BEFORE OUR MEETING I wait on a designed and uncomfortable chair in the reception area of the big conglomerate that owns the company he works for a few days a week. The wall-to-wall carpet is grey and everything else white, bar the receptionist in black. Silence reigns. The experience is a bit like being in an upscale dentist’s waiting room at an imaginary space station, if it were used as the backdrop for a fashion shoot. It’s minimal and, I assume, intended to be both impressive and somewhat intimidating. When I’m taken to meet him, his appearance is a welcome respite to all the high status monochrome, albeit a studied one. He looks relaxed, though he’s just six days away from one of his high profile womenswear shows, and hardly any fabrics have turned up yet. We talk until his PA signals that it’s time to escort me out.

***

I change styles all the time. Yesterday I was dressed as a goth and today I’m wearing vintage because it’s what I felt like when I woke up this morning. I’m a bit of a borderline person so I need to have options or else I’d get bored. Not long ago I was stopped by the police at Gare du Nord, coming back from Brussels with my boyfriend. We’d been to a Sisters of Mercy concert and were dressed like metalheads because that’s how you dress to those kind of concerts. I was wearing platform New Rocks and a lot of black, and we were both searched for almost an hour, for drugs and for terrorism. We were singled out because of the way we looked. I remember back in the early days of Vetements, when I was still into partying I used to dress in security uniforms, which are really easy to get anywhere in the world – you don’t need a license. I’d dress in boots, a T-shirt with ‘Security’ printed on it and bomber jackets. I never had to queue and I never paid for a single party. I just walked right in. So the question is, does changing my style all the time make me inauthentic? I don’t think so; I think it’s the opposite. Every way I dress is me, but I also play a role. If anyone else wore what I am wearing today, he’d probably be working in a supermarket or in construction. People don’t expect me, as a fashion designer, to dress the way I do.

I like playing roles; it makes me feel safe. Authenticity for me perhaps means something different than for most people. I don’t have one interpretation of authenticity when it comes to style; I like moving between them. When I wear a sweatshirt with ‘Monoprix’ on it, what am I signalling? Am I saying it’s cool to work at a supermarket or am I making people ask themselves why I’m wearing a Monoprix logo, when I could be wearing one from Balenciaga? Well, you tell me. Obviously everybody knows that I don’t work at Monoprix, well everyone who knows me does anyway. If a stranger sees me in the street wearing my Monoprix jumper, they might think I really do work there and I quite like that. Because of my physique I tend to go for the security outfit or the supermarket logo rather than, say, a Brooks Brothers suit; certain roles feel closer to me than others. If I had an alternative life, I’d see myself working as a cashier before I saw myself working in a bank.

Authenticity is something very personal, it’s hard to define what it means in general. I think about this now when so much of the information disseminated online has to do with numbers. Finding what appeals to the most people, most of the time. To me, authenticity can be the fabric you choose to make a parka: a military parka is authentic in a khaki washed cotton. If you do it in denim, it’s not authentic. Authenticity is about going back to the original archetype. Every garment I do is based on a garment that already exists; I don’t invent anything new. Well, apart from the legging that turned into a pump that I did recently at Balenciaga and called ‘pantashoe.’ But typically I would use the term ‘authenticity’ to describe something I can associate to something from my past experience. Take the trench: for me there is only one image in my mind when I think of that garment and it’s Meryl Streep in a movie from the eighties, standing on the Manhattan Bridge.

In January 2017 I put on a Vetements fashion show that was all based on archetypes of dressing; that show was a revelation for me. A lot of people, or rather a lot of fashion people I talked to afterwards thought it was too simple. Not fashion enough. And that’s even though the collection included forty-five different design concepts, like a wedding dress as a jogging suit. In most collections you have one concept – like, this season the concept is ‘Greece’ and the whole collection is about Grecian goddesses. I had forty-five, and still fashionistas found it simple. They found it simple because my trench coats were beige, or because a model in jeans and a shirt reminded them of a neighbour. To me, that was the whole purpose of the show. I had to explain things afterwards. It wasn’t about normcore at all, it was highly conceptual. The trench coat was lined with a dress that you can also wear, but you have to put it on to know that. But everyone was watching the show through their phones so how could they tell what the collection was really about?

Both the Balenciaga and Vetements client is a very well-informed person: they know about the brands, and even when new products are coming out. It’s quite surprising and fascinating to me, how much they know and care. If I wasn’t working in fashion, I don’t think I would ever spend so much time on it. For the Vetements client, it’s all about attitude, you know, grunge and greasy hair. It’s still a bit underground. Balenciaga has a very different take on conceptual design in terms of construction, shape, volume. Wearing either brand is a social signal too – it says that you’re in the right fashion clique. In any period of fashion history, there are always a few brands that best signify the times, brands that those in the know feel they should be wearing. In the nineties, it was Helmut Lang and Margiela, and now it’s this. You wear your Vetements or Balenciaga with Acne shoes and Céline sunglasses, and you’re it – that’s how they function in their fashion minds. It’s funny actually, since I dress both the Vetements and Balenciaga customer, my client base as ‘Demna Gvasalia’ is much bigger than either one brand. I’ve become a brand too, sort of.

I went to buy a jogging outfit the other day but to me all those brands have zero authenticity – they all look the same, just with different logos. They invest all this money in authentic image and branding but what they produce has no authenticity. To really be authentic you have to be able to recognise the products of one brand from another. It has to be unique. Identifiable. Logos are the easiest way to brand something, it’s a little lazy even. We did it a lot at Vetements at the beginning, and many of those products are still in demand so we keep producing them. I was experimenting with an almost shameless idea of branding, and it really worked. It’s a way of communicating that’s very adapted to the internet era: you can see immediately where a garment is from if it has a logo. It has a visual immediacy that’s easily instagrammable. At Balenciaga I’ve used logos almost to identify this new era for the brand; it’s like a stamp that authenticates a garment as a ‘Balenciaga by Demna Gvasalia’ piece. When I design a piece, my last thought is always, ‘Does this need a logo?’ Generally though, we do logos less and less – I’m too tired and bored of it now. I’m really into the idea of storytelling today. I know it’s an old school way to work in fashion, but since I’ve always focused on wardrobe categories, the products I make coexist but don’t necessarily interact. Working with a story would unite all the elements in a collection, and that’s unknown territory for me. I’ll work with real characters, actual people who are inspirational to me for a particular collection.

I think about the dangers of selling out every day. You can’t saturate the market. It’s so easy today to get caught in the sell-out trap, especially when a business is successful and a product is in demand. When something becomes popular, buyers want to get more of it and are willing to invest a higher budget in your brand in order to make more pro t from it. But you get to the point of oversaturation too easily: you produce too many hoodies and T-shirts and soon people don’t want it anymore and it goes on sale. We’ve had to deal with this kind of situation a lot at Vetements and we’re only now beginning to understand how to strategise and manage this in the future. We’re reducing the supply: it’s a very basic market economy model. When buyers say, ‘We want to give you more money,’ you say no. But that’s the most difficult thing for a company, whether it’s new or old. No one wants to refuse money. Many brands destroy themselves because they can’t say no. Thanks goodness I’ve had four years of economic education, so I always balance up the risks. You have to believe in your own long-term strategy, even if it leads to you losing money in the short run. To resist, you need stamina.

Anja Aronowsky-Cronberg is Vestoj’s editor-in-chief and founder.

Denis Darzacq is a photographer living and working in Paris. His series, Hyper, captures street dancers in supermarkets.

This article was originally published in Vestoj: On Authenticity, available for purchase here.

TO UNDERSTAND SOMETHING DEEP and true and deceptive about the American Dream, picture a young Tommy Hilfiger racing frantically toward downtown Elmira, New York, on June 22, 1972, in the hours before Hurricane Agnes hits. He has a store, and a future, to save.

Hilfiger, on that day, is just about the hippest guy in Elmira, the small, working class town where he grew up with his eight brothers and sisters. He’s 21, has stylishly long hair, is wearing the right early Seventies clothes, and with his buddy Larry Stemerman is the founder and owner of People’s Place, the only store for leagues in any direction that carries counterculture-inspired clothes for the young and hip. At night the store, which occupies the basement of a building downtown, also happens to be a good place to party. So Hilfiger and Stemerman are having a great deal of fun – girls, drugs, rock n’ roll – while also making a good deal of money.

Hilfiger has just returned from a long trip to London, where he was scouting out new fashions for the store. It had been a good trip. He’d soaked in that particular brand of rock-meets-fashion cool that London had perfected. He’d found an amazing brand of jeans, Made in Heaven, that he was planning to import and distribute in the States. He’d worked for a few weeks at a boutique on Kings Road, one of the hubs of Sixties fashion, to get a sense of how the UK did retail. He had also gotten a useful shock to his still fairly parochial consciousness.

‘After weeks on Kings Road,’ Hilfiger writes in his recent memoir, ‘my store seemed so provincial now, so behind the times. I wanted real excitement. I began looking for something else to do. I dreamed of creating my own brand.’

All this excitement, ambition and frustration are swirling around in Hilfiger’s head, that day in June, when he and Stemerman notice that the Chemung River, which runs through the centre of Elmira, is getting unusually high. If it keeps raining, it’s going to flood.

Hilfiger and Stemerman get back to town, and with the help of a ‘brigade of hippies, high school kids, college girls,’ and most of the Hilfiger clan, are able move their clothes up from their basement store to the top floor of the building. By the next morning much of the town is under a few feet of water.  

It’s a disaster for Elmira and the surrounding areas. Homes and stores are flooded out. Bridges are washed away. 18 people die in the nearby town of Corning.

For People’s Place, it’s an opportunity. For Hilfiger, it’s one of those moments when his American dream advances palpably closer to reality.

‘It dawned on us,’ Hilfiger writes. ‘If every store in the entire valley was wiped out, there were no more clothes in Elmira. Except ours.’

Hilfiger and Stemerman open their doors to the grateful, and desperate, people of Elmira. Within a few months their style is mainstream Elmira.

‘We saw dads in tie-dye and little old ladies wearing bell-bottoms,’ he writes.

When Hilfiger had started People’s Place in 1969, he wasn’t the only 18-year-old in America who knew what the fashions were. But he may have been the only one who encountered the new style and then immediately started a successful business selling it to his peers in the provinces, and then to their parents and grandparents when opportunity beckoned. His ambition was exceptional, as was his efficacy.

In the aftermath of the flood, People’s Place expanded, moving up from the basement to occupy the first and second floors as well, adding new lines and goods. They did hair on the second floor, and sold records in the basement. Tommy and Larry got into promoting rock concerts, and also joined the Chamber of Commerce. Hilfiger kept the inventory fresh, with regular scouting trips to London and New York, Los Angeles and Paris, ‘anywhere people were having fun.’ They brought some of Hilfiger’s brothers and sisters into the business, and opened People’s Place stores in Corning, Cortland and Ithaca.

Stemerman was a sharp businessman, but it was Hilfiger’s eye that fuelled the growing empire. He was always looking, whether at a trade show a rock concert or Studio 54, assessing not just what the cool kids were wearing, but guessing what they might be wearing next, and travelling in as many circles as possible to put himself in the way of inspiration whenever and wherever it might appear.

‘I was like a sponge,’ he writes.  ‘Anytime I went to a factory or store, I wanted to learn more, more, more, because I knew this was not the last stop on the train.’

Soon he began developing some of his own designs, and looking for someone to produce them, but if Hilfiger had a genius, it was less about saying something radically or interestingly new with clothing than about understanding how to curate, translate and market niche aesthetics for a broader audience. His enthusiasm for countercultural fashion, it soon became clear, was opportunistic rather than philosophical. His was a fundamentally pop genius, dependent on his ability to give the mainstream just as much edge and titillation and fantasy as it could handle, but no more. Dependent as well – fatefully, as it would turn out – on forces beyond his control, on the whims of the market, history, and the zeitgeist.     

When he finally did launch his own line, in 1984, the brilliance wasn’t in the look, which was a variation of other mass market prepster brands like Ralph Lauren and Lacoste, but in the price point, the marketing and the business plan. There was room in the market, Hilfiger intuited, for preppy clothes that were expensive but not so expensive. He splashed his nautically-inspired logo, and his name, on the clothes in ways that might be aversive to actual members of the preppy elite but were seductive to the aspirational classes beneath them, people who didn’t come from money but now, in the wealth-embracing air of the Eighties, wanted to look like they did and wanted to let you know that they could afford to look that way. He innovated in the development of his supply and production cycle, finding ways to speed up the process so that new looks could make it into the store faster. He balanced the churn of new looks, for consumers who wanted what was new, with a more stable offering of basics, for consumers who were less adventurous. He was intensely alert and responsive to opportunity.

Throughout the Eighties, thanks in large part to Hilfiger’s design and business instincts, sales and brand awareness grew quickly. He had made it. But it would take another serendipitous confluence of culture, capitalism and opportunity for the brand to ascend to the kind of top-tier market presence Hilfiger really wanted.

Good fortune arrived in 1991, one early morning when he and his brother Andy were at the airport in New York, just back from a trip to visit suppliers in Hong Kong. They were waiting at the baggage claim when Andy noticed the rapper Grand Puba, and his fellow members of Brand Nubian, standing near them. They were wearing a whole lot of Hilfiger.

The rest of the story is fashion business legend. Andy and Tommy introduced themselves, and invited the fellas to the Hilfiger showroom in Manhattan to see the new stuff and take what they wanted.

‘Two days later, the whole crew came down, and we gave them clothes. They were happy, and we were happy. They started wearing our line in their videos, and we saw a groundswell of Tommy Hilfiger awareness and sales to the urban customer. All of a sudden, hip-hop stylists and artists all wanted Tommy Hilfiger, and Andy was in charge of product placement. “You’re going to do a video? Come on up!”‘

Hilfiger, in what was perhaps the last great spike of his particular genius, recognised a few things. Times had changed, and his brand – fortuitously, accidentally – was already speaking to the ascendant hip-hop culture, with its half-ironic but half utterly earnest embrace of the aspirational WASP aesthetic (before Hilfiger, the hip-hop-WASP brand had been Polo). That affinity could be refined and amplified from the company’s direction, with designs that took some more explicit cues from hip-hop, and marketing and promotional efforts that made sure their clothes were on the right trend-setters. And if the company handled it right, they could take advantage of that connection without alienating their base of middle American white consumers.

Over the next few years, the logos and Hilfiger name got bigger and louder, the fit got baggier and the company expanded enormously. It sold not just to the black folks who were influenced by hip-hop culture but to the white folks who were taking their style cues from the black folks, and still, somehow, to all the millions of mostly white folks people who didn’t care much at all about hip-hop but knew, vaguely, that Hilfiger was cool. By the end of the Nineties Tommy Hilfiger was one of the biggest fashion labels in the country. It was the grand success of which Tommy had always dreamed.

The Tommy Hilfiger story, to this point, is a compelling one, in the way that entrepreneurial success stories often are. He wasn’t one of the great artists of the fashion world, but he had built a relevant brand, and had some meaningful influence on American culture. He genuinely saw possibility, in cuts and fabrics and visual vocabularies, that no designer had seen before, or that no one had been able to scale up to the mass market before, and over many years he acquired the business skill and experience to realise those ideas in the form of actual clothing that could be sold in stores around the world.

Fascinating too – and this is what elevates his significance beyond the entrepreneurial into the realm of American Pop – was the utter earnestness that he brought to his empire building, a sincere belief that the vision of American life he was selling, through his brand and clothes, was inspiring to his consumers. It was an earnestness that shapers of American pop dreams like Hilfiger often seem to have, maybe have to have, in order to speak to our fantasies so profitably.

‘I’ve always loved the look and feel of yachting and sailing and being on the sea,’ Hilfiger writes in his memoir, reflecting on how he first conceptualised his brand. ‘It conjures places in the world infused with wealth, warmth, romance, excitement, inspiration and aspiration: Newport, Nantucket, Portofino, Saint-Tropez. Just as in my dreams as a boy, being on the water is all about escapism. It embodies class. I think of Jack and Jackie Kennedy. The good life is something everyone wants.’

It’s possible to take this as just promotional copy, manufactured by a team of Hilfiger corporate flacks to reinforce the brand, but it doesn’t read that way. The earnestness, almost innocence, reads as genuine, and as psychologically consistent. And taking it on its own terms makes sense of the rather sad final third of his memoir, Tommy Hilfiger: American Dreamer, and also of the last 15 years of the life and career of Tommy Hilfiger, actual American person.

The thread is lost. The syntax goes flabby. The anecdotes go slack. It becomes a lifeless story of business transactions and celebrity ‘friendships’ and partnerships. The company goes public. It goes private. It’s acquired by another company. Top executives leave and other top executives come in. There’s a crash. There’s a recovery. Tommy restructures his ownership stake, and then restructures again. They make a fragrance for Jennifer Lopez. He becomes buddies with Tommy Mottola, who is just wonderful, and collaborates with Mottola’s young new wife, singer Thalia. She too is fresh and wonderful. He meets lots of other incredibly wonderful and talented people, who are so wonderful. He feels lucky to know them. And so on.

It lacks the emotional and narrative coherence of everything that came before, and is unpersuasive. More persuasive is the story that we can stitch together from the subtext of the book, and from Google, about what happened to Hilfiger in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Things fell apart. A number of his longtime partners and investors left the company. He got divorced from his wife Susie, who had been an anchor for him as he built his empire. Hip-hop moved on to labels, like Rocawear and Sean John, that came more directly out of the culture, and the Hilfiger label lost some of its heat (and profits). At around the same time, middle America decided that it had had enough of hip hop-ified fashion, and moved on from Tommy Hilfiger. More profits were lost. It was a rough few years.

Hilfiger remarried in 2008, and the company’s financial fortunes recovered, but somewhere along the way he lost something more essential even than his wife or his old comrades-in-arms. He lost, or gave up, or was stripped of, his place at the entrepreneurial heart of the company, where his talent, ambition and savvy were driving it forward. Maybe he’d lost his eye. Maybe he didn’t trust it anymore. Maybe he’d lost his drive. Or maybe the business had simply gotten beyond him. Whatever the reason, he wasn’t chief dreamer of the dream factory anymore.

At the end of the book, he admits as much. After the company was acquired in 2010 by Phillips-Van Heusen, his figurehead status was formalised with his designation as brand ambassador.

‘I am no longer sketching out the styles, picking the colours and buttons, adding the stripes,’ he writes toward the end of the book. ‘I miss the days when I could touch everything, but because of the size of Tommy Hilfiger … it would be impossible for me to participate in every design meeting. I have basically let go, and I am somewhat relieved not to have the pressure on a day-to-day basis. … I couldn’t be in a better position. And I do the fun stuff! The fashion shows. Flying to Shanghai to open a store. Determining the direction of our advertising. Collaborating with stars like Gigi Hadid, Zooey Deschanel and Rafael Nadal to keep the brand fresh.’

This isn’t an intrinsically tragic place to end up. It’s where many great entrepreneurs and business visionaries land, after building their empires, still involved but no longer at the white hot centre of the action. It’s where many successful fashion entrepreneurs, in particular, end up, settling into profitable conservatism after a brief, golden efflorescence of originality and influence. Hilfiger is now 65, an age when most men or women are past the point when they have the energy, or would want to expend the energy, to manage a multinational corporation. It’s easy to imagine many ways that someone in his position, with his wealth and talent and influence, might live a meaningful and satisfying next act.

To genuinely do that, though, Hilfiger would have to come to some kind of terms with the absence at the centre of the American dream, or at least the grandiose version of the dream to which he has subscribed. The promised rewards – cutting the ribbon on a new store in Shanghai, hanging with Zooey Deschanel, befriending Tommy Mottola, and summering in St. Tropez – sound genuinely fun (maybe not Mottola, but the rest of it). They don’t bring contentment or satisfaction, though. It’s the work you do to get the fun stuff, not the fun stuff itself, that creates meaning. Or if you’re a different kind of person the meaning comes from family, friends, art, God, or good works. For Hilfiger it has clearly always been the work, and the fantasy of what it can bring.

For Hilfiger to make something as striking of his last years as he made of his first 50, he would have to get back to work. He’d have to bull his way back to the heart of the Hilfiger brand, and radically revitalise it, restoring coherence, energy and brashness to a brand that no longer knows who or what it is, aside from being a highly profitable but culturally uninteresting younger brother to J. Crew and Ralph Lauren. No more vague and backwards-looking collaborations (nautical-themed Americana with Gigi Hadid one day, Nineties hip-hop with Urban Outfitters the next). No more well-funded but mostly directionless publicity stunts (carnival-themed fashion shows, crowdsourced collections¹ ). He’d have to burrow his way into the living current of the American dream, as he once did, and write a new kind of pop song in clothes.

I have no idea what that would look like. The straight WASP fantasy isn’t in right now. But it runs too deep in our culture, and our collective idea of what success, wealth and status look like, to remain out of fashion forever. It will be reinterpreted and revived, almost certainly by some man or woman from the provinces, fired by a dream, who has set out to conquer the world through stylish clothes.  

Probably not by Hilfiger, who too often seems to be subsisting, now, on a backward looking fantasy. He seems a kind of ghostly after-echo of that stylish, ambitious young man on the top of a hill in Elmira, now living in the dream of his own label, with nowhere to run and no flood to outwit and exploit.

‘I am honored to still be involved in the growth of the Tommy Hilfiger brand,’ he writes, in the last, lonely paragraph of the book. ‘It is my creation. It’s my baby. I couldn’t be happier that the DNA is intact, and the dream I conceived all those years ago, with no money in my pocket and an armful of sketches, is still alive. As a boy in school, dreaming, I thought I had big things in store, but I didn’t know how my dreams would ever come true. I hoped and prayed that they would. I’m grateful to be a dreamer, and always will be.’

Daniel Oppenheimer is a writer and short documentary filmmaker in Austin, Texas. Exit Right, his first book, was published in 2016.

1. See: http://www.thefashionspot.com/buzz-news/latest-news/719935-tommy-x-gigis-spring-2017/ and http://wwd.com/fashion-news/fashion-features/hilfiger-fashion-carnival-south-street-seaport-10512003/ ↩

It’s the same narrative typically generated by fashion collaborations: Can you believe X is working with Y? we ask, re: Juicy Couture and Vetements, Christopher Kane and Crocs, Gosha Rubchinskiy and Kangol. In 2017, the collaboration has become as common as the collection. It generates unfailing press, both critical and laudatory. In both scenarios, interest tends to hinge on the brands’ differences, on the inherent edginess of uniting them. In the case of Louis Vuitton and Supreme, the story is that the former brings to the table old-world prestige (and high prices), the latter irreverent youthfulness (and fans rabid enough to pay them).

Yet it’s worth asking: how different are Supreme and Louis Vuitton, actually? They are worn by the same celebrities.³ They are sold in the same shops.⁴ And they both communicate primarily through logos, reinforcing the notion pervasive of late that brands, even more than craft and design, create objects of desire.

Looks-wise, Louis Vuitton x Supreme is a copy-paste. Wallets, duffels and backpacks are virtually unchanged from their, in some cases, decades-old silhouettes; they’re spottable thanks to the word Supreme in limb-size font. Other pieces – skate decks, denim jackets, trunks – stamp the skate company’s logo atop the Louis Vuitton monogram, with the artistry of a teenager pasting an unrequested bumper sticker on his mum’s BMW. When Supreme knocked off Louis Vuitton in 2000, the results were more complex than this: those skate decks tweaked the century-old monogram, swapping out the LV for a dollar sign. Now, the two logos keep safe distance. If the old decks deconstructed logos, the new ones reinforce their sanctity.

The original decks didn’t make much money: two weeks after they were issued, Louis Vuitton sued Supreme,⁵ and unsold inventory was supposedly incinerated.⁶ This bit of streetwear lore fuels the narrative that there’s something subversive and daring about the new collection, too. The collection is ‘not dissimilar to that 17-year-old bootleg,’ writes Vogue.⁷ The denim looks ‘like something you might find on Canal Street rather than Bond Street,’ notes Dazed.⁸ Kim Jones, Louis Vuitton’s designer, encouraged the comparisons. ‘It’s tongue-in-cheek, a bit Dapper Dan, you know? That’s what things are now,’ he told the publication.

Dapper Dan is the Harlem tailor who, in the 1980s, turned bootlegging into an artform, creating custom outfits for rappers and sports stars and eventually getting sued by the luxury brands his designs were besting. When it was founded in 1994, Supreme had more in common with Dapper Dan than Louis Vuitton. Its red box logo was an appropriation of an artist, Barbara Kruger, who herself worked with found images from advertisements. Throughout the Nineties it was known for its irreverent ‘logo bites,’ placing stickers across Calvin Klein ads of Kate Moss, selling T-shirts that aped the branding of Patagonia and Courrèges.⁹ As Supreme grew, these were replaced by official collaborations with Vans, Nike, the Muppets, Playboy. The company began to sue others for copyright infringement, as it had once been sued.¹⁰ Its logo – created as a commentary on logos, worn as an emblem of a wry attitude towards corporate fashion – now served the ur-logo’s original design function, pioneered by Louis Vuitton in 1896: to mark authenticity and protect against intellectual property violations.¹¹

This use of the logo makes sense when you consider how much money is at stake. Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy’s annual revenue in 2015 was €35.7 billion.¹² Supreme is a privately held company, whose earnings are not subject to public disclosure law, but it has ten stores in five countries and fans willing to wait in line every single week when new products drop. The collaboration is priced accordingly: cell-phone cases are reportedly retailing for between €200 and €300, backpacks and bags between €1500 and €3000, trunks for $68,500.¹³

Dapper Dan closed his shop in the 1990s. Though many of the brands he knocked off now reference him, none have invited him to do an official partnership, he told me when we met a few years ago in New York. In one sense, this is surprising: It was Dap, after all, who invented new techniques for working with leather and fur, who created couture-like pieces that rivalled the craft of Louis Vuitton’s own artisans.¹⁴ But it’s Supreme who has most in common ideologically with the luxury brand. Its logo projects status and power. By wearing it, you align not with a person, but with an abstract and impersonal entity. It is, by definition, corporate.

Fifteen years ago, fashion collaborations followed a formula: high-end designer trades cache for cash with a mass-market retailer.¹⁵ Today, they come in all shapes: lateral (Canada Goose and Levi’s), cross-industry (Moschino and Barbie), mainstream-underground (Converse and Comme des Garçons). Often, these garments are mashups, refreshing brand aesthetics through the juxtapositions of familiar silhouettes, patterns, materials. In an era of increasingly ephemeral trends, where brands of all price points churn out hundreds of garments a year and where creative exhaustion is rampant, it’s perhaps unsurprising that designers are eager to find a kind of cheat code, a quick and easy hack for attention.

It’s also perhaps no surprise that, as the collaborations pile up, some of the buzziest versions take a meta-stance, commenting on the phenomenon while benefitting from it. Vetements, for instance, took the collaboration concept to its logical extreme, with a Spring 2017 line consisting solely of co-branded items with companies like Juicy Couture, Hanes and Dr. Martens. Shown in a department store during couture week, emphasising business instead of craft, the pieces felt like anti-couture – a clever in-joke. Similarly, Louis Vuitton x Supreme draws on the latter’s lingering anti-establishment aura, its legacy of satirising precisely the kind of consumer branding this collaboration typifies, to make appealing bags that might otherwise be seen as the luxury versions of totes from a well-sponsored conference.

In many ways, it’s an old story. Fashion has always preferred its capital and wealth obsession with a side of radical chic. But perhaps there’s something contemporary about the collection, too. In the world outside fashion, corporate power is at a heights never seen before, infiltrating art, media and politics. In November, the U.S. elected its first brand as president. His logo is his name, and it’s been used for decades to make money through reality TV shows, real estate projects, and licensing deals. Like Louis Vuitton x Supreme, Donald Trump x America is a collaboration which serves up corporate power with a side of outsider populism. And, like Supreme x Louis Vuitton, it promises to generate lots of money, at least for some.

Alice Hines is Vestoj’s online editor and a writer in New York City.

1. http://www.highsnobiety.com/2017/01/24/supreme-louis-vuitton-reactions ↩

2. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/19/fashion/mens-style/louis-vuitton-supreme-collaboration-fall-2017-menswear.html ↩

3. 2 Chainz; Odell Beckham Jr.; Kylie Jenner ↩

4. Dover Street Market ↩

5. http://www.supremenewyork.com/random/decks ↩

6. http://www.crfashionbook.com/text/louis-vuitton-supreme-2/ ↩

7. http://www.vogue.com/article/kate-moss-david-beckham-louis-vuitton-supreme ↩

8. http://www.dazeddigital.com/fashion/article/34407/1/why-lv-x-supreme-is-a-watershed-moment-for-fashion ↩

9. See: http://www.imgrum.net/media/1292882430637713806_1647796372 and https://www.reddit.com/r/supremeclothing/comments/2nm9oe/info_on_patagonia_supreme_box_logo ↩

10. ‘She’s trying to build her whole brand by piggybacking off Supreme,’ Supreme’s founder, James Jebbia, told New York Magazine, of Leah McSweeney, whose women’s skate line made goods printed with the phrase ‘Supreme Bitch.’ The logo, McSweeney said in court documents, was meant to ‘parody and comment critically upon the Plaintiff’s use of the term SUPREME in connection with its misogynistic and highly demeaning “boy’s club” attitude and line of skateboard street wear.’ See: http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/supreme-2013-5/ and http://www.complex.com/style/2013/05/supreme-court-the-12-greatest-moments-of-supremes-legal-battle-with-leah-mcsweeney/105 ↩

11. S Bonvicini, Louis Vuitton: Une saga française, Fayard, 2004. In 1895, the luggage company’s original ‘Damier’ checkerboard pattern was copied. The next year, Georges Vuitton, the son of the house’s founder Louis, designed a more complex monogram – the one still in use today – in order to ‘dissuade’ imitators. ‘Ironically, it would become the most copied design in the world a century later,’ writes Bonvicini. [my translation] ↩

12. https://www.lvmh.com/news-documents/press-releases/excellent-performance-of-lvmh-in-2015/  ↩

13. See: https://www.instagram.com/p/BPcxeOTA1_Z/ and http://www.highsnobiety.com/2017/01/25/supreme-louis-vuitton-prices/ ↩

14. Dapper Dan is interviewed in Vestoj’s On Masculinities issue. He was also a storyteller at Vestoj‘s Storytelling Salon at MoMA PS1 in 2015. His story can be viewed here, at minute 34:20. ↩

15. Isaac Mizrahi for Target in 2003; Karl Lagerfeld for H&M in 2004. ↩