Conflicts of Interest, Culture Jamming and Subversive (S)ignifications: The High Fashion Logo as Locational Hip hop Artic

Abstract

In 2012, a fashion line called “Conflict of Interest NYC” (C.O.I.) released a collection of three unisex t-shirts: each one took the brand name and/or logo of a storied fashion house and imposed a set of urban and hip hop references to subvert the brand’s refined, Eurocentric connotations. This article describes the t-shirts’ function as parodies using media studies accounts of culture jamming as political practice; Linda Hutcheon’s formulation of parody as literary method; and Henry Louis Gates’s outline of Signifyin(g) in the black oral vernacular tradition. It further contextualizes the t-shirts within historical tensions between dominant fashion institutions and hip hop culture at the semiotic level of the brand logo. It then reads the t-shirt containing the name BALLINCIAGA (manipulating the Paris fashion house Balenciaga) for its intertextual and historical relations to the expressive forms and urban locations of hip hop culture. Finally, the article examines a photograph of a fashion editor wearing the BALLINCIAGA t-shirt to London Fashion Week, in October 2012, as a moment of resistance but also of fashion re-appropriating the t-shirts’ political content. Still, the t-shirts’ circulation as commodities permits for reflection on the politics of fashion and subcultures within the dominant logic of capitalism.