HOLLISTER, Yah?

"Few companies rival Hollister's brand-powered momentum, and our success is founded in the excellence of our employees."



Ok, let's congratulate ourselves. Society has arrived at the point where a video on youtube where a girl shows off all the tops she has managed to accumulate from Hollister gets 4 stars. That's 80%. That's more than American Psycho gets on IMDB... and American Psycho is a pretty great film. Just why is this brand so nauseatingly ubiquitous? On the way up a set of stairs the other day, just one set of fairly average stairs, I counted five people on the way down wearing Hollister branded T-Shirts. FIVE. Out of a maximum of 15 people. Something's deeply wrong here. I am no expert on fashion, or sociology, but as far as I can see this phenomenon can be explored by a process of elimination. Let's start with why we wear clothing in the first place, a broad question but here goes.

1) Clothes are for keeping warm, and for allowing us not to be naked in public. For this sole purpose, what we wear need be little more than the most utilitarian option, maybe a big boiler-suit, a huge baby-gro. If there were no other consideration to clothes than utility, this is what we'd all be wearing.

2) Clothes are designed to enhance our bodies, and make us more attractive to others. This is largely to do with the cut, and quality of the clothes we choose to wear. It has very little to do with brand. A good suit is a good suit, regardless of whether it has 'Armani' monogrammed into the inner pocket. Some of the very best and most flattering tailoring is produced by firms in the Far East with no brand identity at all.

3) Clothes are a status symbol. The ubiquity of fake branded goods on markets across the world is a testament to this. These clothes are of poor quality, but the appeal is in broadcasting to others your ability to wear a brand. To anybody who's grown up in the last 100 years, this is part of our cultural landscape.

So the clothes we wear cover broadly these three bases. But where did the idea of 'brands' come from? I guess that somewhere a long way back in time from here, clothes were about quality, and the subtle branding was to remind the wearer who had provided him, or her, with such quality. Although 'brands' have been around for a long time, it has in the past been in a very subtle manner; the tiny Lacoste crocodile, the hint of Burberry tartan on a coat hem. It seems that now, the importance of the brand has overtaken that of the clothing. The chicken and the egg have switched places. Fake burberry is so successful simply because it turns the subtlety on its head and gives the people what they want, a brand.

The problem with these brands is that they become identikit.  Rather than people making individual choices about what to wear, how to express themselves through clothing, people who can't be bothered to think about what they wear, but still want to look 'stylish' presume that they can buy into a brand and save themselves a lot of effort. It is the shortcut, off-the-shelf solution to style. The problem is twofold: this comes at a huge premium of cost, and it's entirely misguided. I have enormous admiration for those who have decided to completely buy out of the style game, who are content to wear charity-shop garb because they genuinely don't care. But for those people who do like to use clothes as an expression, simply paying a premium to cut out the work of thinking about how you look is completely insipid. It's the fashion equivalent of the spouse of a famous actor who basks in the reflected glory without having done anything of merit themselves. Think of Kevin Federline, or Jack Tweed... The truth is that clothing yourself head-to-toe in Hollister, American Eagle, Jack Wills, White Stuff or whichever of these modern-day superbrands it happens to be is the work of minutes. You can buy an entire wardrobe in an hour. And such is the garishness of the huge logos, that to dress in this manner is infinitely worse than going to your local charity shop and piecing together something unbranded, yet entirely you.

These brands are painting by numbers. Most people stopped doing that years ago, There's nothing wrong with brands per-se, they remind us that when we buy something of good quality, we are likely to get it again when we return to the same shop, but to pay a fortune to become a walking advertisement form these brands beggars belief.

I always thought that companies were supposed to pay you for the privilege of advertising on your property. Obviously I was wrong.

One last thing...

I found this, and it is terrible.  

Could we get any more brand aware?