Crypto Mania - NFT Influence in Fashion is Coming

Applied Male Fashion

As we enter the pre blow off the top crypto cycle of 2025 it’s time to reflect on the implications this has for fashion.

“How does this have literally anything to do with fashion” you may ask. Valid question. This post will deal less with hardline male fashion, and will rather serve as a holiday season cultural touchpoint + a bit of a crypto space update with a sprinkle of fashion tips throughout. I understand this is not everybody’s game and if you aren’t into crypto you will likely miss some references. However this would not be getting written if I didn’t feel strongly about getting this information out there, as it may well avoid you some headaches in the near future.

I have been involved in the NFT space for close to three years. They have been a tough industry since the last cycle high and the significant majority still associate the term with *SCAM SCAM SCAM* which isn’t entirely unjustified. However, I’m a firm believer that shitcoins with pictures are going to rip directly into the stratosphere, at significantly greater scale than they did during the last bull.

The thesis is simple – people love to flex. Historically people have flexed with various items in person; watches, bags, jewelry, cars etc. This has been the case since the first time a caveman dragged his saber-toothed tiger skull hunting trophy back to the colony and suddenly found the women way more interested in him.

Flexing is eternal.

As our lives and currencies continue to become integrated with the internet, new means of flexing are bound to surface. Sure you can post pictures of yourself in the club with your Daytona Panda on and hopping out of your powder blue GT3rs…but the bottles weren’t yours, the watch is fake and the car is rented. Flex-fishing happens constantly and anyone with a social life amalgamated with social media can 100% confirm.

Along come NFTs, a new medium for flexing wealth online. One that is immutable, irrefutable and verifiable. Collections of PFPs each of which is unique and worth tens of thousands of dollars that can be marked and verified with one click.

That’s it, it all comes down to flexing. Simple and true. Tech? Nobody cares. Right click save? N/A. Just pretend an NFT is a genuine high-ticket watch and apply standard social implications to it from there, it requires no overthinking.

Twitter got rid of the hexagonal PFP verifying thing sometime around when FTX blew up. This almost certainly comes back, and not just to twitter/X but most social media. The sphere of influence will massively eclipse the scope it currently covers which is crypto twitter clout chasers (BAYC) racists (remilia) and techy crypto old heads (penguins). We will soon be dealing with everything from Ohio soccer moms to oil baron Sheikhs.

Now let’s get into some of the top projects and how I see them making their way into the real world as the golden bull run of 2025 continues to unfold. Disclosure: Some of these projects I own, others I do not. I will not say which ones. Simply assume I own all of them. I try to stay classy while openly pumping my bags.

Pudgy Penguins

Pudgies are my single most bullish pick for one reason – they appeal heavily to children and have an insane social media presence.

Children are a terribly hard market to break into, however once a presence is established it becomes freakishly lucrative. Like a money printing machine on turbo steroids. Get your product in enough kids’ hands, turn it into a status symbol, and parents will click buy without a second thought.

This sounds exploitative, it really isn’t. It’s an immutable fact of how commerce in the children’s goods market works. You usually don’t see it discussed much on business twitter precisely because it’s nearly impossible to outline the business *without* it sounding exploitative.

Pudgies have been laying groundwork in the space for some years now. When Luca bought the dying project in 2022 he correctly saw what it could become and jumped on it. Since then they’ve been steadily releasing merch in the form of apparel, plushies, and various non NFT digital collectibles. They have been in Wal-Mart for close to a year now, which is actually absurd for an NFT project that still has not tapped even 5% of their addressable market.

If you have kids of your own, nieces and nephews, friend’s kids etc. aged 5-12, you would be wise to keep an eye on this project and its offerings. The bull case is that this becomes a phenomenon on par with Pokémon. Genuine merchandise will become unobtainium, so front loading the ability to gift anything pudgy related will win you favorite parent/uncle/neighbor award for a long time.

Kanpai Pandas

I’ve been a famously public panda supporter for some time. Despite the ebbs and flows and drama with the team, the founder is rock solid and I think he carries this collection into the top 10.

This is the first project from which I bought any real life NFT related merch. They have been doing apparel drops since early 2023 (ballsy move in the middle of a vicious bear market) and are currently on the tail end of their season 3 product drop. Now that the bull has ramped, season 4 and onward will likely begin to see more attention, so this will probably be the last chance to cop anything that could be considered ‘rare’ in the future should NFT streetwear become a whole wave.

*Side note* if you are unfamiliar with streetwear trends, NFT projects are all but guaranteed to follow a similar model of “season” drops, where items from the old collection are discontinued after a single run unless they are dubbed a staple. Think Fortnite and their skins. Reselling and collecting can be covered in articles all their own, but understand that this 1. Will attract major amounts of hypebeast liquidity and 2. Presents unique opportunities to people ahead of the curve on NFTs.

The project is officially collaborated with multiple UFC champions (Jon Jones, Ilia Topuria) and is geared primarily toward the 18-49yo male crowd of sports fans, betters, gamblers and raunchy partiers. Having a niche is important for any brand because it establishes clear market expectations and removes the indefinite, abstract concept of ‘who exactly is this for’. It’s sink or swim for the pandas over the next 12 months, crypto tailwinds and great apparel designs have me thinking this one is a winner.

Milady/Remilia/Retardio

You can’t scroll crypto twitter these days without seeing a remilia pfp delivering a white hot take on current events. A polarizing presence in the space, one thing is for sure; the ‘what is your pfp?’ anime girls are here to stay.

During the 2021 NFT craze, the most hyped projects were centered primarily around the public facing money and crypto twitter types. Lambos, rolex, bottles in the club types. The popularity and cultural influence of bored apes made this clear.

Four years later the idea of what makes a wildly popular cultural topic has pivoted. The aforementioned money flexing types will always have their place, but there’s a yin to every yang and in 2025 the yang manifests itself as ostensibly cute anime girls worn proudly by crypto enthusiasts on the cultural fringes.

How exactly an anime girl pfp relates to this is as valid a question as wondering what a cartoon monkey has to do with driving a Lamborghini. There’s no plausible way to describe it, that’s simply the way things settled. Given the current political climate it’s unsurprising that demand for a counter-cultural icont hat displays financial power in online spaces would emerge. I give it until Milady reaches a 20 ETH floor before online watchdog groups add it to their database of hate symbols, which will ironically propel it straight up to 50 ETH floor.

Here's where speculation starts. Given the whole counter-cultural nature of milady/remilio etc, this is exactly the type of project that would catch interest from the likes of designers such as Rick Owens and others who enjoy peppering their artistic expressions with provocative themes. Being semi-ironically right wing is currently en vogue, and that’s the exactly philosophy the whole project stands on.

Let’s be real if you scroll the listings on Milady the potential is insane.

Outside of the current merch suppliers of questionable official status that currently service holders of the project, I believe we see a huge fashion house pick up this art style and run a successful campaign on it. There is simply too much there not to capitalize on. It’s during this time where your “I’m cute I’m punk rock” T shirt will go the hardest.

DeGods & Bored Ape Yacht Club

These two are combined because they both fall into the aforementioned bucket of lambos watches Miami etc people. They’re effectively interchangeable projects that are now forced to coexist since DeGods initially started on solana while BAYC is an Ethereum OG. We’ll see how this plays out.

DeGods specifically is the one project with the most tangible real world hypebeast fashion already out there that isn’t complete dogshit. They captured the vibe exceptionally well and will likely find success in on the street level when the bull shoots off. Real strong upper middle class ‘golf, miami, boating, margaritas with the boys’ type culture with these guys, which has a strong tailwind.

BAYC is similar but given their legacy of transacting for hundreds of thousands of dollars, they have the potential to become quite the status symbol in and of themselves NFT wise. Once a social circle reaches a certain level of associated wealth it begins to become exclusive *very* quickly. Many of the previously mentioned projects will likely enjoy support from non-holders and even non-crypto people, but similar to cryptopunks if you’re holding a cryptographically secured asset worth a Bentley and two Pateks simultaneously, you’re unlikely to tolerate normies stepping on your brand. Think of how people wearing Gucci/Ferragamo/Prada T shirts are tolerated despite their median social class, vs someone trying to show out with a Hermes Birkin. Once you crack a certain level of brand clout the disconnect is simply too much to be casual.

You can keep your eye on these two ass the bellwethers for money/business twitter’s involvement and hype sentiment surrounding crypto and NFTs. When you see bored apes roping off entire blocks in Miami beach for block parties with private Tiesto sets, you’ll know the market is back on its feet in a big way.

Azuki

Complete change of pace from all the previous projects that all contain some degree of non-serious behavior, Azuki is a more buttoned up group that doesn’t tend to find itself at the center of many low IQ public controversies.

Azuki is looked at less as a pfp x fuck around on twitter project and moreso a high ticket membership pass into a community that works serioiusly within the backend and frontend spaces of crypto. Heavy focus on founders and artists, movers and shakers and needle movers. It’s a badge that says “I truly believe in the future of all this” that costs as much as a new Honda Civic.

Similar to BAYC, this is a group that seems to value their exclusivity and doesn’t do much in the way of showing out, at least not yet. They’re a total shoo in if they want to collaborate with many of the major Japanese fashion houses, and there’s a great chance we do end up seeing that happen. If the Tokyocore vibe is for you, keep an eye on what this project may end up dropping in the collab department.

Others yet to come

At the time of fininshing this post, bitcoin just broke 100k. This is basically a final, hardline confirmation signal that the crypto market is back in a big way and money will start flowing in from many angles both into your bags and things you wish were your bags.

Regardless of whether there’s a violent peak and slow retracement, or we continue going up for multiple years, crypto will have an immutable effect on culture. Best to keep your eyes and ears open for opportunities as they will be available en masse sooner than you may expect.