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Notes -
Thank you for the detailed look into Gucci brand dynamics! I quite agree with you that an exclusive proof of ownership for say, a house, has many practical applications.
Let’s get back to this:
If authenticity means anything, surely it must mean that the bag was designed by Mr. Gucci and was once touched by one of his skilled artisans, in the same way that a signed copy of the Lord of the Rings was once touched by JRRR Tolkien himself.
If none of that is true, if it’s literally just another chinese-manufactured fake with a certificate attached, how can the NFT possibly have any meaning beyond ‘I paid far too much for a SuperFake’? At this point I think we’re right back to the monkeys: apelike competition for a limited number of tokens purely on the basis that they’re limited. Even a child stealing another child’s toy on the playground knows the toy has some inherent value beyond just being something that somebody else wants.
Entirely possible! But the point of owning the NFT would be to obtain the physical rights to the thing you actually want, surely? What good does it do me to own the rights to a little getaway in Valencia if the original ‘owner’ is squatting in there and the police refuse to make him leave on the basis of my NFT?
(I accept that I might be a little out of the general stream on this. I’ve always felt that a really good fake of a thing is pretty close to being as good as the actual thing. I’d pay a bit more for that signed copy of LoTR or an authentic 10th century castle, compared to an identical physical copy, but only a bit.)
That's all it is now. There is no quality underneath the luxury that can't be matched, there is just a trademark. Every luxury house other than Hermes has moved production overseas, or into cheaper EU countries. And other than Hermes, which basically keeps the entire traditional leatherworking industry operating in France, the luxury houses are employing cheap labor anyway, often Asian immigrants are making the Italian leather goods in Italian factories. Mr. Gucci has no skilled artisans. Yet people are still paying for it. How divorced can we get the value from the underlying product? Idk, ask Supreme about their stupid brick.
And that kind of luxury competition Veblen good is a ridiculously large global industry. The worst one, in my mind, is the NFL/MLB/etc authentic jersey. A $200 piece of plastic crap, available for $20 on DhGate. Yet some people will still buy it from the Team Store. I'm not much for it myself, but quite simply: if you'd only pay slightly more for a signed copy of LOTR, you will never own a first edition copy of LOTR unless you get extraordinarily lucky at a yard sale. To be fair though, the historic castle may be cheaper than a repro, as the repro will be more modern and easier to maintain.
My title agent examples are largely orthogonal, there I'm talking about NFT transfer becoming the essential legal ceremony indicating ownership, in the way that now it involves signing little pieces of paper in front of the correct witnesses and sending them to the state capital and then having them sent back. Where that starts is with accepting NFT ownership as ownership.
eta: WSJ is reporting today that Dior spends $58 on labor for bags that retail at $2,900. There's no underlying value there, just branding.
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