylor’s digital realm interiors, , will be released in July. But fantasy will further become reality in 2024. One of her designs will be built as part of the in-progress Para Zion hotel and retreat in Utah.