Link Banana

In this weekend’s New York Times Magazine, Rob Walker highlights this interesting business:

Sometimes, it takes a minute for visitors to the Destee Nation Shirt Company in Seattle to understand the common theme linking the wide array of T-shirts on sale. Many have a vintage look and seem to advertise businesses from a bygone era, or to offer made-up riffs on such advertisements — a faux faded logo for Blue Moon Burgers, the dubious-sounding Tractor Tavern and so on. But each has a tag attached, giving the story of each business, as well as its address. “Then it hits them,” says Matt Morgan, the founder of Destee Nation. “These places are all real.”

Rob Walker has an interesting, if sometimes shallow-feeling, exploration of the increasingly common practice of reviving old brand names that people remember faintly. It an interesting look at psychology and the logic of branding.

Too many such deals, or the wrong kinds, can boomerang: this happens with some regularity in the fashion world, when a famous designer name gets spread over so many products, with so little regard to quality, that the entire image of the brand sinks. Still, if you see a ladder made by Stanley, you may well think, Well, there’s a name I can trust. What you’re trusting, though, isn’t Stanley workers in Stanley factories upholding Stanley traditions and values under the watchful eye of Stanley managers. What you’re trusting is Stanley’s recognition that a badly made ladder with the Stanley name on it could be highly damaging to the Stanley brand. You are trusting Stanley’s recognition of the value of its brand and its competence in defending that value.

Brawndo, the drink of choice in Mike Judge’s Idiocracy, is now on sale. Rob Walker had some interesting thoughts about what it means:

It’s interesting to consider the Brawndo project as metasubversion, making it possible to express knowing amusement at the absurdity of American commerce by buying something. But maybe the message is simply that cautionary tales about dumbed-down culture are a futile endeavor: show us an argument that we will buy anything, no matter how idiotic, and we say, “Awesome — how much for that?”