Fashion is a fast business: it is an industry that keeps constantly updated with what happens in the world, with its finger on the pulse of society, recording trends, passions and shifts in tastes to produce new ideas and manufacture new products. Coronavirus destabilised it, but also pushed the industry to search for innovative solutions, from digital runways and lookbooks inspired by video games to partnerships with game developers, AR products and video game collaborations.
The current obsession of fashion is definitely technology, in particular the possibilities of the blockchain (that seems to have great potential when it comes to protecting the authenticity of luxury products) and super collectible exclusive NFTs (non-fungible tokens - that is distinct, indivisible, scarce and verifiable tokens on a blockchain network).
Things have developed really fast since Christie's auction of a purely digital work with a unique NFT hit the headlines in March. Beeple's monumental collage sold online at Christie's for $69,346,250 USD opened the proverbial Pandora's box, pushing many who didn't have a clue about non-fungible tokens to research more into this technology.
Some projects were extremely successful: art-wise, Sotheby's auction of digital art - The Fungible Collection by Pak (the anonymous creator, who has been producing digital art for over two decades) released exclusively on Nifty Gateway, a marketplace specializing in the sale and auction of non-fungible tokens - yielded a total of $16,825,999 USD between April 12 and April 14.
The cryptohoodie by Overpriced.™, an ode to CryptoFashion by a company set on designing "fashion for the crypto generation", sold at an auction on Blockparty.co for $26,000 USD. On the contrary NTFs of Kate Moss engaged in rather ordinary activities, that were auctioned off as NFTs created by anonymous artist collective Moments in Time were a bit of a flop (only one was sold).
Now it's the turn of the fashion collection as NFT: Dutch digital fashion house The Fabricant (more famous for collaborating in 2019 with Dapper Labs and artist Johanna Jaskowska on the futuristic "Iridescence" dress, sold at an auction at the Ethereal Summit in New York for $9,500 USD), teamed up with virtual brand RTFKT Studios, maker of super cool custom and virtual sneakers, better known for their NFT sneaker drop with 18-year-old crypto-artist FEWOCiOUS that, promoted on Snapchat, reached at the end of February over $3.1 million USD in just seven minutes.
The Fabricant and RTFKT Studios released a non-fungible token collection dubbed "RenaiXance": symbolically inspired by the Renaissance period that marked the transition between the Middle Ages and Modern history, the collection was on sale for 48 hours only (from 16th April) on invite-only marketspace The Dematerialised and featured a wide range of pieces, from a dress to a corset, plus a pair of earrings and, obviously, sneakers.
Everything went fast, in more or less 10 minutes and consumers in many cases bought more than one NFT, with corsets being the fastest selling item (prices went from $10 to over $10,000 USD).
Among the designers who have been developing NFTs there is also Aitor Throup. The Argentinian-born designer often employed his collections to make a critique of the fashion industry and the conventional division into seasons, reshifting the attention of people on the value of a designer's work and the role of a designer.
Since 2006 when he got his MA in Menswear at the Royal College of Art with a collection that told the story of his fascination with the style of English football hooligans (entitled "When Football Hooligans Become Hindu Gods"), Throup developed his own aesthetics creating several collections and collaborating with other companies (including Stone Island, C.P. Company and G-Star Raw) producing technicalwear and functional pieces.
Throup also focused on personal projects that were then developed into collections, such as NOR - an acronym standing for New Object Research - that allowed him to present his designs in a conceptual environment and make statements about the fashion industry, and, more recently, the DSA - that is Daily Sketchbook Archives - collection.
The DSA project consists in an accessible, genderless collection of basic garments such as T-shirts and hoodies, featuring his artwork but no external logo, only the number of the sketch made by the designer. Every piece is conceived as a collectable item as that sketch will not be used in future series, so once an artwork sells out it is not going to be available again. In this way the designer hopes to challenge the industry via unique and collectible pieces.
These two principles - collecting exclusive and unique pieces - are also behind Throup's latest conceptual project based on experimental multimedia design - Anatomyland - a sort of work-in-progress that the designer has developed over 16 years.
Anatomyland's first drop consists in collectable digital characters, almost digital sculptures that call to mind the designs and presentation for Throup's S/S 17 collection (remember the puppeteers reminiscent of the Bunraku theatre?), released as NFTs through Nifty Gateway (the first offering launches on May 7).
There are three characters at the moment - Lil Yin, Lil Yang and Good Ol' Dom: the first represents the feminine, the right side of the brain and the immigrant and its clothes are characterised by black mesh and circular construction details; the second represents the masculine, the left brain and the Anglo-Saxon and in this case clothes are based on white mesh and straight and sharp construction lines. Good Ol' Dom (or G.O.D.) is a representation of the divine and it is therefore characterised by different shades, not just black and white, but bright pink as well.
There will be the chance to wear some of the products part of the project: the designer plans indeed to release two styles of modular caps in limited "First Editions" (only available in five hand-numbered units per style, signed and authenticated by matching digital NFTs) that Throup defines as "archetypes". More archetypes will be released in the following months until the whole collection is introduced. After that, there will be a general and final release of the collection.
So in Aitor Throup's case releasing NFTs is not just a way to join a trend, but more a system to hack fashion and to make the release of a collection incredibly slow, while encouraging people to consider other issues dear to the designer and embedded in his creations, such as inequality, racism and mental health.
There are some points and issues to consider about NFTs: first of all, who buys them. NFTs are mainly targeted at new investors, people who mined cryptocurrencies (you must have a crypto wallet to buy NFTs) in the very early stages when they weren't worth much, and digitally native Gen Z consumers, young people who may be intro trading cryptocurrencies and love collectible items as well and who may not even own the physical space where to keep them.
Older generations may wonder what's the point of collecting fashion NFTs when you can't really wear digital items, but then again there are Haute Couture collectors who never wear the designs they buy and sneaker fans who keep in their boxes their prized shoes, often acquired at the by now not so rare events organised by prestigious auction houses for a younger customer base. Despite being relatively young these consumers are not naive and they know what they want and what may be valuable in future (which explains why most of them didn't buy into Kate Moss' mundane videos, but focus on CryptoArt and CryptoFashion pieces).
While it is interesting to analyse who are the buyers of NFTs, it is even more interesting to consider the consequences of this trend. For example, a collection such as The Fabricant x RTFKT Studios' marks a new development: the remixing process that has led in more recent years to the transformation of Takeji Hirakawa's "Fashion DJ" into a professional "Fashion Remixer", has now led us to another type of figure - the re-constructivist. With this word we may define a creative mind with different skills, possibily a fashion designer with a passion for video games or a video game designer and programmer with a passion for fashion. This new figure disassembles garments and accessories seen in different environments and reconstitutes them back together using digital media.
So while NFTs are definitely here to stay and you wonder when we may have architecture NFTs after seeing this new technology being applied to art, fashion and music, you also realise that this is the real revolution behind this technology - the emergence of new figures that will also have to be hired by fashion houses to meet new requirements.
That said, now there are just some dilemmas to solve and the first is an environmental one: many fashion houses and even fast fashion brands have pledged that in so many years they will be fully sustainable and create recycled collections. If they start releasing NFTs (and this is imminent, especially for houses and brands that appeal to young people such as Gucci or Balenciaga), these companies will also have to consider the impact of non-fungible tokens on the planet, and the usage and emissions of individual NFTs.
The second dilemma regards influencers and their future: it is clear that investment money from many fashion brands and houses will go into NFTs from now on, reducing the budgets available for those influencers whose main purpose in their pre-Covid 19 lives was taking pictures of themselves outside a runway venue, sitting among impossibly cool friends in the front row or posing in their "outfit of the day". Training in programming may not be a bad idea for them, as the fashion industry will need not just designers but also more programmers from now on. So for them it may be a case of embrace CryptoFashion and its complexities or die.
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