Home
Contents
Now available in hardcover:
Search
This Site
Email
|
Another End Of Another Era
August 2005
Is
it possible that a popular fashion (read that to be T-shirts and
jeans) will actually be part of a “no logo” approach?
Now, that to me is news. Good news. I have trouble finding quality
sportswear that isn’t emblazoned with some designer’s
name, initial, or logo.
I might not have been so dead-set against logos if I hadn’t
been raising my children during IZOD’s heyday. If the shirt
didn’t sport that little crocodile then it wasn’t
worn. I would show my sons and daughters the Izod shirt and ask
them to compare them to the J. C. Penney’s shirt.. They
admitted there was no difference; chances were, they agreed, they
were both “assembled” in Costa Rica with the logo
being sewn on later. I thought I’d won. Not so. No crocodile,
no shirt. “It’s an alligator, Mom.”
“Whatever,” I answered.
(But, I still insist, it is definitely a crocodile: Lacoste, the
French tennis player designed a loose fitting shirt for comfort
and his nickname over there is Crocodile. He merged with IZOD.
Voila!)
Gloria Vanderbilt designed jeans, usually dark blue denim or black
with a feminine logo -- a delicate swan and her name. She appeared
in commercials herself. This spelled class. This was high tone.
Put on those jeans and you could feel close to how a daughter
of one of the fabulous 400 families might feel. The name “Vanderbilt”
was embroidered on your back pocket.
Gloria did everything right; however, Comedian Joan Rivers sullied
the image when said: “Well, Gloria Vanderbilt got even with
the Vanderbilts, all right. She wrote their name across the ass
of every woman in America.” Ouch, that had to hurt.
The rage to make your personal mark on the designer market began:
Jordache, Sasson, Chic, Calvin Klein. And, Levi’s, who had
its name on a leather tag across the back belt line, not only
identified themselves years before the new kids on the block arrived,
they also identified the cut by the color of the tag. But, they
made one big mistake: They put the size on the tag, as well. No
teenager wants to be identified as the one with the 32 waist.
So, they tore off the tags, or they opted for the designer line.
Why do parents put up with this? For one reason; they know, and
they remember, how confidence can add to performance in the life
of a high school freshman.
So, we drove from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Erie, about 160
miles, to find the Izod Outlet some parents had discovered. We
bought a bag full of shirts and learned an important lesson: anything
worth having is worth working for. Spending a lovely Fall Saturday
on a long drive in a crowded car was work -- especially since
it was “my music or no music.”
Two things came together today as I approached the keyboard and
typed in my byline. One, I’m wearing a white sweater --
short sleeve, nice cut, fits me well -- but across the front in
embroidered black, block letters almost two inches high are T
and H. The second thing is that the sweater, a gift, is of such
high quality that it feels good to have it on.
But, I hate that designer Tommy Hilfiger so loves the sound of
his name that he scratches his initials graffiti-like on just
about everything movable.
My mother used to say “what if you have an accident,”
for every occasion. Well, what if I have one today wearing this
sweater? No one would take me for Teri Hatcher -- and not for
Tanya Harding, either. If the only thing they had to go on were
“my” initials, then no one would know who was under
that white sweater.
There’s another popular design that I hesitate to approach
since it is so obviously letters transposed but still a recognizable
obscenity: FCUK. However, it really is a company: French Connection
United Kingdom. They announced they would drop their logo (not
that their products aren’t selling like wild fire) and are
hinting they will favor the “no logo” at all approach.
Oh, it’s suggested, they might use some innocuous little
title like a small f on a tag, as reported by Wordlab, Naming
and Branding Consultants.
The remaining letters missing from the f brand will be most conspicuous
by their absence. But, the little f is enough to boost the price
from $10.98 to $59.98 -- and I’m being conservative in my
estimate. Somewhere, someone learned that people will pay highly
for prestige and these togs (and tags) carry a lot of it. But
prestige is not class. That has to be there before the jeans are
pulled on. (As Clare Booth Luce defined it: Class is something
If you have it you don’t need anything else; if you don’t,
it doesn’t matter what else you have.)
In an effort to not look like snobs, the high school trend is
to wear their old, beat up, jeans. Oops, they don’t have
any old, beat up jeans. Not a problem, all the designers make
them. Their underlings beat them up against rocks until they are
full of holes and newly threadbare. And, they actually charge
$125.00, minimum. No exchange; no refund.
There’s nothing beat up about the nice new logo, however;
that remains as a sign of the times -- the times that never change
as we move through adolescence. The styles do change but not the
absurdity.
And, as to the confidence the parents are buying for them, it’s
not unreasonable to given in to the purchase of a small f on a
shirt sleeve if it’s promoting the attitude of striving
for an A on a report card.
|