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Graphic design in fashion – talking Japanese

Mark Tomkins

For the past few years the fashion market has exploited the use of words and phrases to add dimension to clothes to make them look chic, different or just try and be cool and trendy. This is nothing new.

However, with the emergence of  ‘cool t-shirts’ in high street shops, such as Hollister, Superdry and Abercrombie & Fitch and the like, also came a renaissance of the use of foreign languages and foreign characters on t-shirt designs to add a bit of  ‘oh, this old thing? I bought this on a road trip across Japan when I was in Uni’.

These designs, making use of Japanese characters from minority sports teams in Tokyo, Nagasaki and other famous places, become super popular and once launched by brands, such as Superdry and SoulCal, the rest – Primark, George (Asda) and other similar low-end clothing retailers flooded the market.

Their popularity, apart from having their birthplace with the cool brands, is down to the uniqueness and quirkiness of the designs themselves. Almost certainly not designed by a Japanese graphic designer but rather by someone in the UK or US and using Japanese characters of words that are probably wrong and say something tenuous.

It’s one of the situations where, for the UK and US market, the vast majority of the customers can’t read Japanese – so there is a real desire to fling on a few Japanese icons and graphics without having the slightest clue what it says. Now, I am not saying that any of these brands do this, but on the basis that I cannot read Japanese, I also can’t confirm that they aren’t, either!

On a recent business trip to support a client’s website in China, I spotted some posters and signs created by Chinese designers for the Chinese market but used English images of taxi cabs, buses and the Tower of London – but the words that splattered around the graphics with very little finesse were completely bonkers – ‘mother’ ‘lovely’ and ‘limousine’ accompanied the completely unrelated images. So we can only assume that a Chinese designer somewhere thought that by using English words randomly with English graphics will provide the right appeal to their target market.

This example is really no different to our cool-looking t-shirts with the Japanese ice hockey team name and numbers in Japanese characters (or ‘Kanji‘ as their character term should be called).

However, with the wide use of Google translate, I find it difficult to understand why such big brands and their designers can’t use the correct term. Graphic design is not just about making something look pretty, its about making something functional and work well, it’s about making a statement.

So if they are going to make a statement on a t-shirt that could end up travelling the world, at least use the right words and not some utter bonkers.