Dystopia and Logomania: Fascism and Fashion at the End of the World
William Gibson and Brett Easton Ellis depict post-apocalyptic worlds where logos and brands have replaced identity
By Eric Shorey
When you think of the sci-fi author William Gibson, the first thing that comes to mind is probably not the stitch-count of a Mongolian button-down shirt. The world-renowned progenitor of cyberpunk literature is best known for his 1984 novel Nueromancer: a prototypical example of a genre which would be fully realized only a handful of years later. Characterized by the omnipresence of hyper-powerful multinational corporations and a clandestine underworld of hackers who attempt (in vain) to subvert their panoptic authority, cyberpunk literature often mimics film noir with stories of futuristic espionage.
Neuromancer anticipated the rise of the Internet long before the concept was in the public’s imagination, in ways that seemed almost terrifyingly prophetic. Gibson has suggested in interviews that his gift for prediction comes not from any kind of clairvoyance but from a sort of sub-conscious ability to see “nodal points” within data, an ability shared by Colin Laney, the protagonist of his novels Idoru (1996) and All Tomorrow’s Parties (1999). Laney’s ability is described in the books as a kind of barely detectable “concentration deficit” which can, at will, be toggled into hyper-focus that allows him to detect fluxes in massive amounts of data that indicate the potentiality for sometimes world-historical changes. One might call this a fictional form of autism, savantism, or a kind of weaponized ADHD. Gibson in a 1999 interview:
“Laney’s node-spotter function is some sort of metaphor for whatever it is that I actually do. There are bits of the literal future right here, right now, if you know how to look for them. Although I can’t tell you how; it’s a non-rational process.”
Cayce Pollard, the protagonist of Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition (2003), shares a similar ability. Pollard, cursed with a sort of autistic susceptibility to brands and logos (seeing the Michelin Man, for example, instantly gives her a migraine), possesses an uncanny skill for knowing, through a similarly non-rational, sub-conscious process, what logo designs will suddenly work with massive audiences. Seeing a Nike swoosh, for example, might give her a headache, but she could immediately and accurately tell if the brand’s redesign would successfully sell merch en masse.
I always think about Cayce whenever some company unveils a new, carefully constructed corporate logo, what kinds of extensive and exhaustive market testing they went through, what rogue psychologists they consulted with, what secretive calculations they underwent before finally showing the public the new Pepsi brand identity, or whatever.
Cayce, due to her sensitivities, can only outfit herself in brandless, logo-free clothing:
“What people take for relentless minimalism is a side effect of too much exposure to the reactor-cores of fashion. This has resulted in a remorseless paring-down of what she can and will wear. She is, literally, allergic to fashion. She can only tolerate things that could have been worn, to a general lack of comment, during any year between 1945 and 2000. She’s a design-free zone, a one-woman school of anti whose very austerity periodically threatens to spawn its own cult.”
Cayce becomes the target of pan-global intrigue as various fashion conglomerates compete for her consultations, resulting in her being kidnapped by corporate spooks more than once throughout the book.
Her signature jacket, a Buzz Rickson’s MA-1 bomber, is pored over so lovingly in the book that descriptions of its stitches, pockets, zippers, and collar take up probably over 20 pages of the novel. The fictional Buzz Rickson’s garment becomes a kind of totem or fetish: from an ultra-limited edition run of specialized, Japan-exclusive, vintage military reproductions, the impossible-to-obtain jacket is a symbol of exclusivity and power. At one point, Pollard’s jacket is damaged by a cigarette burn. It’s a sign of unfathomable wealth and influence when a corporation she’s employed by replaces it the next day.
Fun fact: Pollard’s fictional Buzz Rickson’s jacket was ultimately created as a limited edition release by the brand, based on the perfect specs provided in the novel. (And yes, I own one of them!)
Like cybernetic information exchange or Japanese subcultures, fashion and the specifics of clothing construction is a sort of quasi-autistic “special interest” for Gibson. If Gibson claims that his talent lies in detecting nodal points in information-dense systems, his fixation on fashion logos follows: a brand’s iconography and graphic imagery is a kind of information-dense system, a unique and ubiquitous kind of cryptographic language (another “special interest” of Gibson’s) that can learn to be read through skill and study.
Gibson’s use of postmodern metaphor, in which he compares “naturally” occurring phenomenon to technological happenings, is often cited by academics as evidence of the disappearance of the “Real” as an ontological category. See the first sentence of Nueromancer: “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” The television static is the Real, the sky the referent.
Less studied is his fashion obsession and his absolutely insane attention to detail when it comes to characters’ clothes. In Idoru for example, the outfit of a hikikomori teenager is expounded upon with obsessional precision: the reader is told not only that Masahiko is wearing oversized sweatpants, but we’re also told what kind of nylon elastic is in the waistband. Laney’s aforementioned Mongolian button-down becomes a point of major contention for his nefarious corporate boss, who spots the garment’s stitch count on the button enclosures and immediately clocks it as a knockoff of a designer Italian shirt, thus indicating his class status and general lack of awareness within a schematic of corporate control. She is easily able to manipulate Laney for the duration of the novel, later blackmailing him by digitally inserting him into a deepfaked rape video (yes, Gibson predicted the problems with deepfake porn in 1996).
What Gibson implicitly suggests in his fashion-obsession is that logos can be used as a subtle form of control; that peoples’ brains are hacked, so to speak, by these discreet symbols which become associated with aspirational dreams, memories, and fantasies in the minds of potential buyers. Fashion is as much a means of exerting authority as it is of personal expression or artistic creativity. Fashion, and fashion logos in particular, become a kind of dystopian linguistics in which power is subtly expressed, conveyed, demonstrated, and deployed.
But, like Gibson’s poetical post-modern rhetoric, the replacement of information with logos reflects a kind of disappearance of the Real. Quality or authenticity becomes replaced with an arbitrary signifier of what might have once been an indicator of value: the three stripes of Adidas becomes associated with athletic performance and esteem, even if the brand no longer makes products that have any intention of ever being used by actual athletes, as evident in their hyper-expensive and occasionally unwearable collaborations with Yohji Yamamoto and Gucci. The association with sports becomes even further abstracted, or perhaps even irony-poisoned, in their collaboration with Balenciaga, which is even more expensive and even more unwearable.
This is sort of the intellectual one-trick-pony gimmick of post-modern theorists: that the original referent, in this case a shoe worn by athletes, has been lost — replaced, instead, with a signifier (of a signifier) of that original athletic shoe, which no longer exists.
It’s precisely this concept with which Balenciaga creative director Demna is often playing, sometimes going as far as replacing his brand’s logo with other corporate logos (Mastercard, Sony, etc…) — or even, in its most extreme version, with a generic placeholder logo. No surprise that Balenciaga also sells garments from Balenciaga hotels that don’t actually exist, activewear for Balenciaga gyms that don’t actually exist, and merch for the boy band Speed Hunters, a group that doesn’t actually exist.
(By the way, that Balenciaga “Your Logo Here” hoodie currently resells for approximately $650. I don’t own that one. Yet.)
What I think Gibson predicted better than any other writer was that eventually, logos would replace personhood, selfhood, individuality, and identity entirely. These things just another referent lost in an unending chain of signification.
In Pattern Recognition, written long before social media influencing was conceived of as a possible career path, Cayce befriends a group of corporate lackeys known as Cool Hunters. The group, employed mysteriously by a shell corporation of a shell corporation, is essentially paid to socialize. But as they attend various parties, gallery openings, galas, events, restaurants, they’re supposed to name-drop specific brands and products casually into conversation. The problem, of course, becomes that after a while, the Cool Hunters no longer know who they are or what they like themselves: what can your identity really be, if your tastes are entirely shaped by people who pay you to have specific tastes? Individuality and personal aesthetics are just another lost referent, replaced instead by information dense, entirely arbitrary logos. This is the truly dystopian element of his novels: the loss of humanity in favor of authoritarian control, not imposed upon us by some overtly fascistic government, but instead by brands who colonize and decimate, through logos, our sense of self.
We can go one step further with this: even within this authoritarian system of logo-control there’s no difference between real and fake anymore — the referent to a “real” upon which a “fake” is based is now meaningless. This New York Times article on so-called “superfakes,” re-tweeted recently by Gibson himself, shows how even experts can’t tell the difference between real and fake handbags anymore. Nor do the sellers of said handbags even know where they get their goods from, as the actual production of the bags is occluded from the sellers themselves through a chain of secretive agents who sell to each other, and ultimately, to cheap, wannabe luxurious ladies in the USA. This is light-years beyond “alienation” in both the colloquial and strictly Marxist senses of the word: the spiritual or emotional alienation of wanting a luxury object for its supposed magical and totemic power in conveying an ephemeral idea of chicness to onlookers and the Marxist alienation of a laborer becoming increasingly divorced from the good he creates or sells.
“There was an aura to the real thing that the fake didn’t have,” says fashion writer Judith Thurman in the article, defending her purchase of authenticated luxury goods. “And if you ask me what does that mean, I really almost can’t say. Part of it was the spirit of going to the shop and paying more money than I could afford.”
Logically, the aura of the real designer item is literally meaningless if there’s no discernible difference between real and fake. (But phenomenologically, I agree with Thurman, even if it doesn’t make any sense.)
Bret Easton Ellis, although not overtly a dystopian writer, shows us the same phenomenon happening. Although less obsessive with regard to actual garment construction, personages in his novels identify each other and themselves not by physical descriptors or personality quirks but by the labels they wear. It’s become his own one-trick-pony gimmick: in American Psycho (1991) and beyond, characters are introduced by a series of brand names they are currently sporting and not by any information about who they actually are. In American Psycho and Glamorama (1998) in particular, the characters are always confused about who they are talking to, since everyone has become a totally modular mannequin on which designer clothing sits. No one knows or remembers each others’ names. They are no longer actual people, instead they are collections of logos.
In Ellis’s latest novel The Shards (2023), a fictionalized, teenage version of the writer hauls around a Gucci backpack that serves the same totemic role as Pollard’s Buzz Rickson’s. The Gucci backpack — which is never once referred to simply as a backpack or a bag, always as “the Gucci backpack” — represents a kind of impossible, unfathomable wealth and power. Gifted to Ellis by perpetually absent parents who are identified more so by where they vacation than by anything resembling a personality, the backpack conveys unto Ellis a kind of untouchable status, even as Ellis barely considers its financial or spiritual worth. But it’s also a replacement for parental love, an arbitrary signifier of that theoretical love, standing in for something that no longer exists.
Although Ellis’s novels ostensibly take place within our world, in our current timeline, his descriptions of the surreal nightmare his characters inhabit border on the apocalyptic. Take, for example, his description of Camden college (a fictionalized version of Bennington college) following a Saturday night rager in The Rules of Attraction (1987):
“The campus is dead, unawake, even though it’s almost noon, which means they will have all missed brunch, and I smile with satisfaction at the knowledge of this luxury withheld from them. Almost all the windows have been smashed at Wooley, ripped sheets lay rolled up in ball over the green lawn outside the broken French windows of the living room, or hang from trees like big deflated ghost balloons. Flies buzz around three sticky trashcans that are lying on their sides in the cool autumn sun, drying. There are three people asleep, or dead, two of them sitting up, in the living room, one of them naked, face-down. Vomit, beer, wine, cigarette smoke, punch, marijuana, even even the smell of sex, semen, sweat, women, permeate the room, hang in the air like haze […] I’m still carrying my bag, careful not to drop it on the floor, which makes cracking noises every time I take a step. Beer and punch, or maybe it’s vomit, is everywhere, in pools, thrown in streaks on the walls from which big chunks of plaster are missing. A broken film projector, half of it crushed, is in the corner, unwound reels surrounding it. Cigarette butts cover the floor like big flattened white bugs. In the hallway are two people, dead, sleeping, on top of each other. The house itself is incredibly silent, even for a Saturday.”
Throughout Glamorama, a novel in which a supermodel unwittingly becomes involved in an international terrorist organization (or, perhaps, is suffering from a paranoid psychotic episode), characters are constantly complaining about the cold, no matter the setting or weather — and there’s always confetti on the floor, no matter where they are. These kinds of dreamscapes, half destroyed and half frozen, establish the setting as some kind of netherworld — an existential limbo in between Earth and Hell, between the past and some terrible, unrealized future.
For Gibson, the world is in the process of losing depth — meaning is being replaced by logos — for Ellis, meaning has already collapsed entirely, as per Patrick Bateman’s infamous monologue in American Psycho:
“Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire- meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead. Fear, recrimination, innocence, sympathy, guilt, waste, failure, grief, were things, emotions, that no one really felt anymore. Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface, was all that anyone found meaning in…this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged…”
And now, in our real world, the collapse itself is collapsing. One of the most notable trends in contemporary streetwear is logomania, a preponderance of logos in different styles on the same garment in bizarrely clashing graphic design:
(Just in case you’re curious, the above hoodie sells for $2120).
Logos themselves are collapsing into other logos, giving way to dizzyingly cynical collaborations like Fendi x Versace, in which both brands simply plop their logos on top of one another, creating a vertiginous hallucination of luxury. (Although, I must admit, the clothes are beautiful!)
For the Gucci x Balenciaga collaboration, stores would hire nameless graffiti artists to spray paint directly onto luxury handbags, with the unique drips becoming ironic markers of authenticity, in what was called The Hacker Project (although, I doubt the nod to Gibson was intentional). A sort of Rene Magritte-adjacent trompe l’oeil that only makes sense if you know how to “read” it.
I always find it sort of quaintly humorous when leftists (extremely online or otherwise) talk about our slow descent into fascism, as if our minds haven’t already been totally overtaken by a more subtle fascist, fashion regime. So the old Walter Benjamin quote goes: “The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.”
And no one, ironically, is more guilty of this than the same leftists who reduce politics to a series of personal aesthetic choices, in which brands and brand ambassadors become representatives of discrete political attitudes: Don’t buy Chik-Fil-A, but we love Disney. Brand allegiance replaces politics in the world of social media discourse. (The recent culture war controversies perpetuated by the American right show that they just learned the same political trick as a means of exerting fascistic control over their own cult-like adherents.) The self-policing of brand affiliation, then, becomes a new function for the superego, and suddenly people find themselves feeling guilt about buying from this or that store and not another, with shopping replacing actual, meaningful political engagement (whatever that means) or sociality entirely. Certain brands become egosyntonic, experienced as a part of the self, while others that supposedly represent a political position antagonistic to a person’s ego ideal, are experienced as egodystonic.
It is of no surprise, once again, that the word “brand” itself has become almost entirely interchangeable with the words “identity” and “personality” and “politics.” If a person says “that’s not my brand,” they’re really saying, “that’s not who I am.” There is no difference, and in this way we are all subjects to ceaseless, authoritarian regime of logos. What brands are on-brand for you?
I ultimately think that the postmodernists were right in asserting that this flattening of meaning into logos represents a kind of apocalypse, a kind of end of the world, from which there is no return. Dystopia forever. Of course, the same philosophers were routinely criticized for not having a revolutionary project, for giving in to political apathy by espousing this as a situation with no exit.
I accept that critique because ultimately, my personal solution to this is to just give up on fighting it. Don’t sell out, buy in — or whatever. Bury me in Balenciaga. That’s my brand, ya know?