Drop 001 of 100
Most products get cheaper as they age. This one does the opposite, by rule, permanently.
Drop 001 of the 100 Cigarettes Project is a t-shirt with a price that only ever climbs. Every time somebody buys one, the price for the next person goes up by a dollar. It has never gone down and it never will, because the rule does not allow it.
The shirt is a shirt. The interesting object is the number attached to it.
Ordinary pricing hides its own history. You see $30 and learn nothing about who bought before you or what they paid. Here the price is a running tally made public. If it reads $67, sixty-six people went before you, and the figure you pay is a fact about them rather than about the cotton.
It also inverts the usual incentive. Retail teaches you to wait for a discount. Waiting here is the one thing guaranteed to cost more, so the decision to buy stops being about the object and becomes about when you arrived.
You pay less than everyone who comes after you and more than everyone who came before. Your purchase moves the number for the next person, so the price is not something done to you, it is something you take part in.
There is no way to be given a better price. That is not a policy, it is the whole piece.
100 Cigarettes is an art project of exactly one hundred numbered drops, on no schedule, ending permanently after Drop 100. Every drop is priced by a stated rule, and the rule is the work. Drop 001 rises with each sale. Drop 002 is priced to Bitcoin and moves all day. Drop 004 is free. Ninety-six of the hundred are still unrevealed.
Every completed sale raises the price by exactly one dollar. Sale number one is a dollar cheaper than sale number two, and so on, without a ceiling.
No. The rule only moves in one direction. There are no sales, no discount codes and no promotional pricing, because any of those would break the rule.
It changes as shirts sell. The live figure and the number sold are always shown on the shirt's own page. It passed $67 in August 2026.
Because the price is a public record of how many people went before you. Buying late costs more and says something different from buying early. That is the point of the piece.
A 6.1 oz ring-spun cotton tee, printed one at a time, with a single word across the chest: CIGARETTES.