There’s a lot of chatter about NFTs, but you’d be forgiven for not quite getting what they are, how they work, or what they mean for art, design or fashion.
NFTs are Non-Fungible Tokens. Non-fungible means that they are unique, or that they cannot be replaced by something else. The digital assets’ ownership and “authenticity” is proven by blockchain, but owning a NFT doesn’t mean you’re the only one who can access your “property.” You can prove you own a digital asset, be it art or a tweet (see below), but it doesn’t reduce the accessibility of this asset for others. NFTs are speculative assets, meaning when someone buys one as an investment, they’re hoping it goes up in value so they can resell it.
NFTs are attractive to collectors. Collecting and owning digital art (the art world is a good place to look for examples of ownership vs accessibility) can now be done through NFTs in a way that is almost “traditional.” You own a piece of art, but it could stay in the gallery/ museum (the Internet) for everybody to enjoy, or reproductions could be widely available, giving access to just about anybody. NFTs, however, are not limited to art. They can be anything digital, as was proven when the founder of Twitter sold a tweet for about $3 million.
Everyone is now in on the action of buying and selling NFTs. Grimes sold a video to the tune of $6 million, the NBA is selling virtual basketball cards with blockchain company Dapper Labs and Beeple sold only one NFT (a JPEG file) for $69 million with Christie’s… Yes, even the venerable auction house, 255 years young, is getting in on it.
With Christie’s on board, NFTs aren’t just a silly novelty. They also have real-life implications for fashion brands. The creators of NFTs can get royalties every time their creation is sold or changes hands. Embedding NFTs into luxury products could help with royalties, but more importantly, with traceability, authenticity (no more fakes) and control, as Glossy explains.
It would also further fashion’s foray into the virtual world, something that started with gaming (buying branded outfits within games) and is now almost certainly set to go further with NFTs. Taking a physical item with you into your digital life shouldn’t be far in the future.
For a more “traditional” NFT sale of fashion products, RTFKT Studios (a virtual brand of sneakers) sold their virtual collaboration with FEWOCiOUS. The items sold were a series of virtual sneakers, as well as digital merchandise like a “Drip” and a “Charm,” and the sneakers by themselves raised over $3 million in less than 7 minutes.
Crypto fashion are assets at their core, and so it is no surprise that there is now a Digital Fashion Operating System. Digitalax is “implementing an optimised architecture for creating 3D digital fashion that can quickly and simply be deployed directly into any media layer (Gaming, VR, other live 3D content environments).” It’s also an auction platform to buy and stack fashion NFTs, keeping the spirit of crypto and making it work for something completely different.
The fashion industry is ready to fully embrace NFTs, whether as a novelty, a way to integrate and merge the real and the digital, or as assets. We’re already seeing a lot of young emerging talent pop up in the virtual fashion scene, and there is now a Crypto Fashion Week. It will be interesting to see how established legacy brands fare in the arena. If Christie’s (a legacy brand if ever there was one) is anything to go by, there isn’t much to worry about for traditional fashion brands and NFTs will bring plenty of benefits to the industry, both in the real and the digital worlds.
Sarah Kante
