Nobody complimented my B*red Ape hoodie
Nobody complimented my B*red Ape hoodie
What do logo jawns tell us about coolness, desire, and where NFTs are headed?? PLUS: handmade Italian GORPY sunglasses & more unbeatable recon
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Before we get to some Mach 3+ recommendations today — the likes of which you will ONLY find at BBSP — we’ve got the (cursed??) semiotics of NFTs on the brain, particularly as they relate to CLOTHES… O yes, it’s time for some “unbeatable philosophical grappling.”
Almost a year to the day since an NFT sold for $69 million at Christie’s, there’s something that still feels mad dumb about NFTs. We share artists’ desire to get paid for their work, and broadly speaking we’re in favor of innovations to help them do that (not to mention help fellow sletters — shout out to our NFT-crowdfunding SpyFriends at Dirt). But it remains hard to imagine NFTs adding up to much more than a bleak pandemic-era micro-trend, hot primarily among goofies and grifters and unlikely to weave themselves lastingly into the fabric of the future.
Many ppl hope this is the case, because of the monstrous ecological toll of blockchain computing; the fear that profiteers are trying to open up yet another new market that transfers wealth upwards & absolutely does NOT need to exist; and, not unrelatedly, the fact that the most prominent NFT paydays seem to occur not among cool artists exploring the form but among corny celebrities cashing in cornballishly.
I counted myself in the “NFTs have gotta prove to be a fad” camp until I was working on our recent sletter about how “‘Fashion democratization’ is a fugazi concept, during which yr boy observed that, structurally speaking, bad logo-heavy jawns have a lot in common with B*red Ape NFTs…
This affinity was made explicit in a very funny tweet from last month, where a dude posted about feeling despondent ‘cause he wore a garment festooned with a B*red Ape graphic in public and, instead of impressing anyone, it created an IMPERMEABLE DORK FORCEFIELD around him that we have to assume made everyone who crossed his path that day 100% less horny:
It’s a comparison I kept pondering after “smashing the send” on that sletter, following its IMPLICATIONS further…
“Logo jawnz must have ALSO seemed stupid as f**k when they first crept into the market,” I thought to myself. “But within a matter of years they became foundational to the fashion industry’s economic functioning and, NOT ONLY THAT, many logo jawnz now register to Mach 3+ observers as ‘actually cool.’”
So what can the triumph of the logo jawn tell us about where this NFT s**t is headed — and about the nature of DESIRE and COOLNESS itself?