Men’s Fashion Debate – Does Brand Matter?

Image: M&S Best Of British AW13

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Introduction

Brands are everywhere. Everything you buy, drink, eat, watch or look at is, in some way, a branded item. When you buy the own brand goods from your local supermarket you might well think that you’re sticking two fingers up at that hateful consumerist, marketing machine when in actual fact you are still investing in some kind of brand, it’s just not so well recognised.
It doesn’t matter if you buy your soy milk, chi tea latte with cinnamon on top from Starbucks or your local independent coffee shop – you’re still buying into a brand, and somewhere along the line a marketing executive will have had his sticky little branding paws all over it.
However, this would suggest that all brands are exactly the same – yet nothing could be further from the truth. Brands are far from equal in almost every sense and there can be stratospheric differences between one brand and the next. From size to quality, intensity to purpose, brands are about as different from one another as we are from giraffes.
Clothes, of course, are all about the brand. Marketing strategies are what make a company successful and when it comes to looking good and dressing well, it’s ALL about the image.

The Debate

I first stoked the fires of this debate a couple of years ago. Back then I considered how we associated particular brands with certain types of people; the issue of location was raised and I pushed the idea of looking past the logos and negative associations in the name of making the most of everything a brand had to offer.
This time we’ll be looking at how brands have developed, along with how this may have changed our perception of these particular brands and the way we consume them and/or dress with them. We will also reiterate the idea that we shouldn’t totally discount brands due to a tiny proportion of their clothing, the associations of the people that wear them or their history.