CARLOS wearing a superleggero in Napoli, Spring 2011.
We say branding is a kind of cultural location of the object, you have the object then you have the branding which locates the object. When I was in New York in the offices of the world’s leading streetwear brand’s offices they said ‘You know J. will do expensive things of an excellent quality but he’ll also do cheap things, but if they’re cheap they have to look cheap, you know? You have to get that cheap look just right.” Nobody likes it when the branding’s wrong. We’re in a period of analysis right now, we’re taking stock, the giants left on the face of the earth are brands, things that started just as surnames, live on powerfully, their image has a life of their own, the designers in the offices get sucked into it, work in its thrall. The most subversive thing you can do is make the brand so potent its copy-able. Designers 20 years ago were still thinking that the politics was in the object and they were interested in perfecting pocket details, now all the cutting edge people know production of the brand’s object is just a symbolic sideshow, a carrier for the digital dispersal of information. Photo and text Lodovico Pignatti Morano.
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