CHRISTIE’S INVESTS IN TECH-ENABLED PREMIUM VINTAGE BRAND, MNTGE
Auction house Christie’s has announced its latest investment in MNTGE, a tech-enabled premium vintage fashion brand founded by Sean Wotherspoon, Nick Adler, and Brennan Russo.
MNTGE offers a category-defining experience where the rich heritage of vintage apparel meets the authenticity of blockchain. Through NFC-chipped garments (and patches), MNTGE is able to provide counterfeit-proof authentication of a garment, allowing it to be digitally “signed and saved” permanently on a digital record, thus becoming a part of the garment’s history. Not only does this technology provide valuable storied info about the garment, but it can also function as a utility in everyday life, opening doors to a whole new world of “digital wearables” and its capabilities.
For Christie’s 2023 Art + Tech Summit, MNTGE sourced premium vintage denim jackets, then NFC-chipped and customized them with embroidery to celebrate Christie’s partnership and its Art + Tech Summit. These jackets were gifted during a MNTGE x Christie’s dinner in celebration of the summit, where guests and speakers were able to pick out their own vintage jackets.
An additional partnership between MNTGE, Grimes (a Canadian musician, singer, songwriter, and record producer), and ELF.TECH (a software that produces music using a generative AI music operating system developed by CreateSafe, trained with Grimes’ voice) stems from Christie’s Art + Tech Summit 2023, where Adler, CreateSafe co-founder DAOuda Leonard, and Grimes spoke on the dialogue around music, fashion, digital, and culture.
Finally, the MNTGE x KEITH HARING: UNTITLED #2 (APRIL 16, 1987) vintage patch is the first time Haring’s work has been sold as NFTs, the first time that the budding fashion+technology company MNTGE has collaborated with a historic artist, and as the selling platform, the first time Christie’s Digital Art Department has introduced a retail component at such an attainable price. NFC(Near Field Communication)-chipped vintage patches launched on MNTGE.com to correspond with the NFT open bidding on Christies.com.