Core77

Rob comes on stronger than he's used to in this essay published on ChangeThis (a collection of manifestos for CEO-types--honest). In The Invisible Badge: Moving Past Conspicuous Consumption, he discusses the true motivations for acquisition and display, moving past Veblen through Virginia Postrel, landing somewhere over the (Maslow) rainbow. Here's a nice taste:

In his book about luxury, Living It Up, scholar James Twitchell compared the effect of certain rarefied, high-end brands with a dog whistle. As an example, he pointed to the various sorts of logo treatments on a Prada bag. A bag with a small logo would likely be more expensive than one with a big logo--and one with no logo whatsoever would be the most expensive of all: Only true cognoscenti would "hear" it. "This was connoisseurship applied to consumption," he wrote.

During the course of reporting my book Buying In--which deals with the intersection of personal narrative and consumer behavior in some detail--I had many interesting conversations with young creators of a newer generation of brands (I call it the "brand underground") that take Twitchell's dog whistle idea into a new realm.

These brands--like Barking Irons, or The Hundreds--may be unfamiliar to you if not are a participating in the subcultures they are part of. But they do communicate participation in a subculture, and in a way that has a lot more in common with Twitchell's dog whistle than with, say, the aggressively flamboyant regalia of punk: As in the luxury arena, you need the proper background to understand what you were seeing. To everyone else--underground arrivistes, Twitchell might say--the brand symbols mean nothing and probably don't even register. Brand underground badges are, in effect, invisible.

And this is not a failure; it is the goal. It suggests a tighter relationship between the brand producer and the brand consumer, and speaks more directly to that most crucial relationship: the relationship between the consumer and consumed.

If the underground logo is a badge, it's one that is most noteworthy for how few people can see it.

Download the PDF here.