Fortune on the Wax

The tokenisation of designer batik warrants another look at this under-the-radar cloth.

-  TAN CHUI HUA

The fabric that Singapore’s fashion community associates with designer Ong Shanmugam and the international crowd with Nelson Mandela recently became a luxury asset.

Alta, Asia’s largest digital asset marketplace, has partnered with renowned batik label Iwan Tirta Private Collection to release 100 new security tokens backed by hand-drawn batik wall hangings. These tokens have a maturity term of five years.

“Each piece of the batik wall hanging is unique, executed by the artisans of Iwan Tirta Private Collection,” says Alta co-founder Benjamin Twoon.

“On top of getting the artwork at the end of the term, investors also get exclusive rights to the design, which further enhances the exclusivity of the asset.” In the meantime, they can trade the tokens on the exchange.

It took a while, but batik has finally come into its own as a luxury asset. Five decades ago, batik advocates struggled to get most Asians to don the fabric with pride, even as it was featured in European haute couture collections. Today, batik is becoming hip again and Asian design houses are increasingly embracing the textile and its rich history of motifs.

FROM ROYALTY TO THE MASSES

The use of wax to create patterns in dyed cloth has been practised since ancient times, but it is in Indonesia, in particular the island of Java, that the technique has been refined to a complex art form. The word batik came from the Javanese words for “wide” (amba) and “dot” (titik), after the painstaking process of dotting intricate patterns in wax on a wide textile panel.