Bobby Hundreds and Jeff Staple on NFTs vs Streetwear Culture
By 2022, brands like Nike and Gucci raised billions from NFTs. These industry leaders then provide attractive utility to buyers, such as Nike’s RTFKT forging of IRL apparel or Tiffany’s $73,000 necklace for CryptoPunk holders.
The hype and the volatile (read: often absurd) prices that come with it drive culturally relevant narratives.
The stories that shape our views, whether they’re about sneakers, sweatshirts, jackets or JPEGs, are based on culturally relevant products. So why is it that of all the above, only NFTs share the streetwear set?
Bobby Hundreds and Jeff Staple are uniquely able to make the connections between streetwear and NFTs.
As two people who helped lay the foundations for “culture” as we know it, both notice similarities between the early days and what is happening now in web3.
Jeff is the founder of Staple Design.
In 2005, Staples’ Nike Pigeon Dunks famously caused riots that “catapulted sneaker culture to the masses.” The shoe was not envisioned as a hyped drop, but simply emerged as part of a larger dream to have his name on a Nike, “an honor only achieved by athletes at the time”. In January 2022, Staple entered web3 with STAPLEVERSE (SV).
Bobby Hundreds is of course the co-founder of The Hundreds. The company’s collaborations, guerilla marketing, famous Labor Day parties and the IYKYK blog cemented it as a streetwear institution, catapulting its home in LA’s Fairfax District as the culture’s West Coast foundation.
In August 2021, the Hundreds launched the Adam Bomb Squad, which used The Hundreds’ Adam Bomb mascot as the basis for 25,000 NFTs. At NFT NYC, the project went viral with a staged NFT “protest”.
“I like to play with the tension between crypto blowhards and NFT haters. Both sides can take a deep breath.” Hundred said.
“It’s far too early to say what this technology might be, so until then I like to take the piss out of the debate. ‘NFTS IS A SCAM’ elicits such a visceral response from people on both sides of the argument, and you have to wonder why it’s so triggering. That’s what the jokes are about: to provoke a healthy dialogue. As long as people talk about it, I think we’re getting closer to the truth.”
Both Staple and Hundreds identify their collectors as coming from streetwear, not crypto backgrounds.
“I’ve been in this game long enough to remember when color laser printing was a revolution,” Staple said. “The Internet, e-commerce and social media were all revolutions. I’ve seen three to four of these monumental changes in the way we live in culture.”
Generationally, streetwear and its collectors have lived through several decades. Both Staple and Hundreds built brands when internet forums like NikeTalk ruled; online community where people would get into long conversations about the latest Jordan drops and (remember, this was pre-smartphone).
Almost 20 years later, Discord (a favorite medium for NFT discussions) reflects similar behavior for this older generation. In turn, Gen-Z and younger millennials also prefer Discord over Instagram, citing a renewed focus on forming stronger communities online.
“Most major NFT brands will admit they were inspired by the last two decades of streetwear,” Hundreds said. “They remind me so much of the creative energy I remember from a burgeoning streetwear culture in the early 2000s. I haven’t seen much of that raw magic since.”
“Meanwhile, the current NFT space is difficult and capricious. In the future, we’ll be embarrassed by so much of what we do today (if we’re not already). But that horror tells me that people are taking risks and trying. And I love that. I call it “the greatest effort.”
Hundreds noted that, by comparison, streetwear is “somewhat predictable and formulaic on the mainstream scene.”
“Eliminating cringe” is something we face every day when involved in NFTs. Many projects that make headline-grabbing money, for example, are likely to be pumped by flippers in trade circles. They only care about an NFT tool because it helps them resell it. Some in web3 assumed that “flipping” would get streetwear fans familiar with reselling to NFTs, thus creating a higher standard of curation, although that hasn’t been the case.
Staple is not advocating a turnaround, but is also impressed that the sneaker culture is big enough to create a resale ecosystem.
He figures that “for every 100 kids who get into sneaker culture through reselling, 51 of them are going to fall in love with the culture. Of those 51, 30 will actually get a job in the industry,” he tells NFTs.
Meanwhile, Hundreds “has an uncomfortable relationship with flipping. The craziest flex in the 2000s was actually wearing your expensive Dunks. The world knew you could sell them for hundreds of dollars, but you didn’t care.”
Instagram is the biggest accelerator of why we stopped wearing shoes and started posting them. This emotional distancing grew as sneakers became an alternative asset class.
While the social media site made sneakers more viable to trade as stocks, it failed to capture any of the value of the trade for itself or the manufacturers.
On November 2, Meta announced plans to launch Instagram tools that will allow people to sell IG posts as NFTs, allowing creators to monetize content they already distribute for free. If done right, Meta could be the first company to successfully introduce digital assets to the masses.
“How much would you pay for a blue badge on Twitter?” Staple asked in early October, weeks before new CEO Elon Musk implemented his controversial new policy of charging real money for an intangible accessory, alternatively mocked and embraced by Twitter users.
Musk’s Twitter experiment just shows how much even web3-averse people value digital assets, even if they say they don’t.
“When you look at what’s happened in web3, and even crypto in general, we’ve been fighting the masses on this perception that people think it’s a scam,” Staple said.
“People said hip-hop was a dying trend. “Why waste your time trying to pull off a skate trick? Why are you still printing T-shirts out of your basement? Stop wasting your time. ‘
“I hear the same sentiment when it comes to NFTs. I feel very nostalgic that these are the same people who didn’t believe me when I printed my first Staple shirts.”
