Does Luxury Fashion belong in the Crypto World? Part 1: NFTs and Appropriation
What happens when high fashion tries to copy what the cool kids are doing?
It could be thousand-dollar flannel shirts. Which goes against the shirts’ entire working-class ethos (they were popularized by American Pacific Northwest grunge bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam, who found lumberjack gear at their local thrift stores) And now, it’s NFTs…*with* a middleman.
According to this article from Vogue Business, “Sydney-based Neuno is…currently working with five luxury fashion houses on launching NFTs…customers will be able to buy NFTs with their credit cards, which removes the barrier to entry of needing to own cryptocurrency.” There isn’t much information about Neuno, but from a buyer-protection point of view: who will be the entity listed on the blockchain as the buyer? One of the coolest parts of buying an NFT is that it’s incontrovertible. The blockchain clearly shows the transaction, and it can be publicly traced to specific online wallets. However, these wallets run on cryptocurrency. So, will Neuno be listed as the buyer? If so, the NFT belongs to Neuno. And Neuno will then more or less be re-selling a graphic, video, some sort of digital file, much like an Etsy shop. The customer is no longer buying an NFT, just a regular digital file.
This then leads to a deeper issue, that was touched upon with the thousand-dollar flannel shirts: can you really call yourself a trendsetter (or even trend appreciator), if what you’re actually doing is trend appropriating? Isn’t it super cringe, on all levels, for anyone to be a culture vulture? Right now, most people have zero idea what an NFT really is, except that it’s some “art.” But those in traditional luxury fashion want to stay relevant, especially because the industry initially dismissed the cutting-edge aspects of the Internet. Now they seem like your uncle, who didn’t buy the limited-edition Murakami Louis Vuitton bags, and now he’s throwing money at anything on eBay that looks vaguely like them.
Current NFT marketplaces like OpenSea and Foundation are literally that, marketplaces. They facilitate and curate items for buyers, because we’re all busy and can’t spend a gazillion hours googling creatives individually and seeing if they have NFTs for sale, then emailing them and getting their wallet address and then sending them some $ETH. These marketplaces streamline this buying process, and some marketplaces, like Digitalax, are also building an infrastructure where artists and designers can streamline their creation process. Therefore, there is a level of accessibility for the buyer, as well as long-term sustainability for the artist. It’s a win-win situation, all done via decentralized methods.
This is why Charli Cohen is in the NFT space, and we’re excited to see how NFTs and blockchain evolves, because it’s an entire philosophy that democratizes fashion for EVERYONE.
Shoutout to Chaweon Koo who put this copy together for me based on a discussion (vent) we had last night. In part 2, I’m going to be digging into the philosophy and values behind the NFT community — and why the physical world of luxury fashion shouldn’t be replicated in the crypto space.