Eye Magazine | Feature | Normcore inferno

Disposable luxury
If the current crop of fashion logos appears uninteresting, it must be conceded that fashion logo design has never exactly been a hotbed of typographic experimentation. In the history of haute couture, innovations in clothing design and the vicissitudes of fashion have been offset by conservative logotypes. Historians map a two-pronged influence on their genesis: one can be traced to the development of the Didone style and its feminine associations through editorial design, and the other to Chanel. In 1925, seeking a logotype for her perfume, Coco turned not to the frippery of the market but to the avant-gardism and machine-age vernacular of Le Corbusier (see Abbott Miller’s ‘Through thick and thin: fashion and type’ in Eye 65). Since then the black sans serif all caps have remained unchanged.

The current logos continue this second trajectory. The PR machines behind them acknowledge as much. The deletion of Celine’s French acute accent came with the following rejoinder: ‘The new logo has been directly inspired by the original, historical version that existed in the 1960s … The modernist typography used dates from the 1930s.’ Even Slimane’s iconoclastic rebranding of YSL was a nod to the brand’s history as a ready-to-wear label. Saint Laurent Rive Gauche, the revolutionary ready-to-wear collection, which Yves debuted in 1966, featured a logo in a sans serif block font and pink and orange squares created with perfume designer Pierre Dinand. It is this essence of the Saint Laurent house, the youthful street fashion, that Slimane was revisiting – subtly, cleverly – in his debut of Saint Laurent Paris’s simple, capitalised Helvetica font logo.

That this legacy is not instantly discernible is perhaps a testament to the enduring relevance of the International Style or to the difficulty of invoking Modernism in retrospect. Such claims to history should be taken with a grain of salt. Logos today are just one expression of a brand. They join a constellation of communication forms that include everything from a retail store’s fragrance to Instagram. These days a new luxury fashion logo is a highly orchestrated social media event in which everything from logo, images and press releases spin a tightly controlled narrative. Viewed this way, the logo – and the historical references – are bit players in the performance of the dialectics mentioned above. They are theatrics in double speak. They acknowledge the ‘h’ for heritage with one hand, while wiping it away with the other. Take Celine again. The launch campaign, marking Slimane’s arrival as creative director, featured an image of disposable luxury incarnate, a GIF of a gently billowing gold foil curtain. It invoked mid-twentieth century references while brazenly signalling a clean slate. Slimane began his tenure by summarily deleting the label’s entire Instagram archive.

Logomania
If fashion logos themselves revel in understatement, never have they been more flagrantly displayed. The fashion press call this typographic ostentation ‘logomania’. Gone are the days when one would look to the seam of a garment for a discretely placed woven tag. Today, even brands built on the aesthetics of minimalism and ideas of stealth luxury proudly display their logos on their goods. To designers, who themselves stereotypically dress in clothes they know to be designed and made well, this can seem somewhat of an affront. From a purely visual perspective, the conventional hierarchy between label and garment has been reversed.

Not since the 1980s and 90s have people been walking around emblazoned with so many letters of the alphabet. That was the postmodernist heyday. The inversion of emphasis between surface and construction was kickstarted by Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi when they observed in Learning From Las Vegas (1972) that ‘the skyline of Las Vegas was made of signs not buildings.’ Ten years later, a young Karl Lagerfeld arrived at Chanel to give the fashion house a badly needed revamp. He did so by amplifying the trimmings. He swathed the conventionally elegant ensembles in gold jewellery and more importantly plastered everything with the interlinked double-‘C’.

As the decade wore on, other fashion houses followed suit. The capitalist boom of the 1980s encouraged conspicuous consumption. Luxury fashion brands continued the practice of licensing and franchising with alacrity. Monogrammed T-shirts became all the rage. You wore one to signal your aspirations, your status, your embrace of style over substance and maybe your aversion to those dead-ended stick-in-the-mud lofty ambitions of eternal universality and form following function. In his 1989 book The Condition of Postmodernity, David Harvey writes, ‘The acquisition of an image (the purchase of a sign system such as designer clothes and the right car), becomes a singularly important element in the presentation of self in individual identity, self-realisation, and meaning.’

The real from the fake
The typographic convention of the luxury-brand monogram can be traced to Georges Vuitton, son of Louis. Wanting to protect the authenticity of the high-quality leather goods the company had been manufacturing since 1856, he stamped them with a pattern inspired by the stone quatrefoil of the Palazzo Ducale in Venice. In 1905, he patented the LV monogram that formed part of the pattern.

Ironic then, that the typography is the easiest part of a product to knock off. In 2019, the war against counterfeiting has been resoundingly lost. Harvard Business Review reports that LVMH employs at least 60 lawyers and spends US$17 million annually on anti-counterfeiting legal action. These efforts are not working. Fake luxury merchandise still accounts for 60 to 70 per cent of the estimated US$4.5 trillion total trade in fakes and represents a quarter of the estimated US$1.2 trillion total trade in luxury goods (see ‘How Luxury Brands Can Beat Counterfeiters’, hbr.org, 24 May 2019).

Digital media has helped fuel the spread of the fake like wildfire both practically, as online shopping opens up more and more distribution networks, and also philosophically, as the very means of digital production fundamentally undermines any distinction between the original and the copy. Resistance, it seems, is futile. Any attempt to differentiate the real from the fake has proved pointless. Logos are no longer authenticating markers, rubber stamps of high quality and original design.

What then do they signal? Why are they being paraded with more gusto than ever? Compared to yesteryear’s monogrammed T-shirts, logos today are applied with far more typographical cunning. Never has the graphic designer’s adage that the key to branding lies not in the logo itself but in the rules of its application been more apt. Different brands play different logo games.

Rather than try to defend its authenticity, Gucci, one of the few brands not to have abandoned its serif logotype, operates with an ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’ attitude. Under the creative direction of Alessandro Michele, Gucci style at the moment is an exuberant exercise in luxury excess. To clothes overloaded with embellishments, embroidery, shimmering surfaces, custom-woven jacquards, jewelled lion’s head buttons or gumdrop pearls, even sleeves dipped in mink, Gucci gleefully adds lashings of branding: big gold overlapping G-monogrammed belt buckles, monogram-patterned twills and jacquards, signature red and green-stripe trims. Michele furthermore delights in violating the sanctity of the bona fide Gucci logo: he indiscriminately overlays monogrammed sweatshirts with crystal starbursts and even incorporates bootlegged logos into official collections, on T-shirts, and purposefully pasted on trainers with no attention to the form of the shoe.

The vogue for mainstream
Other fashion houses use more nuanced tactics. In 2013, New York brand consultants K-Hole coined a catchy neologism ‘normcore’. They defined normcore as a sociological attitude which Alex Williams explained in ‘The New Normal’, an article in The New York Times (2 April 2014): ‘The basic idea is that young alternative types had devoted so much energy to trying to define themselves as individuals, through ever quirkier flourishes like handlebar moustaches or esoteric pursuits like artisanal pickling, that they had lost the joy of belonging that comes with being part of the group. Normcore was about dropping the pretence and learning to throw themselves into, without detachment, whatever subcultures or activities they stumbled into, even if they were mainstream.’

In fashion, normcore played out in the vogue for mainstream products, Birkenstocks, New Balance sneakers, non-ironic sweatshirts. It worked on the strategy that the very strategy of trying to be different had exhausted itself. With everyone jostling for attention and trying so hard to stand out, it’s more original and easier to blend in, or even to stand out by trying to blend in.

Normcore was quickly dismissed by the fashion press as obsolete, but not before the high-fashion juggernauts jumped on board. This happened most memorably in 2016 when, in a brilliant act of Duchampian reframing, fashion designer Demna Gvasalia sent a red-and-yellow DHL logo T-shirt, the kind worn by your local courier, down the catwalk, and attached to it a £185 price tag. Since 2014, his luxury fashion ‘collective’, the prosaically named Vetements, has garnered attention by incorporating mainstream products, such as reconstructed Levi’s jeans and Champion tracksuits, and charging fashionistas a premium for the chance to wear them.

In Gvasalia’s recourse to the everyday, logos are not something you turn a blind eye to, make smaller or pretend aren’t there. The fashion machine feeds on whatever might be external to it, and in his embrace of the humdrum, Gvasalia blithely accepts the logo as part of the status quo. In 2019 there is no backdrop, no such thing as life unbranded.

Gvasalia expanded his strategy when, appointed as artistic director of Balenciaga in 2015, he reinvented iconic everyday items, such as the 99-cent blue Ikea tote and the red-and-blue checked Chinese woven polypropylene laundry bag, in premium leather.

He echoed his valorisation of the everyday in the redesign of the logotype. Designed by Bureau Mirko Borsche in collaboration with Gian Gisiger, the new logotype displaces its predecessor’s twentieth-century classic feel with tightened kerning and condensed letterforms. Public statements about the logo explicitly link it to prosaic rather than luxury sources: ‘Conceived in-house, the development process was inspired by the clarity of public transportation signage. The result is a visually shortened logo which gives a simple, bold stamp to the timeless deluxe Balenciaga signature.’