Thread by @dieworkwear

Do you know why luxury brands put logos all over their clothes? I'll tell you. 🧵

The most obvs reason is that luxury and streetwear have been merging for the last 20 years. Cristóbal Balenciaga was known for these incredible dresses (pic 1). But in more recent history, creative director Demna Gvasalia, who just left the company, borrows from streetwear.

I actually like streetwear, although I'm not crazy about the top-down, corporate-led version of it in recent years (more about that for another time). A lot of streetwear is heavily logo driven. Look up the history of Dapper Dan, who made these incredible couture creations.

That's the obvious reason why a lot of designer fashion now is in logo mania. But there's a deeper reason that has to do our legal system.

In the US, a lot of fashion isn't covered by copyright law bc clothes are considered useful items. You can't copyright polo shirts or jeans.

In fact, this is one of the tricks of the trade. Designers will sometimes send samples of another company's product and ask for some aspect to be copied, such as the fit and silhouette. So if a company likes how Levi's 501s fit, they can copy the cut.

However, you can copyright certain things, such as a unique graphic that has been printed on a t-shirt. Or an embroidery. You can also legally protect trademarks. Back to the Levi's example, I can copy the cut of 501s, but I can't put the red tab on the jeans.

This is one of the reasons why, even before luxury brands started co-opting streetwear, they put logos all over their creations. You might be able to copy the exact shape of this purse and even use the same materials. But the minute you use this logo, you're in legal trouble.

This is why you see logos all over the place—the Balenciaga and Gucci logos on the hats, as well as the North Face logo on the parka. It allows companies to use the US legal system to go after copycats.

Of course, this doesn't stop all copycats. On NYC's Canal Street, you can find counterfeit versions of all sorts of luxury goods. And you know what? Some of them are actually quite good! It can be very hard to distinguish the real from the fake nowadays.

Years ago, I interviewed a luxury consignor, who told me that fakes nowadays are so hard to spot, he asks for receipts and credit card records to prove the owner actually bought the item from an Hermes store. Of course, those documents can be faked too. It's a hard business!

Why are luxury brands so protective? It's because many of them run on the *artificial scarcity.* It can take skilled labor to make an Hermes bag—who knows if they could increase their run of Birkens—but luxury t-shirts? Give me a break. They could pump out a million of these.

And what would happen if the market were suddenly flooded with Balenciaga t-shirts and the company couldn't go after the counterfeiters? What if in every store and on Amazon, you could order this same exact t-shirt? Well, Balenciaga could no longer charge their customers $675

This basic principle—designing clothes in a way that allows luxury brands to create artificial scarcity, enforced by the US legal system—is partly how they're able to extract the most from their customers, even if the clothes are essentially unimaginative, cheap crap.

It's a principle we see in many other areas of the market. I will let you decide where you see it crop up. Where do we see artificial scarcity that ends up creating inflated profits? And how can we change those laws to reduce prices for consumers?