Branding,
Luxury
& Authenticity
The “swoosh” logo, inspired by the wings of the Roman Goddess of victory, symbolises the Nike brand which in turn embodies the spirit of sports. If we isolate this logo however, and remove all these cultural meanings, all that remains of one of the world’s most prominent logos is a simple tick. Furthermore, fashion brands constantly copy trends and designs off each other and the role of design and branding in fashion is less about crafting an original design but rather in creating a particular perception of the brand. The logomania and chunky sneaker trend that has spread across fashion therefore relies not just on visually distinctive symbols or original designs, but on the recognition of the masses in the symbolic capital that brands accumulate.
This essay explores branding in today’s late modernity with a focus on the fashion industry. Using the work of branding theorists as a framework for the textual analysis of fashion brands, this essay looks at the role of brands, their product design today and the associated strategies brands utilise.
I start this essay by exploring and defining certain key concepts, such as taste, cool, branding, value, luxury and the dialectical relationship between consumption and production. I analyse the case studies of Chanel, Supreme and Balenciaga, paying attention to certain aspects of these prominent brands’ business, branding and marketing strategies, as well as drawing parallels with how these previously defined concepts are put into practice. I then examine the nature of authenticity in these contexts before summarising my research and findings.
This essay was originally written for my university dissertation and is about 6000 words long.
Taste
Distinction
Classy
Cool
Taste can be viewed crudely as the line of distinction we use in judging something to be good or bad, high or mass culture, tacky vs tasteful, etc (Bourdieu, Nice and Bennett, 1984). It is a fundamental part of how we construct our identities (what we like as individuals) and interact (how we socialise over common interests). Taste is heavily influenced by habitus (a particular disposition that structures our actions) and shared cultural experiences, and when acted upon, takes on a political nature as we tend to group or exclude people based on taste. The legitimacy of taste (i.e. do others view it as the correct distinction of culture) is a matter of power and influence in a particular field. Taste is also relative to fields and cultures; Within the field of art and high culture, some might make a distinction between more commercial art fairs like Frieze or Art Basel and institutions such as The Whitney or Documenta; Phillip Plein might be considered luxury high fashion to his clientele or in comparison to H&M but perhaps not when placed next to the likes of Comme Des Garçons in the fashion pantheon. Broadly speaking however, all fashion, be it high or fast fashion, exist firmly within the realm of popular culture.
In today’s postmodern world however, it is worth noting that such a stark dichotomy of high vs. mass does not really exist anymore (Rocamora and Smelik, 2016). Even the art world itself, which is supposed to be firmly in the realm of high culture has had many artists such as Duchamp, Warhol, Rauschenberg, Koons and Murakami who have all produced high culture from sources of decidedly popular culture (and whose work can be said today to have become part of mass culture). This blurring of distinction can also be seen in venerable art institutions such as the Royal Academy inviting popular street artist Banksy to exhibit pieces at it’s summer exhibition or in the numerous collaborations that high fashion houses have with fast fashion brands.
People may utilise strategies of pretension by adopting or mimicking the taste of another class in order to better their social standing, change class or profit. Bourdieu writes that taste is a site of class struggle and that dominant taste (i.e. legitimate culture) is always that of the dominant class (Rocamora and Smelik, 2016) but in today’s globalised economy, it can also be said that taste is also a site of cultural differences. Bourdieu notes that people can create a living and potentially a new class through straddling the lines of distinction between pre-existing classes. This concept has been widely adopted by urban planners influenced by Richard Florida’s work on harnessing the economic benefits of the “creative class” of artists, designers and tech workers to regenerate urban areas.
Being classy and cool is a matter of taste and social standing. Whilst classy can be linked to a middle class desire for upward social mobility, cool can roughly be translated as a kind of achieved defiance in response to the challenges of conformism (Arvidsson, 2008). Cool signifies an individual’s constructed attitude that is in opposition to the mainstream, yet socially acceptable and viewed in a positive light. Cool does not have a fixed definition; Once something can have its cool qualities defined by and accepted by the mainstream, it ceases to be cool (McGuigan, 2009). Brands often employ cool hunters who actively research subcultures and counter cultures for cultural practices that can be co-opted and sold to a larger, mainstream audience as a cool new trend. New products are also often marketed by “bro-ing” which involve giving taste makers in certain communities or subcultures a new product before launch, soliciting their feedback and having them create word of mouth amongst their cliques. Marketeers can then use the symbolic capital generated by these subcultures and attached to these products by bro-ing to sell it to a different market under the veil of cool. Nike successfully marketed its sneakers in the 80s and 90s through such strategies, harnessing the street cred of black inner city youth to sell cool back to a white suburban audience (Klein, 2009). In this age of globalisation, cool, class and taste can all be manufactured through exploiting geographical and cultural distances.
A brand can be conceptualised as a complex “new media object”. Brands act as a communication interface between the private and public spheres and organise a two-way asymmetrical exchange of information. Brands are therefore not just the personification of monolithic corporations but are a sort of controlled interactive relationship between consumer and the company (Lury, 2004). A branded product is just a product but the branded-ness occupies the intangible relationship a consumer has with the brand that is (often) visually signified on the product; A Chanel 2.55 could be viewed as just a leather container to be worn but the customer has a relationship (or perceived relationship) with Chanel which transforms the container into a branded item.
In Marxist theory, value can be seen as the surplus generated by the relationship between objects. Human labour by itself has no intrinsic value but when placed in a capitalist mode of production creates products to be sold for surplus value (Arvidsson, 2008). The value is derived from the relationship that human labour has within the capitalist mode of production. Jean Baudrillard, in System of Objects (Baudrillard, 1969) recounts a story in which a rare book collector had the only known first edition print of a book. Upon hearing that there exists another previously unknown authentic copy, immediately purchases and destroys this second copy in order to restore his copy to its original value of exclusivity. The collector is not destroying value but merely ensuring that his copy retains its value as the only authentic first edition in relation to all other copies.
Production and consumption are a dialectical relationship: A product must not only be materially (or in today’s informational economy, immaterially) produced but also consumed to fulfil its purpose as a product. There has also been a shift in focus from the producer to consumer for without consumption, there would be no demand for production (Lury, 2014). The general aim of branding is to create an ambience or environment in which consumers actions are pre-programmed to create a positive sign value of the brand. Brands put consumers to work in collectively creating a General Knowledge (a specific way of using the brand) and sell branded products that embody this values (via copyright protection and intellectual property, a form of property rights for the intangible). The easiest way to capitalise on this is to “co-opt the common” (Arvidsson, 2008) in which brands actively try to insert themselves into the everyday life of consumers by taking over existing cultural practices. Some of these tactics include sponsoring cultural events (concerts, sports matches, art exhibitions) or marketing products that consumers use in everyday life to form relationships (Branded food and drink products used at shared meals, household appliances, apps) (Klein, 2000).
The definition of luxury has changed over time; Sugar was a luxury good in the 16th century but is a necessity today (Berry, 1994); whilst an artisanal handmade Belgian chocolate is often considered luxury where a Cadbury bar is not. Broadly speaking, luxury goods appeal to an emotional aspect and desire on the part of the consumer rather than fulfilling a basic need (Armitage and Roberts, 2016). Someone who does not usually consume chocolate might view even a Cadbury bar as a luxury in his or her life - the Cadbury bar becomes a luxury not because the Cadbury bar is economically expensive or that there is a physical scarcity but because of the rarity of chocolate in relation to that person’s lifestyle. Similarly, a Cadbury bar might be considered a luxury in a developing country where there is an actual scarcity of any chocolate in that geographical location.
Branding
Value
Consumption
Luxury
Chanel
Chanel is unique in its luxury branding in how it sanctifies its founder’s story as opposed to other heritage brands like Louis Vuitton or Gucci, which have chosen to mythologise the history of their products or rework the house codes rather than their founder’s story (Armitage and Roberts, 2016). Coco Chanel was an orphan who eventually dressed the high society of Paris, worked as a Nazi sympathiser (in part to wrest control of her business back from her Jewish partners during WWII) and then reinvented herself as a Parisian couturier to the newly minted American elite (Meza, 2019). Under the late Karl Lagerfeld, Chanel mythologises its founder’s story by the careful curation and distillation of her story into nostalgic films, exhibitions and other cultural offerings (Vinken and Hewson, 2004). These romanticise Coco Chanel’s story and Parisian life through the decades, carefully omitting her work with the Nazis during the WWII occupation of Paris or how she was shunned by Parisian society in the post-war period for such work. The house of Chanel today commodifies this myth of Coco into symbolic capital attached to its logo and stamped onto best selling fragrances and handbags bags named after her.
The bulk of Chanel’s business is not in selling thousand dollar tweed jackets to ladies of leisure but lies rather in selling $30 lipsticks, $50 perfumes, $300 shades and highly profitable leather goods to the masses (Givhan, 2012) who believe the mark of Chanel stands for something. The power of the Chanel brand therefore lies not in it being an actual mark of the upper class but rather that it is perceived to be the signifier of a higher class. The transaction being made here is a sense of upward mobility in social class being bought in exchange for economic capital. The sign of Chanel only gains value when people viewing it share the same meaning and Chanel spends over 15% of their revenue on marketing alone (one of the highest in the industry) to ensure this (Paton, 2018). Chanel stages catwalks in elaborate sets and fills out page after page in glossy magazines with ads, all to instil in the general viewing public across the world the same meaning: Chanel is for the elegant and classy. All this media exposure also confers upon the owners of Chanel goods the guaranteed recognition (and often envy) of the masses who cannot afford such luxury. Purchasing and using Chanel products with the ostentatious branding becomes a legitimate and tasteful form of conspicuous consumption that Chanel the brand ensures.
Baudrillard argues that all consumption is the consumption of signs and that the reality we now live in is nothing but a simulation of signs. Signs may have started out as copies or faithful representations of something real but are now largely devoid of any links to the original and these copies have overtaken the real in recognition. Once commodification reaches a certain intensity in saturation, “the struggle for authenticity becomes futile” (Gilbert, 2008). Whilst there may be some customers who do truly epitomise the image of the ideal Chanel woman in both leisure and status, most customers do not. All of this is to say that the sign value of Chanel is derived not primarily from the brand being a true signifier of the upper class but rather from the collective belief of the masses in Chanel as an authentic signifier of classiness. Karl Lagerfeld himself even states in the Inside Chanel series (Chanel, n.d.) that his job is to transform Chanel into an urban legend, where people unconsciously believe in the style of Chanel. The act of purchasing a Chanel product transcends the ownership of a physical object; Rather, it is the purchase of an idea.
(Chanel, n.d.)
Fashion critics have in recent times been less effusive about the clothes that Karl Lagerfeld created for Chanel today. Some of the most critical profiles have labelled him an unimaginative designer who relies on pastiche and bastardises couture (Givhan, 2012) (Vinken and Hewson, 2004). A positive brand image is maintained through the manipulation of public relations which often include the stringent policing of negative press (Klein, 2000). Chanel has banned journalists from shows and probably threatened to pull ad buys in fashion magazines due to unfavourable reporting (Zerbo, 2018). Journalist Christina Binkley was recently banned from the SS19 Chanel show for a 2015 report she wrote for the WSJ that emphasised Chanel’s secretive billionaire owners, the Wertheimer’s brothers.
We can thus briefly summarise how Chanel creates and maintains its brand. It creates an ambience in which consumers will think positively of Chanel - it does this by romanticising Gabrielle Chanel’s story and representing Chanel as of a higher class, creating marketing such as films, ads, star studded catwalk shows and other branded content to reflect this story. Chanel polices this environment aggressively through the careful omission of less palatable elements in its founder’s story and through the strong handed control of the press (due to the economic dependency of the fashion press on fashion brands). Having enforced its brand-as-class myth in the collective belief of the viewing public through marketing and advertising, Chanel is able to charge customers an economic premium for the luxury of class because Chanel ensures that the use of its sign signals in others the same positive reception of classiness.
Supreme
Supreme, which has been dubbed “The Chanel of Streetwear”, is a fashion brand with no unique aesthetic. Started in 1994 as a skatewear brand in New York by Englishman James Jebbia, its clothes are often better made wardrobe staples like t-shirts, bomber jackets, track pants and bum bags, all emblazoned with its ubiquitous logo and name. The boxy red logo itself borrowed directly from the oeuvre of Barbara Kruger, whose work is a potent feminist rant against consumerism. With just 11 stores worldwide (6 in Japan alone), Supreme is the first streetwear brand to reach a billion dollar valuation and has recently sold a reported 50 percent stake in exchange for investment from wall street private equity firm Carlyle Investments (Kansara, 2019).
The most interesting part of Supreme however may be the hype and community surrounding the brand. Supreme is widely associated with the distribution model of “drops” - a weekly release of new merchandise in small batches that sells out nearly instantly (Menendez, 2017). These frequent drops often attract long queues of customers eager to purchase items from the newest drop even though not all of their purchasing is done for personal consumption but also for resale purposes. This queue to purchase becomes a community in and of itself, with people forming friendships over the shared experience of waiting to spend money (La Ferle, 2017).
There is a thriving resale market for Supreme, driven in large part by people who are unable to afford the time to camp out overnight for limited edition items but want to signal their participation in the Supreme tribe. James Jebbia himself has said that Supreme purposely restricts supply, citing quality and inventory control (O'Brien, 2007). Much like De Beers and the diamond trade however, this artificial scarcity increases the value of the available product in relation to demand.
Authenticity
Chanel and Supreme may have started as representations of a particular lifestyle: Chanel of the Parisian high society, Supreme of New York skaters but as billion dollar fashion brands today, most of these brands’ clientele are no longer high society or skaters. These brands’ fashions have thus moved from being representational of a subculture to aspirational, mythologising class and cool respectively. Established brands like Chanel and Supreme thus present an image or simulacrum of a particular lifestyle for sale - purchase a Chanel bag to be classy, wear a Supreme T-shirt and be cool like a skateboarder.
(Perez, 2017)
Once a brand goes from representational, wherein much of its clientele’s lifestyles do indeed synchronise with the projected brand image, to aspirational, where a larger proportion of the brands’ consumers are now aspiring to the lifestyle of the brand image, they are often criticised for losing their “authenticity”. Much of fashion, especially luxury fashion and streetwear is predicated on managing this simulacrum of authenticity (The Fashion Law, 2017). As mentioned earlier, a brand can be viewed as a sort of controlled interactive relationship between consumer and company. The relationship a brand has with its consumer will always be asymmetrically weighted in the brands’ favour and may thus be “inauthentic”. If consumers form real relationships with one another through the use of a branded product however, then authenticity can still be achieved as brands become part of the social interactions between people and people collectively assume it as authentic (Banet-Weiser, 2012). By this definition, Supreme is still authentic to it’s customers and the communities that form in the queue are proof of that. It is also interesting to note the geographical and cultural differences being exploited here to create such a perception.
Balenciaga
Is Balenciaga still authentically Balenciaga then if it has eschewed much of what the house was founded on? The house of Balenciaga, which once had a couture line and whose founder Cristobal made innovative contributions to the techniques of dress construction, now sells £300 logo t-shirts, £500 branded sweatpants and £600 chunky dad sneakers. To current creative director Demna Gvasalia, authenticity is akin to how well recognised a tweed suit is as a code of Chanel (Cronberg, 2017). As I have argued earlier, Chanel isn’t necessarily an authentic representation of the upper class anymore but within the realm of popular culture it’s hard to deny how well associated the tweed jacket reference is with Chanel in spite of the numerous Zara knockoffs. Authenticity to Gvasalia thus seems more a matter of how well something has entered into the collective belief of the masses rather than a question of provenance.
Balenciaga has reported double digit growth each year since Gvasalia’s hire in 2015 and is poised to become a billion dollar brand in revenue for the first time in its 80+ year history due in large part to strong sales in its ready-to-wear and shoes categories (Kering.com, 2018). Opinions are split on his designs and “originality” but the financial success is undeniable and this is in large part to the buzz that he has managed to create around the brand of Balenciaga.
Commentators have noted that Gvasalia has been especially shrewd in making the brand go viral by designing products that can be turned into memes (Medium, 2019) (Rakestraw, 2017). His croc platform shoes and £1000 shirt/t-shirt designs have all been shared across the internet countless times, often in shock at the price or taste. In the case of the Ikea bag, an official ad response from Ikea themselves, which only increased the exposure and longevity of the meme even further. It is interesting to note the role that design plays here, with some suggesting that Gvasalia is essentially making design decisions in pursuit of a desired social media effect (Wolf, 2019).
The idea of remaking everyday items into fashion is not new - brands like Jil Sander (under Raf Simons) and Comme Des Garcons have made luxury shopping bags before but none of the previous iterations of this idea have set the internet ablaze like this nor have any of those prior iterations so explicitly referenced a product of another already popular brand. Part of the design at work here is also an explicit ambiguity in meaning that is being marketed - Balenciaga does not make a definitive statement on whether this is a laugh at high fashion and the brand itself, a sincere up-make of a beloved everyday item or if it’s meant to be an ironic adornment of distinction from the common man by the wearer. The brand suggests all these meanings through the use of a popular reference (which it specifically credits to Ikea in interviews), allows the fashion press to provide commentary as to the motives of the designer but ultimately leaves the choice and production of meaning up to the consumers who collectively generate and imbue the product with symbolic capital through memes and shares on social media.
EDIT: In a recent interview, Gvasalia has himself given a specific reason for creating the Ikea Tote, calling it a luxurious up-make of a widely used commodity; He credits this ubiquity that has caused it to resonate with people and corporations alike. However, it should also be noted that this demystifying interview coincided with a new collection which eschews much of what Demna initially did at Balenciaga (logomania, chunky sneakers, t-shirts) and could be seen as a sort of soft rebrand.
There is probably much social and economic capital being expended behind the scenes to get these memes and clothings into the hands of the right influencers and press but Gvasalia can be observed to be co-opting the common practice of sharing content via social media by designing objects specifically to provoke a response (often referred to as meme-baiting). This response is largely achieved by venturing against the socially acceptable taste of that time, in the case of Balenciaga by remaking mundane everyday objects into exorbitantly expensive luxury commodities. Throughout fashion history, designers can be observed to have transgressed contemporary distinctions of taste in order to generate attention for their brands, examples include: McQueen’s Bumsters, Tom Ford for Gucci, American Apparel/Terry Richardson, YSL Opium, Supreme being sent a cease and desist by Louis Vuitton and Rick Owens Mens AW2015.
Underpinning these more visible marketing stunts at Balenciaga however is smart merchandising and more traditional below-the-line fashion publicity. The ubiquitous t-shirts, sock-runners and Triple-S sneakers which prominently feature the Balenciaga logo are undoubtedly big sellers even if they’re not memes. The sock runner itself has been mentioned by Cardi-B in no less than 2 songs in 2018, Balenciaga branded scarves have been spotted on Rihanna as well as in a Major Lazer music video and Michelle Obama recently stepped out head-to-toe in a Balenciaga gown complete with a pair of £4000 glittery thigh-high sock-heels.
Balenciaga can be observed to be utilising a two pronged strategy in its marketing approach. First, it designs products that generate exposure for the brand by becoming memes. These products are already guaranteed media exposure by being featured in its runway shows and ensuing fashion press coverage but the meme-baiting creates further interaction between the brand and the public. To ensure that the Balenciaga brand is legitimised into the good taste of the masses as well, rather than just being the punchline of memes, the brand has its products worn by celebrities and influencers who occupy an acceptable standing in mainstream society and their respective fields and inserted into cultural commodities such as music videos and songs that are consumed by the masses. The use of celebrity and influencer marketing represents an exchange of symbolic capital from the celebrity onto the brand which is often the result of a less visible relationship between the celebrity’s personal stylist and the brand’s PR team or an upfront contract between the celebrity and brand (e.g. Jennifer Lawrence was required to wear Dior exclusively to red carpet events as part of an endorsement contract).
Demna Gvasalia, often criticised for copying wholesale, is doing what Karl Lagerfeld did for Chanel and is in the process of launching Balenciaga into the collective consciousness of the masses, albeit in a very different way. Whilst Chanel brands itself as classy (i.e. upward social mobility that adheres to pre-existing societal hierarchies), Balenciaga seems to be “cool” taking an often ironic stand against current society (as well as a few digs at other brands). Balenciaga charges its customers a premium for the luxury of cool.
Note: Rather than simply reducing fashion designers’ successes down to marketing, I would also like the stress the important role of making artistic judgements in taste that fashion designers utilise in creating products that are aesthetically interesting and ultimately desirable by consumers.
Design is thus subsumed under marketing; this is not unprecedented, brands like Calvin Klein had, for a long time, placed heads of marketing above heads of design until the recent short lived tenure of Raf Simons, who took marketing under his purview (Fernandez, 2019). Furthermore, if we go down the list of modern fashion brands which still have their original founders today, many of these brands’ creative directors are not technically trained designers but often celebrities or marketeers: Tom Ford, Thom Browne, Virgil Abloh, Raf Simons, Phillip Plein, Victoria Beckham, Fenty by Rihanna, Yeezy by Kanye West, Neek Lurk (of Anti-Social Social Club) to name but a few.
Memes
Marketing
Summary
Conclusion
To summarise, branding involves an asymmetrical relationship between the company and consumers who are directed via marketing to participate in the production of a general knowledge. Brands create an environment to pre-program these consumer actions by mediatizing the public and private spheres with branded content and often insert themselves into existing cultural practices through co-opting the common. Brands police this environment aggressively through retaliatory practices. Products are marketed to be
ambiguous in meaning so that consumers can produce or attach their own meanings onto them. Through this process of meaning-making, consumers create surplus value for the brand that the brands consecrate into symbols and logos.
The relative nature of luxury means that it needs to distinguish itself from fast fashion yet still be recognised by the masses. The luxury industry thus requires mass advertising and exposure to ensure that the general public shares the same meaning. As a brand reaches new consumer demographics that differ from the original core market it purports to represent, brands can no longer be said to be true representations of a lifestyle but rather become aspirational commodities. However, brands can still be authentic if they become integral in the relationships between consumers or if the masses are collectively imbued with a false consciousness that believes in the simulacrum that brands present to be authentic. Customers who purchase luxury goods pay a premium for the luxury of using the brands’ signs as positive signifiers of distinction amongst their social group.
This essay has looked at the brands of Chanel, Supreme and Balenciaga and analysed parts of their branding strategies. In the case of Balenciaga, the co-opting of the common practice of viral sharing on social media has proven to be extremely beneficial in terms of creating awareness of the brand, launching it in the collective consciousness of the masses alongside Chanel and Supreme.
Luxury fashion today requires not just the design and construction of aesthetically pleasing clothes but also a strong brand message and relationship not just of the consumer and the brand but also amongst consumers. The role of branding today is not just an emotive logo or presentation of an image that is deemed authentic but also the community of consumers that collectively utilise branded products in their inter-personal interactions and whose collective belief is critical to imbuing brand logos with authenticity between each other.
Self-esteem, female empowerment and creativity have all been commodified into a Dove bar of soap, Dior T-shirt or Bachelor of Arts degree through branding. Capitalism may be the most productive system humanity has ever seen but it produces not just constant technological advances and luxury goods that can be bought but also global warming, a growing wealth divide, generational wealth accumulation and feelings of alienation.
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