How the rebels beat censorship and built an NFT community
In fall 2012, in Vilnius, Lithuania, Robert Kalinkin Fashion House released an ad campaign showing 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 pants!” one of the slogans read along with “Dear Mary, what a dress!” and “Jesus, Mary, what are you wearing?”
The campaign ran on the company’s website and on prominent billboards in the Lithuanian capital ahead of a fashion show that brand founders Robert Kalinkin and Indre Viltrakyte organized at the time. “It was a play on words,” said Indre Viltrakyte, Robert Kalinkin co-founder and CEO of the campaign while speaking to nft now. “We had the models and these shots were in very calm settings. They were a very aesthetic representation of our clothes. Everyone loved it.”
A few days before the fashion show, Viltrakyte and Kalinkin received a complaint from a church in a nearby town claiming that they had violated public morals by insulting the image of Jesus, God and Mary. Lithuania is one of the most devoutly Abrahamic countries on earth, with more than 90 percent of its citizens identifying as Christian and three-quarters of adults identifying as Catholic.
The complaint went to Lithuania’s State Consumer Rights Authority (SCRPA), and then to the Lithuanian Advertising Agency (LAA), both of which ruled that the couple had offended the feelings of religious people, a principle enshrined in the country’s advertising code of conduct. .
“They gave us a choice,” Viltrakyte recalled. “Either accept [the ruling] and publicly apologize for that ad or they would go ahead and go to court. They felt that we enraged the Lithuanian Catholic community. So we said, ‘No, we can’t apologize for something we don’t think we did wrong.'”
The choice to oppose the ruling incurred years of litigation. During the fight against the SCRPA’s decision, the fashion house lost three separate court cases, with the latest blow coming from the Supreme Court of Lithuania. “But we felt right in what we did,” Viltrakyte said. – It was a creative expression. Advertising is a form of creative expression.”
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) agreed. Lawyers took on the couple’s case pro bono, arguing that the fines and sentences handed down by the Lithuanian courts had violated their right to freedom of expression as set out in Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. On 30 January 2018, after years of litigation and paperwork, the ECHR declared the Lithuanian courts’ ruling illegal, setting a precedent for the entire EU.
“If you feel that something you’ve created has a right to live, no one should take it away from you.”
Inner Viltrakyte
“I read every line in the finale [court judgment] with a sweet taste of justice for creatives, said Viltrakyte. “If you feel that something you’ve created has a right to live, no one should take it away from you.”
The birth of the Rebels NFT project
In the spring and summer of 2021, Viltrakyte decided to take the same principles for creative expression and instill them in an NFT project. She started buying and trading NFTs and became “absolutely hooked” on Web3. “It occurred to me that we could immortalize our history on the blockchain,” Viltrakyte explained.
In September, Viltrakyte brought the idea to Kalinkin, and the two decided to base the project on the very ad campaign they had fought so hard for over the years. In November, The Rebels launched NFT communities on Discord and Twitterand in January 2022 the collection was stamped into existence.
The Rebels team wanted the 10,101 NFTs in the collection to reflect Viltrakyte and Kalinkin’s journey. Ernesta Vala, the project’s art director (who also directed the couple’s 2012 ad campaign), based the NFTs in the collection on the campaign’s depiction of Mary.
“When we created the project, we wanted to create this character, this mother of mothers – proud and independent,” explained Viltrakyte. “When we saw these traits were in the characters, we just let Ernesta and the team do the rest.”
Get into the NFT fad
The Rebel’s website states that the brand aims to become the first fashion house to fully transform into a blockchain brand. However, Viltrakyte makes no attempt to hide her traditional fashion roots, and believes her perspective and experience serve her well in exploring ways to bridge the gap between the physical and the digital in the Web3 realm.
“We’re looking for ways to be the bridge between the physical and the digital,” said Viltrakyte. “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 Rebels team are launching their first clothing line at the end of September, which will include physical apparel and sneakers with digital NFT counterparts. Creating garments with NFT tags (making them traceable and verifiable) is a compelling opportunity. Still, significant progress at the intersection of fashion and NFTs is currently limited by what Viltrakyte calls “the interoperability problem.”
What is the interoperability problem? In short, it comes from the way independent metaverse spaces are herded off from each other. For example, you can own a metaverse-compatible digital asset in one project’s digital environment, but you can’t take that asset to another metaverse. This lack of interoperability prevents projects and communities from interacting and Web3 from developing coherently on a larger scale.
“Until this is resolved, we cannot have a fully functional one [Web3] fashion house”, lamented Viltrakyte. “It probably won’t come right away. If you make a fashion line for Decentraland, it’s only for Decentraland. And if you make one for Sandbox, it’s just for them. We have to get around it. I have a deep conviction about VR technologies, where you can use wearables. And we are working on something like that too.”
“There are no boundaries there. No one should tell us that we cannot create what we want to create.”
Inner Viltrakyte
The bigger picture, Viltrakyte believes, is to make it possible for creators in the Web3 community to build, design and make their own clothes. “We are working to build a platform that allows people with minimal design knowledge to select the design elements in a way that makes the final garment look unique and custom-made,” explained Viltrakyte. “Then we can open it up to be transformed into whatever platform you want, Decentraland, another metaverse, or an AR filter.”
The success and future of the NFT fashion industry
Fashion brands such as Gucci, Tiffany, Prada and Nike have become fast friends with Web3. The success of these brands’ flirtations with NFTs bodes well for the fashion industry, though Viltrakyte said she hopes these companies follow through on their Web3 commitments.
“It’s important that these brands continue to do so [experiment] with NFTs,” noted Viltrakyte. “If it’s just one or two drops, it’s bad for the space because then there’s no consistency and you can just write it off as a cash. I think in general fashion is just more visible than other industries because it’s a luxury thing and everyone wants a piece of it. Things like DeFi are just not that sexy.”
Viltrakyte believes that fashion is well suited to Web3 because what people decide to wear has always been the most basic form of self-expression. If the focus on identity-creating NFTs and blockchain technology has a parallel in anything, it’s fashion. Whichever brands best recognize and capitalize on will carry the torch forward.
“It will be classic luxury brands that make it,” said Viltrakyte, speaking of her predictions for the future of Web3 fashion. “Tiffany has a good chance of that. I bet they will be consistent [Web3]. Then there will be brands like us that come from a small background. Small, boutique, fairly high-end brands from a small country no one knows about enter this vast Web3 world. There are no boundaries there. No one should tell us that we cannot create what we want to create.”
