Beata Wilczek on Sustainability in Digital Fashion | Unreleased NFTS.WTF Interview

Previously unreleased: this interview is published here for the first time.Beata Wilczek of The Dematerialised on why sustainability in Web3 has to mean more than carbon, and how transparency can keep digital fashion from repeating the fashion industry's mistakes.Interviewed by David Cash. Book David to host, moderate, or speak: https://davidcash.ca

Beata Wilczek is head of digital sustainability and social impact at The Dematerialised, a luxury digital fashion marketplace, and founder of the consultancy Unfolding Strategies. Recorded in Paris in April 2022, she tells David Cash how ten years in academia studying ethics, social impact, and sustainability led her to digital fashion. They talk about the energy debate around blockchains, the difference between proof of work and proof of stake, and why reducing sustainability to carbon offsets misses its economic, social, and cultural sides. Beata explains REAL, The Dematerialised's transparency standard that names who made a digital garment and where, and why the industry needs to plan now to avoid digital sweatshops. She closes with a student project in Mexico that brings Indigenous knowledge into digital fashion and what it means to decolonize the field.

Watch on YouTube

Chapters

1. 00:00 Intro: Beata Wilczek of The Dematerialised
2. 0:56 From academia to digital fashion
3. 1:55 Sustainability beyond energy debates
4. 2:45 Proof of work, proof of stake, and LUKSO
5. 5:33 Answering blanket statements with data
6. 7:23 REAL, a transparency standard for digital fashion
7. 10:11 Indigenous knowledge and decolonizing digital fashion
8. 12:50 Where to find Beata

Speakers

• David Cash, interviewer and editor-in-chief, NFTS.WTF
• Beata Wilczek, head of digital sustainability and social impact, The Dematerialised; founder, Unfolding Strategies

Key topics

• Environmental, economic, social, and cultural sustainability
• Proof of work versus proof of stake energy use
• Carbon offsetting and its limits
• Open research on crypto's climate impact
• Transparency standards for digital fashion
• Digital labor and the risk of digital sweatshops
• Heritage, Indigenous knowledge, and fashion education
• Decentralizing who gets to be a fashion designer

In their words

"We think digital fashion is real, therefore it has some real issues." Beata Wilczek

How to cite

APA: Cash, D. (2022). Beata Wilczek on sustainability in digital fashion [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/mux_GteBMtA

Chicago: Cash, David. "Beata Wilczek on Sustainability in Digital Fashion." Recorded April 2022, Paris. YouTube video, 13:20. https://youtu.be/mux_GteBMtA.

About NFTS.WTF

NFTS.WTF was a Web3 culture publication and interview series edited by David Cash. It covered artists, collectors, and builders during the 2021–2022 NFT boom. It ran for two years and closed after a board decision by the NFTS DAO, which left many of its interviews unpublished.

Recording details

Recorded April 2022 in Paris, France, during Paris Blockchain Week. Previously unreleased. Published 2026 with chapters and captions.

Transcript

Machine-transcribed and reviewed. Timestamps link to the moment in the video.

[0:04] Hello everybody, welcome back to NFTS.WTF. My name is David Cash, your editor-in-chief. We are here live in Paris, France. We are here for the Blockchain Summit, and I'm joined today with an incredible voice in the space. We're here with... I'm joined here with an incredible voice in the space. We're here with Beate from the materialized, head of sustainability at the materialized, and also the founder of Unfolding Strategies. Also does a whole bunch of advising and teaching and lecturing in the space on a whole bunch of different topics. But really from my perspective, a leading voice within sustainability on a whole bunch of different levels, especially within the decentralized Web3 blockchain space. So, Beate, thank you so much for taking the time to join us here today. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Thank you, thank you. Lovely introduction. And just for anybody who might not be aware of you and your work, you want to just

[0:50] give a little bit more of an in-depth background on yourself and how you ended up working at Devaterialize, and all the lovely companies here today. Yeah, sure. So, for the last 10 years, I've been working predominantly with fashion and culture, and I spent 10 years in academia. And all the things I was interested in, namely ethics, social impact, and sustainability, suddenly now are very valid, but particularly, I think, important in the digital space. So, that's why I founded Unfolding Strategies, as you mentioned, and we are focused on consulting and advising on all the projects that are Web3, sustainability and impact, and fashion-related, because I think this is a very important topic. Important intersection, yeah. And this is also what I do at The Dematerialised. So, at The Dematerialised, I'm a head of digital sustainability and social impact. Long title, but yeah, this is what we do, and we are very invested in thinking, you

[1:35] know, how a NFT luxury fashion marketplace can actually embrace and deliver many prophecies that digital fashion is claiming to have. So, how to be transparent, how to make everyone able to participate, how to be accessible, how to promote equity. These are all the things that we are very interested in, and yeah, this is my job. I love it, I love it. What I want to break down today, maybe also for the people watching, I believe, you know, sustainability, when we consider it within the blockchain space, is always very niche. You know, we're always talking about exactly how much energy are we using, and everybody says they have a more sustainable chain, and what does this mean? But I think that something that you do, which I really appreciate, is you consider a broader implication of sustainability and what it means on a social level, on an anthropological level, on a technological level, and how all of these systems can

[2:19] work together, ultimately to hopefully create an equitable world and a more sustainable world. But, you know, obviously when we're considering this, I feel like there's a lot of FUD, there's a lot of just, you know, blanket statements that are being made in the space. You know, we love many proof-of-stake chains, we love proof-of-stake, but I think there's a lot of miscommunication around one chain being more sustainable than the other. Do you have any thoughts on this, and maybe just kind of like where we're at right now without maybe getting too technical? Yeah, definitely. So, working in digital fashion and thinking about things that are related to fashion industry and blockchain, that means that there are two kind of big conversation happening now about carbon footprint, environmental footprint, and people get very scared and very afraid, and very often when I say that sustainability, people are not very excited and they're scared that they're doing

[3:04] something wrong. So there's also a lot of, some rightful, some a little bit blown up, kind of thinking or, I don't know, ideas about the carbon footprint in both industries. Nevertheless, all technology, everything digital, obviously has a carbon footprint and so does fashion production. And it's not like we can shy away from it. But with blockchain, this is, I think, an important moment that we educate all the communities that there are proof-of-work blockchains, there's proof-of-stake, and there are very, very different terms of energy efficiency. So, for example, The Dematerialised runs on looks-so and looks-so as a proof-of-stake blockchain is over 90% more energy efficient. So these are very important numbers when we are thinking about environmental impact and environmental sustainability. But they think that reducing sustainability to carbon offsetting and calculating all those things is very reductive, because then it just becomes about carbon and I

[3:57] don't want to diminish it, but I think we also need to think about sustainability, which is economical sustainability, which is social sustainability, cultural sustainability, and environmental. So I think we need this very holistic thinking and yet not only say we planted trees, therefore something good has been done. Absolutely. And I feel like, I think you nailed it, that we're being very pigeonholed and we're kind of being overly specific when we're looking at the examples of what sustainability or being environmentally friendly means. And, of course, I use these words in quotes in this context. But, yeah, I think that especially around using old statistics, I feel like there's a lot of people who are still on the same arguments that were made back when Bitcoin was starting to get its boom and saying, like, hey, Bitcoin specifically is more, you know, only this many people use it and it uses this much electricity.

[4:43] That's a very specific use case. And I feel like a lot of the time when people are considering these and I'd also be curious to hear your thoughts, they're comparing something that's a peer-to-peer transaction and they're comparing it with something that's usually run by a multinational conglomerate, like a bank. So I think when we're comparing these types of things, when we're considering things in the space, and, you know, most of our audience watching already understand this and are quite deep in the space, but I'm sure many of us have conversations on a daily basis when we're met with these kinds of questions, these kinds of, you know, interactions with people are quite misinformed, unfortunately. And I think, you know, having this kind of almost attack mode on when they hear NFT, when they hear crypto, when they hear blockchain, just considering an immediate kind of negative connotation.

[5:24] So I would just be curious, like, what's your response when you hear somebody saying this and maybe a loaded question, but how do you approach these kinds of blanket statements that people make? Well, I think it's all about education being informed and for, you know, for me also working in the space is constant learning curve. So I think there are amazing people working in the space, providing amazing data. So I think we will see very interesting things coming from places like from Refi, from KlimaDAO for kind of offsetting on-chain and thinking how we can do that. So I think these are the places to look at and there's also an amazing Cryptocarbon Rating Institute based in Germany. They're doing amazing work and publishing great reports. So I think also, like, also of Cetra that we're working with as a partner, I think these are amazing people that should be answering all those questions and they

[6:14] should be, there should be spotlight on them because this is maybe, you know, maybe this is not a highlight of crypto Twitter, but these are very important conversation to have and it's not something that we should think, oh, it's problematic so let's just skip it. It just should be like new normal regardless what we, how the word sustainability makes us feel. We should really, really, really also look into it. So yeah, I would definitely say there are amazing people working in the space. They're publishing amazing open access reports. I would just say go for it. Beautiful. And I think it's quite similar to any of these other technical elements. It took people a while to understand what a smart contract was or what some of these mechanisms in the space are and I think similarly when people see a whole bunch of data a lot of the time they glaze over and like you said, it's not as popular on NFT Twitter because they'd rather be retweeting viral videos.

[7:01] Well, it's not so exciting and it's not so sexy to talk about, nevertheless very important. But I think it's up to people like yourself and I think you're doing a beautiful job of processing this information through companies like The Dematerialised, LUKSO, DressX, you know, these kinds of like leaders in the space being able to contextualize that information and give it a use case so that people can see this in action. So maybe just a segue now into some of your current workup. Yeah, sure. Do you want to consider maybe just for the folks watching some of the work you're doing at The Dematerialised and how you're taking some of these notions. Yeah, to kind of follow what you were saying, you know, to make user cases. This is something that we're working on now. I think, you know, digital labor transparency and transparency regarding also, you know, numbers and data and different weight of things.

[7:41] I think we really kind of own it to our community to say who made their digital clothes and what do they do and where they were made. So I think bringing this actually thinking around certain issues that we have in fashion industry, I think we shouldn't replicate this like massive information haul and bring it to digital fashion. So I think thinking about transparency, but combining both, thinking about transparency for tech and transparency for fashion in that space, this is crucial. So we are creating, we call it real because we think digital fashion is real. Therefore, it has some real issues like, I don't know, carbon footprint. So we cannot shy away from that. So instead of saying it doesn't exist, we are saying this is what it is and what we are trying to do to reduce it, to mitigate it and then to offset it. But with the transparency standard that we did, which is called real, as I said,

[8:30] the focus is also on the makers. So who actually designed the garments because there is a big threat that we will soon have digital sweatshops when, you know, digital fashion will only get bigger and bigger. And so who are the creators? Who are the people? Where is the labor coming? Who is doing that? And also in what places it's happening because this is quite important for the environment. Where are those servers? Where are those computers? Where is all this kind of energy consumption happening? So these are certain kind of data points that we are trying to offer to our community to be able to know, you know, this is what it is. These are the people standing behind it. This is much more real and tangible, even though it's, you know, The Dematerialised fashion. That's beautiful. I think that's a really holistic approach that I hope more people can consider when they're looking at this space.

[9:15] And I love considering, you know, everything that we're creating here is real. They're products. People interact with them and use them in ways. So how are those transactions taking place? How are those interactions taking place and where and how? And breaking that down on a human level, on a sociological level, on an anthropological level, on an environmental level as well, but as a whole. And that's where I wanted to maybe slowly bring our conversation to a close, but also, you know, get your point of view. Because as I mentioned at the beginning of this conversation, I think one of the really beautiful things that you bring into the conversation is, you know, this kind of, this approach, this holistic approach, considering the human aspect of the equation and what that means. And as you said, economic, sociological, all of these implications are very important. So maybe just for people watching who might be a little bit pigeonholed within this

[10:00] environmental concept of sustainability within the blockchain space, do you want to maybe talk a little bit more about this human side? Yeah, sure. As we get more people in the space, you know, obviously we'll be more prepared. Yeah, there is one project I think that illustrates it well that we are doing now. It's a partnership with a Mexican school called SADIM. It's in Mexico, just a bit outside of Mexico City. And we have an amazing team of students. We're working on a 10-month project, and we're basically doing something that normally we wouldn't be able to do with our brands and partners. So we are asking the students to work together collaboratively in partnership with a local native community to bring indigenous knowledge and native fashion. And this might seem like a very cute project and very kind of social, but actually this is a very important conversation to have also for luxury brands,

[10:49] how to bring heritage, how to bring tradition, and how to learn from heritage of both brands, but also different communities that have been participating in fashion. This obviously touches upon something that we could call the decolonization of digital fashion and thinking again how we don't do the same mistakes again, because if this is a fashion that everybody can participate in, if this is the fashion that's about decentralization, open access, for a long time we really needed to decentralize fashion. It doesn't have to be that you go to the five schools in this world to become a fashion designer and you have to, I don't know, live in Paris where we currently both are now. But we need to give space to more places with their histories, with their way of thinking, not only look towards making future, we also need to look and acknowledge the past, and I think that's very important. So this would be one of the aspects of looking at cultural sustainability

[11:39] and how we can bring it together. Beautiful. Good luck. I think that when people start thinking about humanity instead of just thinking about a project or what that entails, I think they have a better approach. And even when you consider it, many of you who are watching this are investors, even from a financial perspective, if you're going to invest in a company, you want to see how that company is being run. So I believe that people have to start looking at virtual projects and virtual fashion projects, NFT projects, blockchain projects, in the same way that they might consider a traditional business and not overlook these types of elements because we have the opportunity to actually store full provenance on the blockchain in perpetuity and have this direct access to this type of information, which I don't think was as successfully available before. Yeah, that's amazing. And I think we cannot forget about, if communities are so

[12:25] important to this conversation, we cannot forget about culture. I understand that we are all thinking that we are building the future and doing something new. Yes, but we are situated also in the now and we have to kind of carry this farther and I think we should grow from it, not ignore certain conversations. It's always such a pleasure to talk to you. I love your perspective on this space. Just for anybody who's watching who might not be familiar and wants to follow along with you and all the work that you do, where can people find you on the internet? You can find me on Twitter. It's Beata and Folding. You can also find me on LinkedIn. My name is Beata Wilczek, so that's also easy to find. Amazing. Amazing. We'll have links below. Thank you so much for taking the time. Again, we're here in Paris, France, one of your hometowns, so I appreciate you taking the time. As always, this is NFTS.WTF.

[13:07] My name is David Cash and thank you all for watching. Take care. Thank you so much.