Shiba Inu holders may have discovered who is involved in an upcoming fashion partnership with the Shiba ecosystem.
After the latest Shiba Inu teaser hinted at a partnership between SHIB and a mysterious brand, holders quickly got to work on finding who was collaborating with Shiba.
With some digging around, SHIB sleuths on Discord and Twitter have deduced that Shiba could partner with British fashion designer John Richmond. Here’s why.
Shiba Fashion Week
In the tweet sent out by the official Shiba Inu account on February 14, users spotted hints of a fashion partnership due to the occasional flashes of models on a catwalk.
While some SHIB holders have requested or asked for partnerships with the likes of Champion, the catwalk made users suspect this was related to a fashion week event. With both the Milan Fashion Week (February 22-28) and the Paris Fashion Week (February 28 - March 8) happening within the month, the search was still wide open. Especially because the video ended with a teaser for February 28 - the date both fashion events overlap on.
Then, SHIB holders spotted the letters ‘JR’ appearing at the end of the video. After a few Google searches and further sleuthing, the ShibArmy stumbled across a British designer, John Richmond.
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Originally from Manchester, Richmond is based in Milan, and has worked with the likes of Madonna, David Bowie, Michael Jackson, Mick Jagger, and plenty of other high-profile stars.
However, JR is a pretty common set of initials, meaning further work was needed to link Richmond to SHIB. So, going back to the original video, one SHIB holder found a lot of similarities between the clothing worn by the models, and the clothes available on Richmond’s store, particularly with the black and white checked patterns.
Indeed, we’ve also browsed Richmond’s Instagram and found the phrase ‘forever and ever’ in nearly the same font used in the SHIB video, which also features the phrase.
This Twitter video from Richmond also uses the same style.
And finally, a tweet from John Richmond's Twitter account when it first launched in January has a reply from the senior graphic designer for Welly - the Italian-based restaurant SHIB partnered with.
So, if it is Richmond, what does this mean for SHIB? Well, currently there are two theories.
First, is that Richmond will partner with SHIB to launch a collection of physical Shiba-based clothing. Second, Richmond will work to create clothing ready for the Shiba Inu metaverse. After all, the Fashion Week website does have a metaverse section.
All SHIB holders can do now is wait, but with a Shiba Inu AMA scheduled for February 22 (the same day the Milan Fashion Week begins), they might not need to wait too long.
However, there is always the chance that all this work is in vain, and Richmond is not partnering with Shiba Inu. A teaser video released at the start of February saw users speculate that SHIB was partnering with McDonald’s or KFC, before the Welly partnership was announced.
Previous speculation suggested the fashion brand partnering with SHIB could be Forever 21, due to the word 'Forever' used in the video.
We've reached out to Richmond via Instagram for a comment.