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Comment by johnpowell | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I just live in a weird place. But I see a lot less branding when I walk around town compared to 20 years ago. My sister has 17 year old twin girls and they pretty much refuse to wear anything that makes them a "walking billboard".

I live close to the university of Oregon and when I was in high school it was all Nike clothes all over campus. Now I still see some but not nearly as much. It is like "Likes" instead of logos is what makes the kids cool now.

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In the UK wearing branded 'designer' clothing is a kind of status signal people with a low status tend to gravitate towards.

People of a higher status are more likely to dress conservatively since they don't have anything to 'prove'.

/*generally speaking

A lot of the really expensive high end designer clothes don't really have any logos on them or if they do they are very small for this very reason. Due to this what they wear might look conservative but could be expensive as fuck ;)

A lot does but it's subtle and only those "in the know" can identify a particular designer.

That exactly. Which is probably the same thing that several others have pointed out.. A 100$ shirt will have huge logos all over the place because the market segment it targets are people who can "just" afford it and want to signal other people who can't. A 1000$ shirt will have little to no logos and will be distinguished only by "others" who can spend as much, because if you wear 1000$ shirts why would you care signalling to the person who can "just" afford 100$ shirts that you have so much more? You may care to signal this to other 1000$ shirt owners but then maybe you just don't care about signalling via clothing ;)

Funnily enough, proper serious money can be spotted in Mayfair/South Ken etc by how tatty and casual their clothes are. For the British it is usually an aristocratic type. Middle eastern princes and billionaires are often in the most expensive restaurants and clubs wearing tracksuits among the suited crowd.

I chalk this up to the culture/counter-culture cycle. When the trend is to wear logos, the next trend will usually be to wear clothes without logos (or with different logos), and vice-versa.

An anecdote I like to look back to here is how Gap once sold mostly clothes with "GAP" prominently displayed, but nowadays is somewhere you can purchase an entire business casual wardrobe.

Think you might be on to something. When I was growing up, the counter-culture was liberal. Now, liberal is mainstream and the counter-culture is conservative. Never thought I'd see the day when a suit and tie would be the daring, non-conformist thing to wear! :)

> My sister has 17 year old twin girls and they pretty much refuse to wear anything that makes them a "walking billboard".

I'm about twice as old as these twins and I made a similar decision back then. If I wanted to be a billboard, at least let me be one I think is worth while.

In Ithaca, Canada Goose is all the rage.

I went to Chicago and was really surprised. Nice coats with a huge patch. I thought everyone had added them themselves.

Depends a lot on the scene. Supreme and others are quite successful with some hyper dominant logos.

I bet they wear Lulu lemon.. that’s the trend now.

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