Five Major Fashion and Art Projects That are Reshaping the Industry With Blockchain
The emergence of blockchain is already beginning to play a pivotal role in transforming the fashion and art industries, making the markets more fluid, transparent and more importantly, based on trust between buyer and seller. Poshspace is among the several up and coming companies pioneering this seismic shift. But here are a few already established projects with proven results.
Babyghost and BitSE Collaboration:
https://www.mybabyghost.com/
At the 2016 Shanghai Fashion week, the hip fashion brand Babyghost announced its collaboration with the Chinese blockchain-as-a-Service company BitSE and its VeChain project. Babyghost’s Fall 2017 collection was inspired by the storyteller in One Thousand and One Nights, who, in order to postpone her own execution begins to tell the tyrant who wants to a kill her a new story each night without ever finishing it. “As artists we felt an affinity to her predicament and clever solution to keep herself alive,” the statement on Babyghost’s site reads. In choosing to integrate blockchain technology into their fashion line, Babyghost have come up with a clever way to allow their brand to thrive in a rigid industry. With VeChain, Babyghost optimizes customer-brand relations, by combating counterfeiting and focusing on supply chain and asset management . The cloud product management solution integrated into the blockchain ascribes an ID on the blockchain that can verify the item’s authenticity. The VeChain chip is embedded into each article of clothing, allowing consumers to either scan the QR code or use Near Field Communication to learn the “story” behind the clothing item. Sounds as wondrous as something out of a folktale, doesn’t it?
Maecenas
For centuries fine art purchasing has been a wolfish battle between galleries, collectors and state museums. The art market remains as stale and outdated as it was a century ago, with auction houses skimming large percentages of the artwork’s costs. Until now, the ability for the masses to have ownership over a Picasso or Rembrandt masterpiece was unimaginable. Behold Maecenas, an open blockchain platform — whose name is inspired by an Ancient Roman arts patron — that seeks to democratize access to fine art. Galleries offer their artworks up for bid on the platform’s auction in fragmented shares, that investors can purchase and later trade. The transaction cost through blockchain is significantly smaller than that of a traditional auction house, allowing galleries to save money for purchase of future artworks. Likewise, investors can only pay a fraction of the amount of the artwork’s whole cost. Through these transactions, Maecenas liquidizes the fine arts market. The galleries use the SPV concept to keep the artwork neatly hanging in its space, while providing shares of ownership to investors. In turn, both parties observe as the value of their art piece increases, and everybody’s a winner.
Fashion Designer Martine Jarlgaard’s Blockchain for Garments
The clothing industry is littered with opaque supply chains, preventing purchasers from knowing the true origins of the cloth they wear. As trends towards eco-awareness and ethical responsibility rise, so are the numbers of purchasers who want to know how and where in the world their clothes are made. Was this “sustainable” woolen sweater indeed sewn by hand in a South American village, and not by a machine operated by an underfed child? London-based designer and tech entrepreneur Martine Jargaard seeks to resew the fabric of the fashion industry, by fusing her future collections with the Provenance blockchain-based app that allows buyers to track the travel route of their products. Provenance has already been used by food supplying companies for customers to see the origins of their produce, but now, Jargaard seeks to implement this method for raw clothing materials. The Provenance app registers and tracks each step of the clothing item’s creation on the blockchain: from the the farm where the cloth is acquired, to the knitting factory, and finally to Jargaard’s studio. Jargaard’s garments are supplied with unique digital tokens that allow the app to confirm every step of the production and create a digital history of that information that consumers can access via an interface when they scan the item’s QR code or NFC-enabled label.
DADA
Individual artists rarely rise to prominence without the support and inspiration of a thriving creative community. Likewise, collaborative work has historically helped spawn several artistic movements and trends that have reshaped and evolved the artistic trajectory, as we’ve seen with movements such Dadaism. Playing on the name of the avant-gardists, the online platform DADA.NYC serves as a social network for artists across the world and operates on blockchain technology. The key factor is that users converse with each other through the “image conversation app” that simultaneously allows them to create a digital art piece together. The second feature — and this is where the blockchain comes into play — is the “decentralized marketplace,” where users can scroll through and purchase any one of these incredibly rare pieces. The marketplace is run by smart contracts where artists have IP protection and collectors then get proof of ownership. It sounds a bit strange, right? But so were the Dadaists.
DASCOIN — Launching their first fashion project: (announced March 26)
https://www.reuters.com/brandfeatures/venture-capital/article?id=30038
Fashion designers are always at risk of their intellectual property being stolen, especially since the fashion industry requires multiple parties to share a plethora of designs. In collaboration with the haute couture designer and pioneer in the French fashion industry Julien Fournie, the blockchain-based currency DASCOIN are offering a tool for the protection of the fashion design value-chain. DasCoin blockchain technology long been tried and tested for its speed and scalability, so there’s no doubt that . The guarantee that designs will only be released to a verified partner, while also thoroughly audited, will be provided by smart contracts, automated non-disclosures and other legally binding agreements. As we’ve seen with the previous projects, these transactions will happen quickly and seamlessly, an most importantly, without money wasted on middlemen and extraneous supply chains.
