Photographer Hugo Comte Is Expanding Beyond the Image Into the Metaverse and Must-Have Fashion

French photographer Hugo Comte will launch three massive projects over the next three weeks. Today, he announced the launch of $NIKITA, a proprietary digital token powered by P00ls. On February 3, an exhibition of his work with the stylist Ib Kamara will open at Galerie Hussenot in Paris. Then, February 17 will see the debut of a fashion line he designed with Central Saint Martins grad Lois Saunders, Dear Nikita. Comte seems to be powered by jet fuel, though he pointed out on a late night Zoom call from Paris, “I don’t even drink caffeine.” 

What motivates Comte is a furious passion to demystify his art. His rise to fame coincided with the lockdown days of the pandemic, when in-person life halted and all we could do was pore over the internet. After he photographed Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia album cover, fans began to obsessively stalk his social media profiles. On them, Comte would post images from Vogue photoshoots, 032C editorials, and campaigns for Bulgari, Zara, and Heaven Marc Jacobs. “I have 180,000 people who follow me on Instagram and they see my work, but I don’t see them,” he says. “I want to completely change and break the way I interact with my community.”

Citing Virgil Abloh as an inspiration for the way the late designer used architecture as a framework to create physical and digital communities, Comte explains the first part of his global takeover: the $NIKITA token. While it’s technically a digital currency, the token is less about trading dogecoins for stocks, or whatever happens in the Ethereum-powered net, and more about building a club of Comte fans. Visitors to his site can acquire tokens by engaging with content, and with ongoing participation one gains more premium access—to behind-the-scenes photos, Masterclass-style lectures, podcasts, and conversations. The framework supporting the token looks a lot like a virtual tower—Comte did study architecture, after all.

“It’s a way to build a bridge between the pop culture audience that I have, the high fashion audience that I have, and the more crypto audience,” he says. “All those audiences need each other, so for me, it’s really about building a bridge. I would like to start to give something a bit more open and more accessible.” 

The token and platform also put Comte’s creativity back in his hands: He no longer has to rely on magazines, social media, or other artists to promote existing projects. By establishing a dedicated group of Comte community members, he owns not only his work, but the narratives behind it. “What is interesting to me about P00ls, is that they don’t really have competitors,” says Comte. “It’s very new, and what I like about the whole thing is money is not the only currency. It’s like your taste becomes the currency here, your ability to smell talent and smell potential in people becomes the currency. Your loyalty to artists becomes currency. I really like this idea.” 

Early $NIKITA adopters will have the opportunity to put their access into action almost immediately. When the “Testament” exhibition opens in Paris later this week, token-holders will have access to an exclusive Q&A between Comte and Kamara. The pair will have a lot to discuss. Their images, made almost one year ago, are representations of their different histories: Kamara is from Sierra Leone, moved to Gambia, and settled in London working as a stylist before becoming the editor-in-chief of Dazed in 2019. Comte’s father is from Algeria, his mother is from the Caribbean, and while he is of mixed heritage, he benefits from white privilege in Europe and abroad. “The exhibition started with a desire for me to give sense to who I am in my work, because I think I had a tendency of really creating a gap between what I do and who I am,” he says.