The Garment Passport

Built into all fifty pieces of ABRI-01

Every piece we make carries a label you can hold a phone to. The jacket answers, proves it is ours, and opens an archive that belongs to the garment rather than to whoever currently owns it. This page explains how that works, what it protects you from, and the things it deliberately does not do.

01 What it is

Sewn into each garment is a small chip. It is not a QR code and not a serial number printed on a tag. Both of those can be photographed and reprinted by anyone who sees them once. This is a secure chip of the kind used in contactless bank cards, and it holds a key that cannot be read off it by any means, including by us.

You do not need an app. You do not need an account. Any modern phone can read it, and the whole thing happens in the browser you already have.

02 What happens when you tap

Hold your phone near the label. The chip wakes, performs a calculation using its key, and hands your phone a web address that has never existed before. That address opens this jacket's passport.

The passport shows the edition number, when the piece was first woken, how many times it has been opened, how many owners it has had, and the chip's own serial. It carries a seal drawn with the number of that particular garment.

03 Why it cannot be copied

This is the part that matters, so it is worth being precise.

Each tap produces a fresh signature. The chip counts every read it has ever had and folds that count into the calculation, so the answer it gives is different every single time. Our side records the highest count it has seen and refuses anything equal to or lower than it.

A counterfeiter holding a genuine jacket can read the serial off the chip, because that number is public by design and any phone can see it. What they cannot do is produce a valid signature, because that needs the key, and the key never leaves the chip. A fake tag produces an answer that fails the check, and a fake garment carrying a copied address produces an answer that has already expired.

04 The archive

Behind the verification sits a private archive. Photographs, video and sound, kept in albums you name yourself.

• Several albums per garment, renamed by tapping the title.
• Photographs, video and audio together in the same album.
• Album covers, captions and names for individual items.
• A star for the pieces worth keeping to hand, and a Favourites view across every album.
• Items grouped by the day they were added, so the archive reads as a record of when things happened.
• Share one item or a whole selection straight to Messages, AirDrop or your camera roll.
• Optional locations, off unless you turn them on, shown on a globe you can turn with a finger.
• An optional passphrase, if you would rather the archive were not open to anyone holding the jacket.

There is no size limit worth naming. A long video uploads in pieces so that the size of the file stops being your problem.

05 It belongs to the jacket

The archive is attached to the garment, not to a person and not to an account. There is nothing to log in to and nothing to lose access to.

That has a consequence most people find surprising the first time they hear it. If you sell the jacket, lend it, or leave it to somebody, the archive goes with it. The next person inherits not only the piece but everywhere it has already been.

06 Privacy, and what we cannot see

The archive is private to whoever holds the garment. It is not published, not indexed by search engines, and not shared with anybody.

Every photograph and video is served only to a verified session. There is no public link to any file. If you were somehow sent one it would not open, because the check runs again on every single request rather than once at the start.

Locations are off by default. If you switch them on we ask you first, in plain language, and we read the spot out of the photograph on your own phone before it is sent. Switch them off again and every location already stored is erased. The photographs stay where they are.

A passphrase, if you set one, is stored in a form that cannot be reversed. We cannot read it and we cannot recover it for you. The only way past a forgotten passphrase erases the archive, because a recovery that handed the photographs back would make the passphrase worthless to begin with.

07 Handing it on

When a piece is going to somebody else, the passport has a step for it. It removes your passphrase so the new owner is not locked out of their own property, erases every stored location, and closes any session you left open elsewhere. The passport records the hand-off and counts a new owner.

You choose whether the archive travels. Keeping it is the default, because that is the story the piece carries.

08 Taking your copy with you

Everything in the archive can be downloaded in one file at any time: the photographs, the video, the sound, a written record of the garment, and an index of what each item is and when it was added.

This is not a gesture. It is the practical test of whether an archive is really yours. If you cannot take it with you, it is not.

09 Why this matters beyond one jacket

Clothing has always thrown away almost everything about itself. A jacket that went somewhere remarkable looks identical to one that sat in a wardrobe, and once the receipt is gone there is no way to tell a genuine piece from a good copy except by feel and by guesswork.

Three things change when a garment can answer for itself.

Counterfeits stop being the buyer's problem

The secondhand market runs on trust that mostly is not there. Resale platforms employ people to authenticate by eye. A garment that proves itself in under a second removes the guesswork, and it does so for the buyer rather than only for the brand.

Provenance becomes ordinary

Art and watches have had documented provenance for centuries, and it is a large part of why they hold value. Clothing has not, because there was no way to attach a record to an object that gets worn, washed and handed on. Now there is.

Clothes become worth keeping

The fastest way to make somebody throw something away is to make it anonymous and replaceable. A piece that carries a record of its own life resists that. This is the same reason people keep a grandfather's watch and not his shirts.

There is a regulatory version of this arriving as well. The European Union is introducing a Digital Product Passport requirement for textiles, so that garments sold there will have to carry documented information about what they are and where they came from. We did not build this to meet a rule. We built it because it should have existed already, and it happens to put us years ahead of one.

10 What it does not do

An honest list is more use than a longer list of features.

• It needs a signal. The check happens on our side, so the passport will not open without a connection.
• It proves the label, not the fabric. A genuine label transplanted into a different garment would still verify. Nothing short of destroying the chip prevents that, which is why the label is sewn where removing it damages the piece.
• The chip's serial is public. Any phone can read it, and we print it on the passport for that reason. It proves nothing on its own, and nothing in our system will ever treat it as a password.
• Locations are as accurate as your phone's, and no more.
• If you set a passphrase and forget it, the archive cannot be recovered. That is a deliberate design decision rather than a missing feature.