Having just returned to New York from Hong Kong for the first time since the pandemic took hold, Vivienne Tam is excited to be participating in New York Fashion Week.

Her show Wednesday will not just be another run-of-the-mill runway show. The designer has linked up with several blue chip NFT and crypto resources. For her 2023 spring collection, Tam is incorporating numerous avatars from some blue chip NFT collections. The result is meant to be genderless and intergenerational. Tam is using characters from the Yuga Labs umbrella — Bored Ape Yacht Club, CryptoPunks, CyberKongz and Awkward Astronauts — and has sewn, embroidered, printed and emblazoned onto and into various cuts and silhouettes, including numerous accessories.

Tam’s collection will be presented against a massive digital IRL landscape created by Scapes, which will flank the central runway at Spring Studios. Scapes are a collection of 10,000 unique landscapes stored on the Ethereum Blockchain. Several people have approached her about getting into NFTs, due to the preponderance of prints that she is known for. Wanting to understand the market first, Tam said she has since found NFTs and the metaverse to be “really interesting and mind-boggling. Wow — there are so many possibilities for creativity. You can create 10,000 images and each image is unique,” she said.

Now that COVID-19 travel restrictions have lifted, the designer plans to divide her time between New York and Hong…