Lost in translation
Recently I was lucky enough to visit both HK and Tokyo to pimp the brand and catch up with some old crew. But the entire time something weighed heavily on my thoughts. And it suddenly hit me in a taxi deep under HK harbour – our products just don’t translate well.
Recently we’ve been thinking a lot about what we stand for as a brand. Our ephemeral start seemed to be solidifying into a comfortable niche within the broader streetwear scene. And it was armed with this new-found confidence that I hit Asia. So it was particularly disappointing to realise that our plan to be ‘big in Japan/China’ had just stalled like a single-engined Cessna.
After some (tender) examination, I realised that its not the brand that’s the problem, but the literature-specific graphics. Unfortunately for us, it is these graphics that best illustrate our brand right now.
And therein lies the rub – concepts are hard enough to describe and comprehend in your mother tongue, let alone in another language. Translation annihilates subtlety, but even if we were fluent in every language out there, the real strength in our current designs is that they are proxies for much larger ideas. Piggy-backing Orwell’s genius (for example) works only where Orwell already means something. Trying to distill 1984 in an arm-waving parody of charades in the middle of a trade show in Tokyo quickly relegated us to the too-hard basket. The sad reality is that Dunks, Ray-Bans and bling are universal in a way that literature will never be.
When we started the-affair, how the brand translated in the Far East was not top of mind – we just weren’t thinking that far ahead. And on reflection its a real shame we probably never will be ‘big in Japan/China’. But ultimately I’ve realised that you can’t be all things to all people. And perhaps this is the real lesson from my time in the Far East.
