Brands and Labels

 

In the mid-to-late nineteenth century, brands emerged as a means of commercial differentiation in the marketplace. The branding process begins with the application of a name to a business, product, or family of products and includes the creation of an image for that business that distinguishes it from its competitors. Brand image is typically communicated through advertising, but the value of a brand is generally determined by its reputation and the level of consumer loyalty or desirability it can generate. A desirable brand name allows companies in the fashion industry to bridge the gap between expensive, high-fashion garments and affordable mass-market goods such as perfumes, accessories, and ready-to-wear diffusion lines.

Copyright, Patent, and Trademark Legislation

The establishment of copyright, patent, and trademark legislation in the nineteenth century is closely linked to the emergence of brands, as this allowed companies to legally protect their names and seek redress from their imitators. Many other factors influenced the emergence of modern brands, including the expansion of new distribution and retail networks, the increased dominance of fixed pricing, the concurrent growth of the advertising and packaging trades, and the shift of consumer goods markets from local to national (and international).

Patent legislation, which protects the unauthorized use of original designs for manufacture, allows the fashion industry to seek legal protection for designs. It also benefits from intricate trademark legislation, which safeguards the words, names, symbols, sounds, or colors used to distinguish goods and services. This effectively covers the use of a company's logo and brand identity from counterfeit and "look-alike" goods, where the visual identity of the brand is suggested rather than copied exactly.

Levi Strauss and Co.

Levi Strauss and Co., for example, incorporated many trademarked features into their garments (such as rivets and stitching) and provided proof of authenticity in the form of a patent and trademark "certificate" with each garment (later to be sewn on as a label). Authenticity is a central promise of branded goods, and the fashion industry has used it to generate high cultural value in a world of fast turnover, shifting consumer loyalties, and an apparent insatiable desire for novelty. Fashion branding has come to be associated with a late-capitalist consumerist culture in which the experience, rather than the product, drives demand.

Developing a Brand

Many fashion houses became brands as a result of franchising and licensed copying. Couture houses like Worth and Paquin sold through an international network of department stores between 1880 and 1914. In order to reduce illegal copying, they sold reproduction rights to private dressmaking salons. Model copying was a fundamental part of the nineteenth-century fashion trade, and designer "names" such as Worth would create models specifically for retailers in both Europe and America to profit from this practice. By the 1860s, Worth had to incorporate a house label into their products, with the Worth name and address either stamped or woven into garments (labels were in turn copied by counterfeit producers).

This two-tier system of couture models and more accessible ready-to-wear lines bearing the same label was used to build the international reputations of successive generations of designers, including Paul Poiret and Coco Chanel. The "signature label" became a defining feature of twentieth-century fashion, allowing fashion houses and named designers to attach their names to goods such as clothing, perfume, cosmetics, and even household products to distinguish them. In this way, fashion branding expanded beyond the "naming" of a product to the creation of desirable lifestyle scenarios that consumers could ostensibly replicate by purchasing even the smallest named item. During the 1930s, most major couture labels, including Elsa Schiaparelli, Coco Chanel, and Jean Patou, successfully marketed their signature perfumes far beyond the couture market.

Franchising

In the postwar period, franchising became more popular. In the 1940s, designers like Dior used the success of franchise agreements to support the riskier business of couture. Designers such as Paco Rabanne, Pierre Cardin, Calvin Klein, and Ralph Lauren capitalized on the value of their brands in the 1970s and 1980s by franchising their names to producers of housewares, accessories, and beauty lines. Some labels were quickly debased by a lack of quality control, crossing the fine line between exclusivity and down-market ubiquity. Because the practice has become more common, it is also more heavily influenced by the presence of major global conglomerates such as LVMH and the Gucci Group. Many brands, such as Donna Karan, have successfully established a family of brands or diffusion lines, each with its own personality and target market.

Influence of Sports and Leisure

Aside from the diversification of fashion houses, the expansion of the sports and leisure sectors into fashion has also influenced brand culture. Despite its claim to be driven solely by the needs of athletes, Nike has become synonymous with street fashion since its diversification in the mid-1980s. Nike's meteoric growth was also due to its direct appeal to a sense of personal achievement via its "Just Do It" slogan and highly emotive advertising. It also fueled overt brand loyalty among its wearers. The popularity of branded goods among narrowly defined "style tribes" has resulted in an overabundance of goods with prominently displayed logos.

Building a Portfolio

Investment in brand building had reached unprecedented levels by the twenty-first century, with many familiar brand names reinventing themselves through the hiring of celebrity designers and radical company overhauls. Fashion and luxury brands have been hit the hardest, as companies known for a specific product category (such as leather goods) launch couture and ready-to-wear collections. Brand "auteurs" like Tom Ford have transformed the fortunes of companies like Gucci in a few short years by combining business acumen and designer credentials. Many individual designers now work in multiple capacities at the same time, such as designing their own couture and ready-to-wear collections, creating a collection for another fashion house (John Galliano and Alexander McQueen have both held this position at Givenchy), and possibly acting as a consultant to a department store's own label. These designers' individual reputations may be jeopardized by the success of named collections, but the companies behind them are now multinational conglomerates, each with a massive portfolio of brands.