Are metabirkins real? Are NFTs real? The PR blitz is definitely real.
A lot of my thoughts recently on the fashion NFT space are about what is real and what is REAL and what is not real at all. What is the point of embracing Web3 if you are a physical goods brand, concerned with selling your merchandise?
On the real or REAL side you have:
Driving Revenue
PR
New Customer Acquisition
Testing
On the unreal side you have:
Lawsuits, metabirkins, and disappearing NFTs
Driving revenue
Genius or totally insane. Selfridges is selling NFTs and an immersive digital experience in-store. The basis is an in-store design exhibit, Vasarely x Paco Rabanne, layered with an NFT/metaverse experience. The most ingenious aspect: they are taking credit cards. Surprisingly novel. That’s a barrier for the entire industry, that you need a certain level of crypto sophistication to buy a lot of these interesting fashion activations. On the other, does it speak to me in terms of what physical stores should, at this point in time, be offering? The uniqueness of this idea is the metaverse/NFT aspect, the in-store boutique not as much. If you could bring in the whole haptic rig, that would be something, and fun for customers to test. But I don’t see how an NFT, which you could buy online, would pull you into the heaving masses of Oxford street.
Testing
HM wades in with a virtual fashion campaign, a competition to win a picture of you wearing one of three looks. One of the benefits they tout is that there’s no waste created as the pieces are virtual. Kind of a funny unique selling point from one of the largest apparel retailers. But then again H&M also is hosted a vegan fashion show inside Nintendo’s Animal Crossing. You heard that right. Both activations highlight the, uh, eco-friendly nature of digital fashion and it seems like H&M is testing what tone and point of view with which to approach digital fashion. And then that does make sense, as one of the world’s largest retailers, how you might reposition for a more sustainable future.
Customer acquisition
Using an NFT to create a club that attaches belonging to ownership is an interesting way to introduce new, NFT-interested consumers into fans of a brand. Take The Dematerialised Karl Lagerfeld second drop, of which “holders of (the).. NFT collection will also unlock an invitation to a once-in-a-lifetime event that will be both URL and IRL in Paris in June 2022*. Owners will experience an exclusive performance by Endless and be the first to see the upcoming KL X Endless NFT collection launching in 2022.” A useful postscript “Don't worry though - all KL NFT holders to date will be rewarded for their loyalty with an invitation to the community.” Good to know that even teams that are way ahead of the curve on this, e.g. The Dematerialised, are learning on the go as well.
PR
Of course, doing something novel in the web3 space often gets you PR, but there’s also a traditional PR lens to be applied as well. Such as Tokens.com hosting Dentraland fashion week, just like Mercedes Benz and New York fashion week?
Not real
Maybe none of it is real though? There’s a great OpEd in Business of Fashion from Matt Powell of NPD, discussing the lack of real value in the NFT space. Are they a Ponzi scheme? Perhaps. He surmises that brands are getting in because they need to take control of their IP now so that as all of this shakes out, they’ll maintain control in the future. Like Hermes which has apparently, at least for now, lost control of the Birkin in the metaverse. Consider the “metabirkin” over which Hermes is suing Mason Rothschild, the artist who created NFTs of the bags, which have traded for 200 ethereum (around $790,000). Hermes’ opinion is “These NFTs infringe upon the intellectual property and trademark rights of Hermès and are an example of fake Hermès products in the metaverse,” And I think I agree, but this is a very new space and I’ll be watching avidly.
To add insult to injury, Mason Rothschild says that scammers have made $35,000 from selling fake versions of his creations, called MetaBirkins. How meta indeed.
But the craziest unrealness of all was pointed out to me (and everyone else watching this space) last week by Moxie Marlinspike, famous cryptographer and computer-security expert, in a blog post. The post elucidates a complicated idea - most people think of digital art when they think of NFTs, but NFTs do not store that data on the blockchain that they are using. For most art NFTs, that would be too expensive.
What do they do? “Instead of storing the data on-chain, NFTs instead contain a URL that points to the data. What surprised me about the standards was that there’s no hash commitment for the data located at the URL. Looking at many of the NFTs on popular marketplaces being sold for tens, hundreds, or millions of dollars, that URL often just points to some VPS running Apache somewhere. Anyone with access to that machine, anyone who buys that domain name in the future, or anyone who compromises that machine can change the image, title, description, etc for the NFT to whatever they’d like at any time (regardless of whether or not they “own” the token). There’s nothing in the NFT spec that tells you what the image “should” be, or even allows you to confirm whether something is the “correct” image.
So as an experiment, I made an NFT that changes based on who is looking at it, since the web server that serves the image can choose to serve different images based on the IP or User Agent of the requester. For example, it looked one way on OpenSea, another way on Rarible, but when you buy it and view it from your crypto wallet, it will always display as a large [poop] emoji. What you bid on isn’t what you get. There’s nothing unusual about this NFT, it’s how the NFT specifications are built. Many of the highest priced NFTs could turn into [poop] emoji at any time; I just made it explicit.”
The post is very much worth reading in general. But this idea about the inherent fungible-ness of NFTs bears some serious thoughts for those wading in using real dollars and brand assets.