NFTs? Check. Live Cuban music? Double check. Signature cucumber gin and tonics from Épicerie Boulud? Triple check! This is how Clandestina, Cuba’s first private fashion brand parties. They celebrated the launch of their new collection, Metavelso at The Canvas 3.0, a new gallery space located in the World Trade Center here in Downtown Manhattan.
Clandestina was founded in 2015 by Cuban artist, Idania Del Río and partnered with The Canvas, a sustainable fashion marketplace, in 2019. The brand’s success has grown rapidly throughout the years, focusing on t-shirts, caps, bags, keychains and other types of streetwear, all marked by the brand’s signature Cuban touch of humor, irony and eclecticism. What sets their newest collection apart from previous collections is the use of NFTs.
“The NFT collection is from the Clandestina archives. It’s like the expression of the brand we started. It’s how we communicate, how we express the brand. So all of the NFTs they are not products. They are not even designs of the brand. It’s a lot of social critique, a lot of absurdity because we live in Cuba and things in Cuba have to be a certain way. You have to say without saying, you have to always be hiding something and that’s the spirit of the NFT collection,” shared Idania, who currently serves as the brand’s creative director. The social commentary goes beyond the NFTs. “The name is Metavelso which is a joke about the metaverse in Spanish. There is a huge immigration crisis in Cuba. [The impact of COVID] was very strong and there are a lot of people leaving the island. So Metavelso is sort of a reflection of that, moving around, going to places, inside your head, inside your mind but also in your own reality. You move around. The clothing is very loose, baggy pants, so you have space. The island, the country is almost, you feel, there is so much space because people are leaving so we have to fill the gaps. So everything is like big, large.”
Beyond its social commentary, Clandestina takes social action through the brand’s production. “We try to be very conscious about scale. We don’t produce a lot, we try to keep the drops short, not for the hype, but that’s how they come. We are in Cuba, it’s very hard to get new stuff. So we grab whatever we can find, any material, from any source, second-handed material and we work with that. It’s very flexible, you can’t attach to one material because you have to change every time and that’s how we are sustainable. We work with whatever else left, whatever is there and our production is very small.”
The partnership between Clandestina and The Canvas is a no-brainer, given The Canvas’s mission to showcase brands committed to at least two of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. But what made the night extra exciting was visiting The Canvas 3.0, their new gallery space located at The Oculus at The World Trade Center. The gallery walls are lined with digital canvases created by the tech company, WHIM, serving as “an intermediate between a screen and a painting,” as described by The Canvas associate Sarah Debenish, who helps run the new art space. The gallery aims to show people how digital art and the internet can be brought into the physical realm. “We are so used to looking at our phone and looking at our computers and looking down at everything and this is a way to bring the things you like about the internet and see it liven a room, instead of keeping a file of a picture you like,” added Sarah.
TThe Canvas 3.0’s mission to combine the digital with the physical was certainly accomplished this night. Clothes purchased from the Metavelso collection come with a NFT chip, so purchasers not only get a physical t-shirt, they get a piece of art as well. Given that the t-shirts start at 48 dollars, that’s a pretty reasonable price considering you get to call yourself a fashionista and an art collector at the same time. Make sure to check out Clandestina’s line on The Canvas’s website and their NFT collection at The Canvas’s gallery space while you still can.