Alessandro Michele sent out a few decapitated heads and a baby dragon down the runway last week at Gucci. They accessorized clothes that were dazzlingly representative of the “Frankensteins” we humans have become in the age of the Internet and iPhones, cherry-picking our personal aesthetics from vastly different cultures, societies, and zeitgeists, and stitching them together.
Another piece of Michele’s weird puzzle was the continued exploration of the Gucci logo, a symbol that nodded to another possible personality in Michele’s cyborg lineup: label whore. Logos are as prevalent this season as they have been for the last couple of years, especially at Gucci. For Fall, in addition to crystal double-G monograms and labels on sheer tulle garment bags worn over full looks, Michele included team logos from his MLB collaboration and a Paramount studios shout-out, too.
Outside of Gucci, there were more logoed trenches and bags at Fendi. Karl Lagerfeld teamed up with Instagram artist Hey Reilly on a series of logos based on the Fila design. For Christopher Bailey’s farewell show at Burberry, he revamped the label’s ’80s logo and put it on sweatshirts. And back in New York, Alexander Wang turned his name into corporate signage.
The written word is one of the most valuable commodities in fashion at the moment. Some might argue that logos have sold more clothes in the last two years than any single trend. A DHL label on a baseball hat now carries as much clout as an interlocked pair of letter Cs on a quilted handbag. The industry has become so enamored with wearable language and the manipulation of familiar signage, that a logo from a shipping company and a storied European fashion house carry equal value. Why? M/M Paris cofounder Mathias Augustyniak, who has created album covers for Madonna and Björk, and worked on campaigns with designers like Riccardo Tisci and Nicolas Ghesquière, believes that designers today struggle with the speed at which we visually consume fashion and that they strive to capture our fleeting attention with words or bold visuals. “Now, more than ever, clothes need to express their origin right away,” he notes. “To nurture and mature a tridimensional language takes nearly a lifetime, and one of the last designers to do this was Azzedine Alaïa—his clothes were recognizable in one glance without any branding.
Augustyniak says social media has completely changed the game. He adds, “Today, anyone with a smartphone can take a picture of clothes within their own reality. Photos of fashion no longer communicate a message, nor do they engage a conversation with a viewer.” Younger fashion designers understand this shift and it’s not necessarily a bad thing, Augustyniak explains, but he warns of adding more signage to an already visually perplexing sartorial world. “In 2018, signs are creating an immaterial yet tangible landscape which has immersed itself in our reality,” he says. “Most millennials have grown up surrounded by extremely well-crafted signs—a DHL logo is, for a millennial, as cute as a panda or a kitten. It has no meaning, it is only an emotional decoration.”
Halima Olalemi, a London-based graphic designer and founder of the popular @adarchives Instagram (which features old fashion advertisements) agrees, but also sees the draw of nostalgia: “Calvin Klein brought in Peter Saville to tweak the logo, to take it back to its original routes—if anything, I think the millennial customer is nostalgic for the past and the way everything used to be.” She adds, “You could say that these brands are trying to give their customers something to identify with, but I think it’s that they’re looking back and looking at what worked and repackaging it for current audiences.”
Repackaging can mean anything from a mash-up of a sports logo with that of a storied fashion house à la Fendi, or it can mean rendering a bootlegged monogram trimmed in fur like Michele has done. It is successful when the recognizable image becomes something that is newly visually arresting or, sometimes, controversial. As graphic designer Ole Lund, who has worked with Chanel and Calvin Klein, among other luxury labels, explains, “Logos now break rules. When done right, the balance of restraint and brazen wildness dashed with color and simplicity at the same time can create the most captivating logo.” Brands like Versace—and, as Olalemi noted, Calvin Klein—have also toyed with fashion’s ongoing focus on nostalgia, bringing back older versions of their logos and using advertisements from the past as templates for marketing their brands today. “Graphic design was the pure heart and soul of fashion in the ’80s and ’90s,” Lund says. “It’s all coming full circle, and that is quite exciting.”
He also believes that we will definitely see more tweaked logos and bold font slogans on the runways this year and as long as they feel fresh somehow, whether it’s an out-of-the-box idea or a completely original, thoughtful image, that’s really all that matters. It’s also what will last and resonate with the people buying and seeing the clothes. “Gucci’s collaboration with Coco Capitán is indicative of what I believe and hope we will see more of in 2018,” Lund predicts. “It sends a clear message and questions the current climate but is constructed in a way that says fashion. On top of their mastery of graphic design, they showed us something new, which is not an easy feat in this day and age.”
The short story? Logos aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. They will remain relevant so long as they continue to push boundaries and challenge our imaginations. Michele’s Halloween accessories might be head-scratchers, but he is right about the way we see the world through the lenses of our iPhones. “Personally, I believe that it would be difficult for a designer not to pay attention or to be influenced by Instagram,” explains Fendi’s collaborator Hey Reilly. “Brands have to progress alongside their customer and their customer’s taste changes, it’s what drives the fashion juggernaut. That being said, I don’t think we’ve hit peak logomania just yet.”
Source: Vogue