Hey, and welcome back to the Interline Podcast. 

Today’s title is a purposely provocative one. Not just because I’m a well-documented Web3 and digital fashion skeptic, but because we actually are in the middle of entering a very different age of the internet. It’s not the one that Web3 advocates thought it would be, but it is one. And now feels like the moment to do a bit of a post-mortem – even if some people would say it’s a premature one – and ask whether the idea or the promise of Web3 was a fundamentally faulty one, whether it was a good idea that was too early, or whether it was a prescient stab at trying to fight back against the platform-dominated content sphere that I think we now all recognise in an overdue way that we live in and that we try to sell fashion into?

To have this debate, I invited on Karinna Grant. Karinna’s a friend of mine who’s good at arguing with me, which is something I definitely need. And she’s also someone who’s spent probably as much time as anyone stress testing, building, re-evaluating, speaking about, and now retroactively dissecting the ideas, the principles, and the technical primitives behind Web3 and digital fashion. So let’s get into it.

NB. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

Okay, Karinna, welcome to The Interline Podcast.

Hey Ben, I’m very excited to have this conversation with you.

Likewise, I feel like this one’s been a while in the offing. I feel like we could have come around to this several times in the past, but I’m glad we’re doing it now. You can have all these sorts of things clandestinely behind closed doors, but this time’s for real. 

Now we’re on record.

We always try and start these podcasts by getting any important definitions out of the way. And in this case, I think that’s going to be a super useful exercise because there’s a bunch of terminology we’re going to end up using that I suspect may not be current for people or may be something that they don’t have their own operating definition of. And I think there are things that you and I also have different definitions of to start with as well. So the first of those is, how do you define Web3? And I have to go to the trouble now of spelling that out. So capital W, e, b and just the number three, because we’ll have to put a pin in the idea of Web 3.0 – the machine readable web – for another time, even though I think we’ve covered some of it in our recent AI focus shows. 

But Web3, for me, there’s a strict link there, implied in that, to blockchain-based decentralisation as a step change beyond the user-generated social era of the web, like Web2. That’s what my definition is, what you could call maybe like a purest technical definition. And I think some parts of that are more compelling to me than others, which I know we’re going to get to. But my definition of Web3 isn’t the only one. And generally, I think it feels like Web3 is one of those living terms that’s taken on a very different meaning for within the community that grew up around it and outside of that. So how do you define it?

I mean, for me, it’s about ownership. I guess versions 1 and 2 were like read and write and Web3 is about owning either what’s on the internet or owning something via the internet, and definitely concur with you that like the backbone of that is it’s got to be kind of underpinned by a blockchain-backed kind of decentralised system and in the part that you said about what part do you like and I think, done right, it’s about empowerment of data about assets and about identities, but as we all know that doesn’t always happen. We’ve not necessarily got to the good bit yet. 

Okay, that’s fine. I think that makes sense. So the other definition I want to get out in front of is ‘digital fashion’. So think this is an area you and I kind of diverge, but kind of converge in some areas. 

Yeah, let’s fight.

So my own definition of this has been pretty fixed for a while. So I see digital fashion as a separate vertical from physical fashion and as a unique avenue for creative expression. It’s its own separate thing. I think it’s not the same thing as digital product creation for me, which is the process of using digital tools to streamline the creation of physical products. And I think it also lives separately from the business opportunity of selling cosmetics and games, which we’ll come back to. 

Now, you actually wrote a pretty incisive taxonomy of this for us in our 2024 DPC Report. And I know you gave a TED Talk on the same topic in 2023. So I’m keen to know if you feel like what you had back then is still a valid rubric for how you think about these things or have your definition changed?

For my sins, I think my definition has got broader. In fact, I have quite a lengthy definition that’s going to be published in an academic journal later this year. I’ll kind of explain to you what that is. So I described digital fashion as a realm of fashion involving digital representations of clothing, footwear, lifestyle products. And I see it exists as both an operational tool (so I do include the DPC part) and as an end product as well (so I do include the assets in games). And I’m on the same page as you. I think it offers an augmentation of creativity. And I think it also offers new forms of identity, expression, culture, experience. I mean, efficiency and value too for all the different players inside the kind of fashion ecosystem. And I think its form and its function I describe as being kind of omni-dimensional, and it changes as with the kind of progression of new technologies and what its use case is within the value chain. So I’m maybe being too broad there, but for me that definition encompasses the broadness and its kind of dynamism.

No, I do like your definition because I think it captures the extended scope. I think ours is driven by operations and budgets and job roles and things as much as it is anything else. Which is to say that people invest in digital product creation for a very clear outcome, right? Which is time to market, reducing samples, streamlining the creation of physical products. Whether that’s always achieved is a completely different matter – 

Yeah, units of measurement.

– but it’s a cost centre. It’s a profit and loss sheet. It’s a technology segment. To me digital fashion is the cultural bit that lives separately from that and it’s not something that I think your average brand is spending on or would not say that they were spending on. It seems like we’re splitting hairs here, but,  I don’t know, for me it’s been useful to have those things separate. 

Yeah. I think it’s important. I agree. I think and I guess one of the reasons related to that is that kind of unquantifiableness. Wonderful English is one of the reasons why digital fashion historically has kind of struggled but maybe that’s a story for another day.

Okay. I don’t know. I think we might get to it. So to add some context to the discussion here. So spoiler for people listening. These episodes don’t always come out within days of being recorded. Sometimes there’s a bit of a lag. And Karinna and I are recording this not too long after SYKY – which was one of the poster children for digital fashion that was pegged to kind of platform independent ownership – not too long after that was shuttered, for want of a better word. 

Now, anyone who knows me might be expecting a bit of schadenfreude because I’ve not been the biggest advocate of blockchain-backed digital assets and trading platforms. But actually, I kind of think SYKY’s winding up is actually a surprisingly compelling testament to the idea that if you buy digital goods, you should own them and they should outlast the platform. And I think that’s especially true at a time right now that we could probably define as ‘peak platform decay’. 

It’s probably fair to say there’s not a huge amount, there’s not a big reservoir of, trust in platforms right this minute. So I think we’re at the process of crossing over from me being grumpy about NFTs to actually I’m generally pretty optimistic about the idea that the open web content ownership and federation – all things that afford people direct control of ownership over the things that they create and own – is a good thing. And I think I’ve come around to the idea that SYKY in particular actually kind of demonstrates the value of disconnecting ownership from the lifecycle of the platform itself. 

And you don’t have to feel any type of ways about NFTs or anything to really think about this because everyone’s familiar with the idea that if they create content for TikTok or …I’m old. What do people create content for these days? But the content lives there and only there and then it dies when those platforms die along with their hard-won followers and so on. And you can extrapolate that to buying some Nike kicks in Fortnite or buying licenses to music or movies or whatever. We don’t really own a lot where the modern web is concerned. 

This is a stupidly long question, but essentially what I’m saying is that when you look at a platform like SYKY winding down and you see that actually the things it sold will outlive it thanks to the architecture that they were built on, that’s a good thing. That actually feels like evidence that maybe the idea was right after all, even if the timing wasn’t. What’s your take?

My take is, yay, we managed to convert you finally. I mean, I was genuinely sad when I read Alice’s post and also when I’ve seen subsequent founders posts and also when the platform that I was previously involved in, The Dematerialized, was sunsetted – although I’m not sure that’s the right verb. And I agree with you, it’s different to when a physical fashion, like e-commerce platform goes bust because the assets and all that are complicated and legal whereas as a Web3 kind of native platform. And I guess you could say the same happens with Artifact and some of the other kind of RIP platforms that yes, this is a benefit that if you architect the infrastructure in a kind of true Web3 way, the ultimate benefit is to the consumer and the creator if there is a kind of revenue being able to be built into the contract on chain. Although that’s kind of again maybe a discussion for another day but I mean, I’m pleased but I’m sad that it took that and all the other platforms to shut down for us to be like, yeah actually the tech is useful and I’m excited for the next wave. 

I’m with you and I think that some of this is definitely a case of seeing things through your own lens. As a publisher, we’re very keen to own the things that we create and we’re very keen that those things remain as openly available as they can be. And I would like the stuff that we write to outlive the platform that we’ve created for it. At some point, give me 20 years, is The Interline still around? I don’t know. Are some of the thoughts and ideas that we put down and some of the reports and things that we released still in people’s hands because they were given away in a format that makes them part of the open web? Yes, I would class that as a good outcome.

I think where I’ve landed over the years is for a while I was one of those people who would say, what you’re doing with a blockchain in any given application, 99% of the time could be done with a database and did not need to be that. This is one of those occasions where you could not have achieved that with a database. This is something that was a blockchain-based system. Yeah, it was a suitable use case for it and it was one that demonstrated. 

Suitable use case.

Now does that automatically mean that the promises of utility and everything else that come with this are going to be realized? Does it end up with people holding copies of digital fashion in wallets that just languish there for the rest of their lives. I don’t know. Those two things are not synonymous with one another. 

If we stay on that for a minute though, we think about SYKY. The founder, Alice, said in her parting message that she felt the vision for this, the vision for digital fashion in general, was inevitable, but that the ecosystem and the tech that would need to underpin it weren’t ready for the vision to scale. I want to know how you feel about that because I can see that being true if I could see the demand, right? If it was the case that demand was outstripping the ability for platforms to keep up. That doesn’t seem to be the case. Maybe there’s a big reservoir of people who do want digital fashion and hold it in their wallets and I just don’t know who they are. Instead, it kind of feels like a chicken and egg problem because ownership of verifiably scarce digital goods needs a widely adopted digital platform to take off or a physical platform shift. No one’s going to create that platform with the necessary foundations without the demand being there. To get a return from building out or very deep pockets, an external investment which creates a whole different set of incentives. 

Preach. Or very deep pockets, yeah.

To get a return from that kind of ecosystem building, you have to have some confidence that there’s going to be a royalty model, some other model that makes it sustainable to create those platforms. And to me, I feel like that’s at odds and in competition with the idea of independent ownership, because I feel like those royalties and things only happen if you keep people locked in place. So there’s a drive to create a platform and then things outlive the platform and the platform died because the platform wasn’t able to keep people there. There wasn’t demand for it. There wasn’t enough money in it. I don’t know. It feels like there’s a push and pull here that I don’t know how it gets resolved.

I mean, I think I agree with both of you partially. I mean, to answer what you said just a second ago, if the user experience of Web3 platforms was friendlier or more intuitive I think that would make a difference. Because as a platform builder and as a platform user it needs to be easy for you to know what the utility of that digital asset is and be able to use it and then the technology behind it. So particularly for instance smart contracts that are interoperable or the interoperability of the asset into different environments – all of that has to be neat, intuitive and easy to use and it just isn’t. And I think that’s a little bit of what Alice was kind of referring to. 

It’s quite a timely question actually, because for the last 18 months I’ve been working on an academic research project trying to look at, why hasn’t it worked? So far we’ve interviewed 30 industry experts. You have already taken part, so thank you. I also have painstakingly catalogued about 250 digital fashion projects between 2016 to 2026. And we’ve also undertaken a kind of semantic text analysis of digital fashion communities on Reddit, Instagram and Roblox. So we’re trying to take a kind of 360 view of, like, why did this adoption, like kind of mass adoption not work? And I guess things that we’ve kind of seen from, particularly from the chronological study of the activations is that, well, post the NFT crash, obviously lots of the NFT-specific or kind of limited utility projects obviously faded out because the demand wasn’t there. And the things that are kind of still hanging in there, I guess, separate from the DPC investment are virtual try-on, which I know you and I kind of disagree about kind of where it sits, kind of shoppable gaming or kind of being able to with kind of 3D environments, either in game or in specifically created environments, and also kind of early experimentation with DPPs and using assets and digital twins in DPPs. 

I don’t know, we’ll probably talk about this next, but also in my academic research, interoperability appears to be more valuable in theory than practice. So with gamers specifically, they actually say, well, I don’t want to take my Air 1s from one platform into another. I’m quite happy keeping them there, which is kind of interesting in itself. But yeah, I think it’s a complex answer to a complex question, I guess, or a complex problem. 

Mm-hmm. And to be fair, a lot of these are complex questions. For anybody who’s about to switch off, we’re not gonna spend a huge amount of time talking about the intricacies of blockchain here. These are complex questions because they get to the heart of what seemed to be a promising idea and seemed to be a new business unit potentially, and seemed to be something that fashion could extract additional value from work it was already doing and it did not pan out in the mainstream. 

And I do think that some of the technical underpinnings were at fault in the sense that what you said, is that just too much overhead, like user overhead, too much work to get to the juice was not worth the squeeze, as they say. But, I do feel like it’s interesting to understand whether people actually want the juice in the first place. And that’s a good one. 

And you mentioned the gaming side of things. Let’s do that one. ⁓ Because I think the closest thing we have to some of that kind of mass adoption that we talked about is video games. It’s Fortnite, it’s Roblox. I would previously have talked about those as very different entities, but it seems like from a functional content point of view, they’re getting pretty interchangeable now that Fortnite’s put more of an emphasis on user generated content and on giving creators the ability to leverage payments and things through V-Bucks. 

People point to these platforms quite often as a rebuttal to some of the stuff that we would have talked about already now, right? They will point to it and they will say, people clearly want to buy skins. People clearly want to buy cosmetic fashion adjacent items to use in digital worlds for want of a better term. And that’s proof that digital fashion as a business model should work. To me, it kind of seems like evidence of the opposite, right? It seems that people want to buy licensed products based on established IP, not new stuff from new creators necessarily. They’re happy buying it using non-portable current virtual currencies, V-Bucks and so on. And, like you said, they don’t seem to care that those things will have a life outside of the walled garden that they’re created for. So I don’t know if I see a through line from Fortnite. Epic has a very profitable line of business selling skins because, well, digital fashion should work on that basis because the technical and commercial model is very different and the incentives don’t seem to line up for big brands or for independent artists and designers. It seems like the windows in this are like mid-sized creative agencies and people who can make a killing from building Roblox experiences. 

What do you think? Does one of these lead to the other? And I’m putting a pin in what you said about virtual try-on because I’m going to come back to that.

Yeah. Well, I agree with you. To be able to sell skins in Fortnite as a brand is no easy feat, kind of nigh on impossible. And in the new kind of in-game interactions, you need to commit to publishing an island and employee studios if you don’t have that kind of talent in house. I guess kind of platform specific stuff, my understanding is that Roblox is kind of much more accessible and easier for independent designers and what I describe as prosumers, I guess, to kind of make money by selling their own designs. But I think that there is a market there. It’s not just, I want to buy the licensed products of brand X or brand Y. Obviously that does exist though. I mean, I think we’re kind of seeing the same thing, but I’m also like, what can I do to suggest to you that that is in a customer’s eyes, an end customer’s eyes, I think they see that as digital fashion. And I think they like it because they see a form of psychological ownership, even though it’s not an asset necessarily for them to pass on to their children’s children or an heirloom, a potential heirloom yet. It would of course be if it was a Web3 digital platform, but that’s what I think about that.

No, and I think, again, it’s not just a semantic distinction because we’ve already established that you and I define ‘digital fashion’ in different ways. We just happen to be a couple of people who spent a bunch of time working on, around, commenting about this whole space. The prevailing wisdom is that definitions get coined by the people who actually use the thing and who actually interact with it. If, to the user, buying some branded kicks in Fortnite is digital fashion, then who am I to say otherwise? And in very broad strokes, it is. Somebody is paying money for a non-physical fashion-adjacent item. That is a proof point for it. And I’ve definitely got very hung up on the idea of walled gardens over the years and say, well, interoperability is not there. Does that mean that people should object to it or as you said is it the case that interoperability was a bit of a red herring in all of this and that actually digital fashion has a very healthy life in this kind of balkanized way?

I think only time will tell. But I think those who use it, I think I go back to that, like the end customer. And there’s also a rationale for saying the end customer doesn’t say, I’m buying a piece of digital fashion. To them, it’s just a piece of fashion if it’s gaming. And they don’t necessarily, certainly for the kind of young team, they don’t see that distinction or just like support the digital and physical online-offline life. It’s just all together and I think that’s something that will probably become more apparent. And I don’t know, maybe digital fashion needs a rebrand.

And I think if you separate it from the idea of interoperability and ownership, that’s where you also start to get into the marketing-led side of this, which is, so far we’ve talked about digital fashion as a transactional thing, something that companies would want to sell and people would want to acquire. Whether that confers permanent or temporary ownership, like transient ownership, is kind of beside the point. What we should be talking about, I guess, is brands that see these as activations and see these as methods of engagement and marketing that nobody has to buy anything digital at the end. Ideally somebody will go on to buy something physical in the end as a matter of fact that to me like the bigger part of this now. Again, splitting hairs, is that digital fashion to me? I don’t know. Does that matter in the actual use case? Probably not.

Yeah, I mean, I guess we have to agree to disagree.

No, I think that’s fine, but I do think the marketing side of it is a big piece. I think that’s where a bunch of value will come from, from this sort of area. But that does bring us to the question of whether you’re creating digital experiences, digital items, with the goal of just letting people immerse themselves in them and try them on as a kind of marketing that you then go on to use as a sale for physical stuff, or whether you’re actually trying to turn it into a business unit.

All of that relies on you having or creating digital representations of products, right? You need to have 3D assets in order to sell 3D assets. And it does seem at the minute like there’s less of what you might call incidental supply for this, where you have companies creating 3D assets for other purposes that then get turned into sellable or marketable digital goods because companies are pulling back a little bit on their use cases for 3D. So that kind of feels like there may be a supply squeeze happening. 

What’s your general take on what’s happening with 3D adoption in general and what that might mean if we think about building a market, whether it’s a market for experiential digital fashion or actually directly sellable digital fashion?

I mean, I think it’s a legitimate fear that, and like you say, there already are kind of retractions or like I work as an innovation matchmaker as well, kind of partnering companies, with startups, with large brands. And some of those are 3D environment, 3D asset related and a very common rebuttal is that it’s just nowhere near important for us right now. And much to my kind of sadness.

I hope that as more solutions arrive in the marketplace, as software prices go down and as the skill and education of the next generation of creative strategist marketers go up, that creates a positive kind of movement. I think for me, a basic kind of hygiene level, the customer data points and kind of research says if you put a 3D asset for example on your e-comm page or if you have a virtual try-on experience it helps the customers end decision-making process of purchasing a physical garment. Although thinking of the future version of that, if it’s an AI agent that’s shopping on your behalf maybe they don’t care if there’s a 3D asset on the screen, but again probably a discussion for another day. 

I think AI is kind of letting us have access to cheaper, faster ways of making digital twins or digital representations of physical objects with multiple 3D file types that hopefully can serve different purposes within a fashion business. And I think you and I both observe that that kind of notion of 3D assets living only in one siloed business unit is something that we still observe within the marketplace, but I hope that that will change. 

I think at the more advanced level, I’m with you. I’m still pretty stunned how underutilised gaming is as a separate retail vertical, considering there are so many solutions that make it very cheap and very fast and very easy to have a digital representation that could be used in a digital activation or as a digital something in game. Sorry, the second is more where I was going with that. 

And I guess as well with the impending kind of DPP legislation, I hope that that will kickstart the more forward thinking brands to use a 3D asset as part of that and thinking about that in a more experiential and storytelling way, particularly at the higher end of the market and potentially something that’s on chain as well.

Yeah, OK. And I do think, I do see a future for 3D as a container. And I’m definitely not alone in this. This is something the big 3D platforms see as well, is 3D not just as a neat visualisation exercise, but as a container for a bunch of product information. You can take that and you can extrapolate it into digital product passport stuff in the sense that the 3D asset contains construction details, material details, provenance, and so on. It doesn’t at the minute, but you can extend it into things like virtual try-on, which for me it’s not digital fashion. Again, I’m not the arbiter of truth in all of this. It’s a use for assets created as part of digital product creation that could have a life as part of digital fashion. 

I think you’re onto something, and that something is that the value of creating digital representations of things that you either sell or could someday sell should not be confined to either the marketing channel or the direct digital sales opportunity. They have utility that exists across business functions but across different consumer functions as well. 

Beyond. 

Okay, now you mentioned AI.

Mmhmm. So let’s go there. 

Yes, let’s do it. It feels like generative AI may be doing something profound here by challenging the idea of what it means to create, right? So if we think about the original vision for digital fashion, it would be that you would be acquiring something that was authored by hand. Authored by hand using digital tools, but was an expression of somebody’s work and effort. We’re all familiar with how quickly flat image generation has been commoditised. I think the head of Instagram said at the end of last year, getting the ‘Instagram aesthetic’, you know, perfect looking images is now table stakes because anybody can do it with a prompt. 

I don’t think we’re super far from the same commoditisation happening for 3D objects as well. There’s already a lot of work going into it. You upload 1-4 images and you get a really good 3D object from it without having big dedicated 3D scanning rigs. I can see all of that playing out one of two ways. 

I think either people just take a very nihilistic approach to this, is usually where I land. I might be a bit of a cynic in this area. And they say, well, you know what? It means basically nothing to create a digital object anymore. And as a result, there’s no value in it and no reason to try and it. Or we go the other way, where people put much deeper stock in human creativity. People balk against the mass commoditisation of asset creation. And that does seem to be happening a bit and that to me does lead to saying, well, maybe there could be a bigger market for digital assets if those assets are approvably human created. I don’t know if they have to be blockchain-backed necessarily, but I think there’s a market for human authenticity and for ownership that’s going to grow up. When you have YouTube and other platforms that are really leaning into everything can be fake, there’s definitely a market for stuff. 

I don’t know what we do with that. I feel like it is the thing.

Yeah, I mean, a million percent.  I feel that all roads are pointing to B, the humanisation kind of aspect but I think that the first kind of cynical, nihilistic kind of perspective will always be there and it’s quite often dependent on the level of expertise and knowledge. Even though actually that doesn’t make sense for you because you have a wide expertise and knowledge but I think seeing that way wider or kind of broader potential does often kind of affect the viewpoint. I think whether or not it should be on or off chain, I think depends on its core use case back to what we said at the very beginning. I think with AI kind of challenging the provenance in IP going forward, that’s a perfect reason for the asset and the metadata behind it to be on chain so that it is verifiably human as you see.

I think at the very least the AI moment should have us re-evaluating a lot of this stuff. I think that’s very fair. 

Tell me what you’re working on with the other project of yours, Keeper. Because that feels to me, you and I have spoken about it before, whether you intended it or not, that feels really well-timed to take advantage of maybe some of that cultural backlash against synthetic media and that sort of search for authenticity.

Are you working on that on the assumption that we’re rediscovering the value of tangible archival history because there’s just so much volume and variety and inauthenticity in the digital world? It seems clear that people still want to own a piece of fashion, whatever format it is. Maybe that piece isn’t digital, maybe that piece is physical. Tell me what you’re doing and tell me what that looks like.

I mean, first of all, I’d love to say it was completely strategic, but it was partially strategic and partly experience-based. So I learned the hard way with The Dematerialized, the NFT platform that I co-founded, that regular customers on mass can’t quite get their head around digital fashion because they fundamentally don’t understand how or where they can use it yet. And they’re kind of right with that. Right. And I guess, like we mentioned earlier, until there’s adoption of a platform or a hardware that makes it easy, functional, blah, blah. I knew I couldn’t launch another pure digital fashion startup. 

So firstly, Keeper is about kind of normalising a new form of ownership, which we’ve, I guess, started off with the theme of the day. But it’s about shared ownership rather than individual ownership. And I see that as an evolution of the access-based ownership models like rental and e-commerce, which have boomed.

And now it’s time to introduce what I’m calling kind of experience-based ownership because we don’t really need any more stuff, right? I mean, The Fabricant was always great saying that before. And I believe that the traditional things which fashion is generally not like accessible and democratic or something that shared forms of ownership kind of allow for. 

And the second thing that I guess is the evolution of Keeper, is that it’s about the stories behind the things almost more or equal to the things themselves. So I watched and kind of predicted the vintage resale market explosion and I tracked what are the items that herald value and what was consistently in demand. And that led me to see the kind of iconic historical fashion archive items are safest, if you want, in that category. And also they are legitimately an asset class now. And I think those two things together are significant. And then I also researched all the big auction sites and resale sites. And I was again dumbfounded at how little storytelling there was and also how few of these sites which are selling very expensive pieces, they don’t have any blockchain-backed ownership for kind of facilitation of providence and authenticity.

So what does that mean in practice? Well, the keeper, if you see what I did there, gets to basically co-own a piece of fashion history which they otherwise would be probably not able to do. So think about an Iris van Herpen dress or the Margiela kind of glass slipper. They join a community of other like-minded keepers who are also kind of into the same thing as them and like they can like be passionate about the things that kind of ‘float their boat’. They get to with this co-ownership, they get to experience a blockchain-backed digital product passport, obviously under the hood because they don’t necessarily care about that very overtly yet. And I guess as a user, what they see is a 3D spatial timeline which storytells that piece and is dynamic as well. And I think that’s something that we haven’t seen before. And where the IP allows it. I am a digital twin that they can use in specific circumstances and I’m kind of calling it collective cultural ownership. So that’s it in a nutshell.

Well, it’s an interesting model. I would also love to tell you that we started The Interline right as COVID shut the world down and everything went digital, on purpose. But no, just a complete coincidence. Fortuitous timing.

[Laughs.] Ta-ta-ta!

Right, second to last question. You hinted at it before, some of your academic stuff. You’re doing a PhD right now. What are you working on in academia? What does it look like? What are you covering?

So, I’m really lucky that I’m at the University of Manchester and I’m investigating the phenomenon of digital collective ownership. So predominantly from a kind strategic managerial perspective, thinking about if and when digital collective ownership becomes a thing, how could it facilitate innovation within specifically the kind of pre-loved luxury sector. 

And I’m kind of defining digital collective ownership because I know that as a group rather than an individual having rights and control of an asset which is managed via a digital platform. And I’m also kind of looking at it with a bit of a circular lens because at the moment I don’t know whether you would agree or disagree but the major kind of resale platforms are actually pretty linear, very centralised and could be considered as quite extractive in places. So I’m hoping that by the end of three years’ time, although I’m going to publish as I go, that I could demonstrate that digital collective ownership could be a kind of legitimate alternative form of consumption. And specifically, I think it could be really, really great for preservation and conservation.

Okay, that’s it. I’m looking forward to reading the thesis once you get it together. I’m always jealous of people who have the drive and the time to finish things like PhDs and books. You are looking at somebody who does not have a huge amount of time on their hands but also has abandoned trying to write books more times than I care to mention. So yeah, well done there. 

Excellent.

Let’s try and end this on a bit of a constructive note. I do think there’s a service that you and I could provide one of these days to people where it’s like a devil on one shoulder, angel on the other when it comes to this stuff. But for now, if you were advising a brand today with the benefit of hindsight when it comes to Web3, digital fashion, NFTs, that whole point cloud of stuff that happened, what, if anything, would you tell them to try and carry through from that? What to avoid? What did we learn?

Love it!

Well I guess if they didn’t design their own products, so they kind of weren’t vertically integrated, then I would plead them to experiment with either creating their own 3D assets of other people’s stuff, I suppose, but with permission, so that they could use it in kind of e-comm and marketing. And if relevant to their demographic, looking at collaborations as another sales channel. Obviously, that depends on ownership and stuff like that. 

I think if they were vertically integrated, then I think firstly, basic hygiene, ensuring that digital product creation was in their physical design workflow, because as you said, everything kind of starts from there, what’s possible, what isn’t possible, and that the assets were used up and down the chain by multiple teams. And I guess thirdly, if they’re kind of premium luxury or a cult or a brand with kind of a lot of brand elasticity, then to consider kind of experiential blockchain-backed DPPs I think initially because it could be a really great form of marketing and a kind of point of differentiation. 

And I know you wanted to end on a kind of happy or positive note, but I really still believe in Web3 and what it offers fundamentally in terms of that kind of ownership because as the institutions that we kind of used to trust continually fail us quite spectacularly, I think, I don’t know, Web3 offers us something that is like a new future that we haven’t had before. So I guess that is positive.

Mm-hmm. I will echo that. I still see digital fashion as a valid form of creative expression, for sure. And I think we’ve aligned on more here than I thought we might do. And from a Web3 point of view, again, as somebody who we publish to a channel that we own on purpose, could we be a Substack functionally and still deliver the bulk of what we deliver to the readers? Yes. Do I want to be a Substack and give ownership over to a centralised platform holder rather than ourselves? No. 

Mm. I think that’s a hell no.

And I think that, even if I don’t agree with the letter of Web3, the spirit is there. And that’s something that I line up on.

I mean that’s a beautifully poetic note to end on, right?

On that basis, Karinna, thank you so much for your time today. It’s been a pleasure. I know you and I will chat off the record in the future. Hopefully we get a chance to do it on the record again at some point.

Sounds good. Thank you very much.

That’s all. Thanks for joining.

And that’s the end of my lively chat with Karinna. I think we actually ended up agreeing on more than either of us initially thought we would. So hopefully it’s been an entertaining and informative exercise for you. I would recommend you go and read Karinna’s co-authored Taxonomy for Digital Fashion, which was published in our 2024 DPC Report. 

I’d recommend you read the new 2026 DPC Report as well, obviously. Because I definitely think it’s true that the enterprise value of digital assets is still going up, even if that value is going to be measured in places that the original digital fashion or even the original digital product creation advocates wouldn’t have expected. 

Much more to come on some very different topics next week and beyond. For now though, thanks for listening and I’ll talk to you again soon.

Ben is a senior fashion technology storyteller, analyst, and moderator with more than a decade's experience in retail.