Exploring 'Precious': A Special Archive of Personal Stories and Fashion Gems

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photo credit: Abby Richard

A project by Abby Richard (@abbyrichard):

For this project, I considered how blockchain technology could be utilized to preserve the stories that secondhand clothes carry with them. There's been much discussion about how blockchain can be used in the production process to track where and how clothing items are made, ensuring ethical and sustainable transparency for buyers. This project considers the lives lived in clothing after purchase. If we could know the stories behind the clothes we purchased from secondhand shops, would it make us value them more? Could thrift stores be seen as museums of personal histories, and could this preservation platform the communities that are overlooked in biased curation processes? 

photo credit: Abby Richard

Precious aims to create a decentralized archive of personal stories that people contribute to as they donate their clothes to secondhand shops. The hand-made hang tag notebooks encourage individuals to document their personal stories about the article of clothing for new owners to discover and add to. This collecting and trading of stories creates a shift in our understanding of value under capitalism, framing the older objects as more valuable than the newer ones. The project includes a digital archive as well which combines blockchain with narrative, creating paper trails of the clothes and the lives they've led. Through its visual manifestation, it tackles hyper-consumerism through hyper-femininity, emphasizing the power of soft data in an inherently hard-data society. It combines themes such as blockchain and narrative, preservation, and heritage. 

The digital archive includes memory boxes that viewers can click into to discover different stories that were collected while creating this project. The Precious logo was created by photographing ribbon, and the materials used for this project are largely sourced from second-hand stores and car boots.