Nice, Frickin'. Tapestry.

Meet the original NFTs. And they're making a comeback.

- SPENCER BAILEY

Over the course of her lifetime, Lady Helen Hamlyn, the 88-year-old widow of the late publishing magnate Paul Hamlyn, has amassed one of the world's most impressive collections of rare textiles. Last year she decided to sell a slim selection of her hoard at Bonhams, including a mythic Flemish tapestry, of Rothschild family provenance, that was woven sometime in the early 16th century. When the gavel came down, the piece had fetched more than $330,000, roughly double the estimate.

Tapestries, it turns out, are enjoying a 21st-century renaissance. Even if the market remains decidedly niche, recent auction sales demonstrate an intense desire on the part of a competitive, upper-crust collector pool seeking a tangible distinction from the New New Money: cryptocrats and nefarious NFTers.

"We're living in the mega moment," says historian Glenn Adamson. "Not just the megarich, but mega-ambitious domestic architecture. If you've built a 20-foot-high, 50-foot-wide wall, how are you going to make that wall perform? Boy, a 16th-century Flemish tapestry would be hard to beat. There's nothing more mega than a historic tapestry?"

Once used for ceremonial rituals and palace decor, tapestries were the Jeff Koonses of their time, bragging rights that telegraphed gravitas. The most prized examples were highlighted with gold and silver thread, meticulously woven in Flemish and French workshops over months or even years. "They were considered the most valuable thing other than jewelry, gold, and silver," says Frances McCord Krongard, the European art specialist for the Washington, DC, auction house Potomack Company. "Nobles would have them rolled up and travel with them to their military camps and castles. At home they often had guards protecting them.