Luxury before logos
Soon after arriving in the South Korean capital of Seoul late last year – pre-pandemic – Véronique Nichanian found herself observing the outfit of a young man on the street. There was a lot to take in – three or four different brand names and logos in large fonts vied for the French designer’s attention, like neon signs in the city’s famous Gangnam-gu district. “I was thinking to myself, what does this mean? What does this express about himself?” Nichanian wonders aloud with a shrug that implies slight frustration at the s-word that’s dominated menswear for the last few seasons. “I didn’t understand it. The logomania, I hate it.”
At the peak of the recent streetwear boom, which menswear archivists will hereafter peg to late 2017 or early 2018, Nichanian’s stance probably would’ve been perceived as cynical and out of date. Hoodies and sneakers were the new status symbols, and the definition of luxury seemed on the cusp of unrecognisable, irreversible change. But Nichanian has been making clothes long enough to recognise the ebb and flow of a fad when one hits and threatens, Virgil Abloh boldly stated “it’s definitely gonna die”) do we declare through the lens of hindsight that Nichanian had a point. The hype couldn’t last forever.
