Saved by sari and
The Unbranding of Abercrombie
K-HOLE and Box1824 captured the new landscape in their breakthrough 2014 report “Youth Mode.” They described an era of “mass indie” where the search for meaning is premised on differentiation and uniqueness, and proposed a solution in “Normcore.” Humorously, nearly everyone mistook Normcore for being about bland fashion choices rather than the grea... See more
subpixel space • After Authenticity
In the culture where people largely express who they are by tagging the brands they choose to wear, eat, and wash their face with , it was surprising to come across someone whose identity doesn’t revolve around brands.
Viktoriia Vasileva • Have We Reached Peak Brand?
réka added
Another few decades later, in 2024, it’s difficult to even remember the world that came before this. No Logo feels dated in 2024 because it’s a dispatch from the twilight of the (comparatively) unbranded world that has since been overwritten, the logic of branding having escaped its traditional corporate confines, now internalized by subcultures, i... See more
Drew Austin • Learning from the Virgin Megastore
This started with the Seventh Avenue, shop-and-copy approach that has defined the industry, but no longer works with consumers on a global scale. America created the concept of lifestyle brands—it drove the rise of casualization as early as the 1950s, first through denim, then khakis, and now leggings. But the fashion itself has long been predicate... See more
Coach & Kors’ Marriage of Convenience
Diego Segura added
“The product has to be really good, or really cheap, or both. Not in between.”
Shein doesn’t have a style. It doesn’t try to impose its taste on global consumers. It doesn’t even have its own taste. It’s a mirror that reflects each country’s current style back to it, in real-time, based on data alone. Remaining generic, storyless, and nationless allows it to project whichever image is needed in the moment on its loose army of... See more
Not Boring by Packy McCormick • Shein: The TikTok of Ecommerce
And it sounded like a giant contradiction — a slick, Red Antler-crafted brand called Brandless? — which made it a popular topic for discussion. A lot of industry people seemed to want to see it sink.
The New Consumer • The end of Brandless
sari added
Whereas in the past a person wearing a Nirvana t-shirt was probably a fan of the band’s music, today no such guarantee exists (and many more shirts are sold). This often precludes one of the original purposes of merch, a signaling of belonging to a certain (sub)culture.
Still, the meaning-making of merch has not disappeared, but merely shifted. A pe
... See moreAna Andjelic • Everything Is Merch
Keely Adler added
K-HOLE and Box1824 captured the new landscape in their breakthrough 2014 report “Youth Mode.” They described an era of “mass indie” where the search for meaning is premised on differentiation and uniqueness, and proposed a solution in “Normcore.” Humorously, nearly everyone mistook Normcore for being about bland fashion choices rather than the grea... See more