How Rebels Defeated Censorship and Created an NFT Community
In fall 2012, in Vilnius, Lithuania, the Robert Kalinkin fashion house released an ad campaign featuring a man and a woman posing as Jesus and the Virgin Mary wearing jeans and a dress from the company’s then-upcoming clothing line. “Jesus, what trousers!” One of the taglines read, “Dear Mary, what a dress!” and “Jesus, Mary, what are you wearing?”
The campaign was run on the company’s website and on prominent billboards in the Lithuanian capital before the fashion show, organized by the brand’s co-founders Robert Kalinkin and Indre Viltrakait at the time. “It was a play on words,” Indre Viltrakait, co-founder and CEO of Robert Kalinkin, said of the campaign when speaking to NFT Now. “We had models and those pictures were in a very serene environment. They were a very aesthetic representation of our clothing. Everyone loved it.”
A few days before the fashion show, however, Viltrakite and Kalinkin received a complaint from a church in a nearby town that they had violated public morality by desecrating images of Jesus, God, and Mary. Lithuania is one of the most devoutly Abrahamic countries in the world, with more than 90 percent of its residents identifying as Christian and three-quarters of its adults identifying as Catholic.
The complaint went to Lithuania’s State Consumer Rights Protection Authority (SCRPA) and the Lithuanian Advertising Agency (LAA), both of which ruled that the pair had hurt the feelings of religious people, a principle enshrined in the country’s code of advertising ethics. .
“They gave us a choice,” Viltrakite recalls. “Accept it [the ruling] And publicly apologize for that ad, or they’ll go ahead and go to court. They felt that we had offended the Lithuanian Catholic community. So, we said, ‘No, we can’t apologize for something we don’t think we did wrong.’
The choice to resist the rulers has been litigious for years. While fighting SCRPA’s decision, the fashion house lost three separate court cases, with the final blow coming from Lithuania’s Supreme Court. “But we still felt right about what we did,” said Viltrakite. “It was a creative expression. Advertising is a form of creative expression.”
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) agreed. Lawyers took the pair’s case arbitrarily, arguing that the fines and sentences handed down by Lithuanian courts violated their right to freedom of expression as enshrined in Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. On January 30, 2018, after years of process and paperwork, the ECHR declared the Lithuanian court ruling illegal, setting a precedent for the entire European Union.
“If you believe that something you’ve created has a right to live, no one can take that away from you.”
Indra
Viltrakite
“I read every line of that finale [court judgment] With the sweet taste of justice for creatives,” says Viltrakite. “If you believe that something you’ve created has a right to live, no one can take that away from you.”
The Rebel NFT Project was born
In the spring and summer of 2021, Viltrakyte decided to take the same principles of creative expression and deploy them in an NFT project. He began buying and trading NFTs, becoming “absolutely hooked” on Web3. “It occurred to me that we could immortalize our story on the blockchain,” Viltrakite explained.
In September, Viltrakity brought the idea to Kalinkin, and the two decided to base the project on the advertising campaign they had fought so hard for years. By November, the rebel NFT community was on Discord and TwitterAnd in January 2022, the collection was brought into existence.
The rebel group wanted 10,101 NFTs in the collection to reflect the journey of Viltrakite and Kalinkin. Ernesta Vala, the project’s art director (who also helmed the pair’s 2012 ad campaign), based the NFTs in the collection on Mary’s campaign imagery.
“When we created the project, we wanted to create this character, this mother of mothers – proud and independent,” Viltrakite explained. “When we saw that these traits were in the characters, we just let Ernesta and the team do the rest.”
Entering NFT fashion
Rebel’s website says the brand aims to be the first fashion house to fully transform into a blockchain brand. Viltrakyte makes no attempt to hide his traditional fashion roots, though, and believes his perspective and experience serve him well in exploring ways to bridge the physical and digital in the realms of Web3.
“We’re exploring ways to bridge the gap between the physical and the digital,” Viltrakite said. “We know how to make clothes, we know the business side of it – we’re not digital natives and we don’t pretend to be.”
Viltrakyte and the Rebel team are launching their first clothing line in late September, which will include physical clothes and sneakers with digital NFT counterparts. Making clothing items with NFT tags (making them traceable and verifiable) is a compelling possibility. Still, significant progress at the intersection of fashion and NFTs currently faces what Viltrakite calls “the interoperability problem.”
What are interoperability issues? In short, it comes as self-contained metaverse spaces close off from each other. For example, you can own a metaverse-compatible digital asset in one project’s digital environment, but you cannot take that asset into another metaverse. This lack of interoperability prevents projects and communities from interacting and developing Web3 cohesively on a larger scale.
“Until this is resolved, we cannot be fully functional [Web3] fashion house,” Viltrakite lamented. “It’s probably not coming soon. If you do a fashion line for Decentraland, it’s only for Decentraland. And if you do one for the sandbox, it’s just for them. We will get around to that. I’m a big believer in VR technology, where you can use wearables. And we are working on something like that.”
“There are no boundaries. Don’t let anyone tell us we can’t create what we want to create.”
Indra
Viltrakite
The bigger picture, Viltrakite believes, is enabling creators in the Web3 community to create, design and manufacture their own clothing. “We are working to create a platform that allows people with minimal design knowledge to choose design elements in such a way that the final garment looks unique and custom made,” Viltrakite explained. “Then, we can open it up to transform it into whatever platform you want, Decentraland, some other metaverse, or an AR filter.”
Success and future of NFT fashion industry
Fashion brands like Gucci, Tiffany, Prada, and Nike have become fast friends with Web3. The success of these brands’ flirtations with NFTs is a good sign for the fashion industry, though Viltrakite says he hopes these companies follow through on their Web3 commitments.
“It’s important that these brands continue [experiment] Including NFTs,” Viltrakite commented. “If it’s just a drop or two, it’s bad for the space because then there’s no continuity and you can write it off as a cash grab. I generally think that fashion is more visible than other industries because it’s a luxury thing and everyone wants a piece of it. Things like DeFi are not so sexy.”
Viltrakyte believes that fashion is perfect for Web3 because what people decide to wear is always the most fundamental form of self-expression. If the identity crafting focus of NFT and blockchain technology parallels anything, it’s fashion. The brands that will best recognize and capitalize on this will carry the torch forward
Speaking about his predictions for the future of Web3 fashion, Viltrakite said, “There will be legacy luxury brands that nail it. “Tiffany has a good shot at it. I bet they’ll be consistent with that [Web3]. Then, there will be brands like us who come from a small background. Small, boutique, high-end brands from a small country no one knows about, going into this huge web3 world. There are no boundaries. Don’t let anyone tell us we can’t create what we want to create.”
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