Since the mainstreamingof NFTs earlier this year, NFT streetwear has been one of the first segments ofthe fashion industry to adopt blockchain-backed digital artwork andcollectibles.
Highsnobiety andHypebeast, for example, have widely covered the NFT boom, with Highsnobietyrunning stories like "The Rise of NFTs and How They'll ImpressTradition" and Hypebeast always including NFT material in a weekly roundupof enterprise and crypto tales. On the Tons of's corporate blog, Bobby Tons of, the founder father of Los Angeles NFT streetwear company The Tons of, has been writing avidly about style's convergence with NFTs and blockchain. Inreturn, some fashionable NFT designers are embracing NFT streetwear. Yuga Labs, whose Bored Ape Yacht Membership avatars have been spotted all over Twitter and brought in $24.4 million at a Sotheby's public sale last week, has partnered up with The Tons of on physical T-shirts and hoodies. RTFKT, a digital innovative studio that shot to fame in March after selling a single collection of NFT sneakers for the equivalent of $3.1 million, collaborated on a pair of NFTs streetwear legend Jeff Staple, the founder of the Staple model and artistic firm Reed Artwork Division. They looked like high-tech Nike Air Drive 1s plucked directly from an online game, and numerous others are currently selling for upwards of $1,000.
"The area istremendously tight knit and so they're using codes and communicationroutes," Staple said, comparing it to streetwear.
"Whereas it used tobe lingo and boards he explained, "Today it's Twitter and Discord andloads of abbreviations and acronyms that no one knows until you're in."
Thesimilarities between the two fields are not coincidental. Both thrive onoverpriced properties fueled by scarcity, which appeal to exorbitant secondarymarket prices and have become online status symbols. Beyond that, NFTs andstreetwear share a feeling of community in some ways, with a portion of the NFT increase typically masked by the deal with speculative investments in the region. NFT Streetwear firms, which have borrowed freely from streetwear in recent years, offering their own versions on shoes and hoodies while adopting the latter's drop system for distributing items, may find themselves borrowing from streetwear once more. "There are classes on the planet of street style and street tradition that are exactly like what's happening in NFTs," said Jeff Carvalho, who co-founded Highsnobiety and more recently launched Burrata Corp. with menswear veteran Brian Trunzo to advise brands on emerging technologies like blockchain. "The concept was putting on a pair of Air Jordans that anyone would see walking down the street in real life and recognise." The flex right now is proudly owning a CryptoPunk and changing your avatar to that punk to show ownership and be a member of that community."
