Lapu Vintage Branding

Branding and fashion marketing have gone hand and hand for much of the 20th century. I wanted to examine and integrate into the project were the topics of fashion branding and marketing, and how our currently changing social norms, such as gender, class, socio-economic status, and body positivity have become a part of a brand’s identity and its perception to the greater public, as well as how these formulated identities have made fashion itself inclusive and accessible to individuals who may not have had access to the art in previously discriminative decades. My senior research project involved branding for Lapu Vintage, a vintage fashion store based in Chicago and San Francisco. As a company, Lapu Vintage values the importance of inclusivity when it comes to fashion, with much of our discussions revolving around the accessibility of stylish clothing in terms of race and gender. During my design process, I based my design principles and research for this project with a big emphasis on market research about current clothing companies who reject people who don’t fit their perceived clientele, such as Brandy Melville. Brandy Melville, an Italian young women’s clothing company, for example, has been under fire for shunning people of color and plus-sized women in their stores, all while making their overall preference for white women sizes 0 to 2 shameless in the form of both their employees in-store and their models online. With this in mind, Lapu Vintage and I wanted to create a logo that would not exclude people based on factors that may be out of their control. As a Filipino-American based company, I am in the process of making a logo that will be created for Lapu Vintage and embraced these factors immensely, with the Filipino woman as the face of the logo representing the empowerment that clothing can bring for people who may have been rejected by the Western standard of beauty in decades past, but are now being pushed to the forefront of a more accepting Millennial/ Generation Z clientele