by Eugene Rabkin
"If this past menswear season showed anything it was that the logo, that constant companion of fashion that periodically goes in and out of style, is now firmly back. The Balenciaga show was a parade of mega-sized logos. At Junya Watanabe the North Face collaboration pieces featured logos as large as half a torso. There were also plenty of logos at the two perennial favorites of the current generation of fashion victims – Vetements and Gosha Rubchinskiy. And of course the much-talked-about collaboration of Supreme and Louis Vuitton was all about the logo.
What is a logo and what is its purpose in fashion? First and foremost, a logo is a symbol. In fashion a logo is mostly a status symbol, the most direct and often the crudest way to broadcast to others what you are about. It used to be that the logo signaled purely monetary status – I can afford, there for I am. It was mainly the provenance of the arrivistes to signal that they, well, have arrived; that they are now able to spend money on certain things. This is why logomania was particularly aggressive in the greedy 80s. In the 90s, the fashion audience seemed to mature. Logos became to be seen as vulgar, a prime example of the ostentatious, dumb and loud fashion of the previous decade. The consumer was now more sophisticated and elegant.
The logo, of course, never went away completely. There were the Helmut Lang t-shirts with his name on the back. Originally created for Lang’s fashion-show crews, eventually, in an ironic gesture, they migrated onto the backs of his devoted followers (I still have one, black on black, so you have to squint to see it).
And, of course there was the pinnacle of the logo for the cognoscenti, Martin Margiela’s four white stitches, that held the blank white label inside. Margiela meant for these to be cut off with the label after a purchase, but in one of the great fashion’s moments of misunderstanding, they had become the secret handshake of the artists, gallerists, architects, or simply people with understated taste, who nevertheless wanted to carefully signal it to the select few who were in the know. This was particularly relevant for men, because Margiela’s garments looked fairly basic at a first glance. They required a much closer look in order to see their ingenious construction, but who had time for that?"
Read the rest of the article on SZ-MAG
"If this past menswear season showed anything it was that the logo, that constant companion of fashion that periodically goes in and out of style, is now firmly back. The Balenciaga show was a parade of mega-sized logos. At Junya Watanabe the North Face collaboration pieces featured logos as large as half a torso. There were also plenty of logos at the two perennial favorites of the current generation of fashion victims – Vetements and Gosha Rubchinskiy. And of course the much-talked-about collaboration of Supreme and Louis Vuitton was all about the logo.
What is a logo and what is its purpose in fashion? First and foremost, a logo is a symbol. In fashion a logo is mostly a status symbol, the most direct and often the crudest way to broadcast to others what you are about. It used to be that the logo signaled purely monetary status – I can afford, there for I am. It was mainly the provenance of the arrivistes to signal that they, well, have arrived; that they are now able to spend money on certain things. This is why logomania was particularly aggressive in the greedy 80s. In the 90s, the fashion audience seemed to mature. Logos became to be seen as vulgar, a prime example of the ostentatious, dumb and loud fashion of the previous decade. The consumer was now more sophisticated and elegant.
The logo, of course, never went away completely. There were the Helmut Lang t-shirts with his name on the back. Originally created for Lang’s fashion-show crews, eventually, in an ironic gesture, they migrated onto the backs of his devoted followers (I still have one, black on black, so you have to squint to see it).
And, of course there was the pinnacle of the logo for the cognoscenti, Martin Margiela’s four white stitches, that held the blank white label inside. Margiela meant for these to be cut off with the label after a purchase, but in one of the great fashion’s moments of misunderstanding, they had become the secret handshake of the artists, gallerists, architects, or simply people with understated taste, who nevertheless wanted to carefully signal it to the select few who were in the know. This was particularly relevant for men, because Margiela’s garments looked fairly basic at a first glance. They required a much closer look in order to see their ingenious construction, but who had time for that?"
Read the rest of the article on SZ-MAG
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