APPROPRIATIONS

It’s a story of keen youngsters who eagerly douse themselves in fragrance. Alert to every new launch, they collect the bottles and analyze the scents. For a while now, they’ve been fixated on a particular one from a major perfume house. It’s not only the most luxurious, but also most expensive. Over time—and against all the odds—it’s even become their fragrance. Theirs, and all their friends’. Bottles are exchanged, and imitations of varying quality pass from hand to hand. Its status has reached legendary proportions, and its appropriation is complete. Now this fragrance no longer belongs to the brand that created it. Who would have thought it? Who could have imagined that the marketing edifice so cleverly constructed by the great house of luxury could be upended like this?

Here at L'Étiquette, we love to relate these tales of cultural hijackings. In past issues, we wrote about how and why Lacoste was appropriated by urban working-class kids. Another time, we described Italy’s Paninaro youth movement and its obsession with down ski jackets designed for Milan’s bourgeoisie. We also headed to the United States to tell the story of how New York rappers reclaimed Carhartt, the working man’s brand, in the 1990s. In this issue, along with the uplifting fragrance story, we bring you a historic account of the casuals, an aesthetic born in England in the 1980s. Members of the proletariat and avid football fans, the casuals appropriated a comprehensive array of Italian middle-class tennis brands like Fila, Ellesse and Sergio Tacchini to wear in the stands of soccer stadiums.

What about the future? The fashion industry’s power is constantly growing, ever-bigger budgets are being plowed into strategy development, and the analysis of personal data is increasingly being weaponized to forecast— or rather dictate—what consumers will want next. Against this backdrop, what scope will remain for these grassroots “hijackings”? Will they be able to withstand an increasingly weighty fashion-industrial complex? In two or three decades, will young people only be wearing clothes that have been precisely calibrated for them by the brands? Or will they still have the fortitude to seek out fashions and fragrances beyond the mainstream? We can’t know for sure, but we like to think that the worst may never happen.