No one wants logos anymore. Discretion is the better part of glamour, writes Lisa Armstrong
A LONE bag sits in the window of key Gucci stores. Shiny as a marble, shaped like a Gladstone bag and lit like a Hollywood starlet before the movies got small, this is no ordinary Gucci bag.
For one thing, it’s fashioned from crocodile. For another, it is completely devoid of identification. You know it’s Gucci only if you’re an aficionado of these things. You know that it’s precious only if you’re someone who can distinguish real croc from mock-croc.
Alexandra von Furstenberg, a New York society beauty and daughter-in-law of fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg, has just snapped up the first one in the US. Last week Women’s Wear Daily, the fashion industry’s bible, reported this momentous achievement as breathlessly as if she had just found a cure for AIDS.
The bag costs pound stg. 9150 ($25,592), way more than Hermes’s Kelly and Birkin bags, which were previously thought to set the benchmark for what premium-priced bags could sell for. And there is a waiting list — which is good news for Gucci, which recently announced a 50per cent drop in profits. Maybe, just maybe, this bag signals a new direction for the label that made several fortunes in the 1990s from marketing exclusivity to a broader market, which took in everyone from pop stars to contestants on Big Brother.
Anyone wondering what happened to conspicuous consumption post-9/11 will find some of the answer in the above. It’s still with us, but it has morphed into something that is both more and less complex than its late ’90s incarnation.
Back then — and it seems a long time ago — the beauty of luxury retailing was its apparent simplicity, its seeming lack of neurosis. Brands such as Prada, Gucci, Chanel and Calvin Klein, which spent millions throughout the decade promoting their names across the globe and rolling out identical stores filled with identical products displayed in identical style, cashed in on a moment of fin-de-siecle euphoria (or possible hysteria). After years of sober minimalism, the buzz words in fashion were ghetto fabulousness (after rap stars such as Puff Daddy and Missy Elliott).
Tom Ford was the first to tune into the move towards obvious displays of wealth. Having spent the early years of his reign at Gucci eradicating the tacky monograms that had tarnished the label in the ’70s and ’80s, he reintroduced a classic style from the Gucci archives in 1999. Christened the Jacqui, after Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, it was a slouchy, over-the-shoulder leather-trimmed canvas number, spattered with the Gucci logo. It was a sell-out. The bull market seemed unstoppable. People had money and wanted to flaunt it.
The next season the catwalks were awash with monograms. But they weren’t confined to accessories; they were stamped on to shoes or woven into dresses, skirts and coats. In the hands of Ford or John Galliano (at Dior), logos became ironic statements about the late 20th-century obsession with brands.
At Louis Vuitton, Marc Jacobs, one of the most successful logo pioneers, even made the logo seem counter-cultural by commissioning underground New York designer Stephen Sprouse to reconfigure the famous LV monogram into a graffiti daubing that became summer 2001’s hottest must-have. It still ended up in the hands of Victoria Beckham, which says it all. The quasi-rebellious and the so-called exclusive were all too widely available. Things had to change and they did.
“Even before September 11, the logo as a status symbol was beginning to wane; this was noticeable even at Gap,” says Sagra Maceira de Rosen, head of luxury goods research at JP Morgan.
Who would have thought the spirit of Seattle would percolate through to the Gucci bag-carrying classes? Yet it does seem that the rejection of logos is partly a reaction to globalised branding.
“It’s also fashion coming full cycle,” observes Suzanne Tide-Frater, the head of creative direction at English department store chain Selfridges. “The logo was avant-garde in the mid-’90s, then mainstream, then ironic. Now it’s over.”
We have seen the demise of logos before — when the early ’90s reacted against the previous decade’s excess. But 10 years ago, there was significantly less money sloshing around. This time it’s different. Many still have spending power, but the mass consumerism of the ’90s looks crass. Consumers are seeking new guidance on how to consume. Enter our gurus, Miuccia Prada and Ford. Having each overseen the evolution of two of the most successful fashion supertankers in history, they were among the first to identify a growing hostility to monolithic brands.
Two years ago, Prada commissioned a flagship store in downtown Manhattan that was to look like no other Prada store. This ran counter to all retail wisdom at the time, which was still pursuing a relentless program of cookie-cutter roll-outs. Designed by cult architect Rem Koolhaas at a reputed cost of more than pound stg. 30 million, by the time it opened in a beleaguered SoHo in December 2001 it was widely cited as a folie de grandeur. But Prada may have the last laugh as other brands race to give their stores a unique veneer.
While Prada embarked on a policy of “thinking global and acting local”, Ford was giving voice to his suspicion that “sometime soon, retail may stop being about getting the same item to everyone at the same time and start being about getting different items to niche segments”. Anticipating a new kind of status buying, he did some shopping himself — acquiring Boucheron to cater to a new generation of serious jewellery buyers, and Bottega Veneta, a company that considers obvious logo to be a betrayal of everything that its hand-made products stand for. Fast-forward to autumn 2002 and the logo as a fashion statement is dead in the water.
At Gucci, the percentage of logoed leather goods, which a few years ago stood at about 40 per cent, has dropped to 10 per cent. And Prada’s famous metal triangle, which had grown bigger throughout the ’90s, has been cut back to size again. Calvin Klein, Donna Karan and Ralph Lauren are also learning the art of discretion. Upscale labels might make their money by selling $80 bottles of perfume to the masses, but they hang on to their allure by appealing to the elite. The consumer who was happy to pay $850 for the same Gucci bag she saw featured throughout the pages of fashion magazines would now prefer to pay more for something less ubiquitous. Enter that crocodile bag.
“Price,” as Tide-Frater says, “is not the issue. Exclusivity is.” In response, companies are going back to basics and re-examining the product.
Gucci has introduced customised items, as has Tod’s — crocodile loafers that can be ordered in any colour through some of its branches, with or without personalised monograms.
Hogan — Tod’s sister range, aimed at a slightly hipper market — has commissioned a series of three limited-edition bags designed by Dennis Hopper, Damien Hirst and Ed Ruscha. Due out at the end of the year, they won’t be cheap.
Yet before we consign logos to the dustbin of fashion history, it’s worth remembering that, for some, a logo will always equal status. That’s why Chanel’s stamped, albeit discreetly, buttons still sell and why, at the other end of the market, there is still a huge market for fakes.
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