Frank Gehry, the brand

Brand: A unique and identifiable symbol, association, name or trademark which serves to differentiate competing products or services. Both a physical and emotional trigger to create a relationship between consumers and the product/service. (allaboutbranding.com)

Marketers often look to other marketers for inspiration and learning on creating and sustaining successful brands. One of the most successful brands out there right now is not a product or service but a person.

Frank O. Gehry is one of the world’s most renowned architects; famous for creating structures that look radically different from anything else that have ever been built. His creations are sculptural, sensual, and curvaceous in design. Two of his most famous building are the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain and the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Gehry is currently working on a $1.8 billion development plan for L.A.’s downtown district, scheduled for completion in 2014. (New York Times, April 25, 2006)

Gehry is a big name architect and a big brand. While he has been designing buildings for more than four decades, in recent years he has expanded beyond buildings to bring his distinctive design sensibility into new categories.

In 2004, Gehry designed the bottle for Wybrova Single Estate Vodka, a super-premium Polish brand that launched in the US in the Spring of that year. Like his architectural forms, his “twist” bottle design is meant to capture a sense of movement. It was inspired by a building that Gehry had created in Germany(Packworld.com, April 27, 2004)

Gehry, who is from Toronto and a huge hockey fan, also designed the trophy for the World Cup of Hockey tournament that same year. At the trophy unveiling, reactions were less than positive. The Toronto Sun included the following headline for a related story: “What Is That?” Another source described the trophy as looking like “two mating jellyfish impaled by a trombone”.

Most recently, Tiffany’s has just launched the Frank Gehry Collection, a line of jewelry “of astonishing originality and sensual beauty”, inspired by the landscape of a women’s body. (Tiffany.com) At the launch party for this new collection, Gehry is seen surrounded by a “bevy of models” and celebrities, as captured by New York Magazine.

Another of Gehry’s New York-based initiatives was the interior design of the Tribeca flagship store for Issey Miyake, a high end designer of men’s and women’s fashions. Gehry created a titanium structure that threads throughout the boutique to deliver on the fashion designer’s request for “movement, light and energy”. (tribecaisseymiyake.com)

What do other architects think about Gehry? According to one insider, there is a sense within the field that Gehry has started to tread a bit too far into the world of celebrity. One example being a supposed collaboration between Gehry and Brad Pitt, Hollywood poster boy and self-schooled “architect” who counts Gehry to be both a friend and mentor. There was talk last year in the press of the two working in partnership on a building project in the U.K.

Criticism aside, there isn’t much argument about Gehry being a visionary and trailblazer in the realm of architecture and design. Even as his empire continues to expand, he has stayed remarkably true to his core brand and its distinctive iconography. Gehry has been able to expand his empire by translating his unique equity- sculptural, sensual form- into the broader realm of design. While some categories feel like a better place for Gehry to play than others (high end jewelry versus professional sports), you can’t blame a guy, or a brand, for being inspired.

white guys with afros

The concept of white guys with afros first entered my consciousness when the rock band The Strokes released their first album, Is This It, in 2001. At this point Albert Hammond, Jr., a guitarist in the band, was introduced to mainstream music listening audiences, along with his natural looking, devil may care, afro-inspired hairstyle. At the time, I hadn’t thought much about Albert, or his hairstyle. Flash forward to the year 2006:

In the past few months, no matter where I find myself in the New York metropolitan area- on the street, in the subway, at a museum- I will inevitably see at least one white guy, usually in his 20s, sporting an afro, or some semblance of one. Where are they picking up the memo?

According to the Wikipedia online encyclopedia, “the afro is a hairstyle in which hair extends out of the head like a halo or cloud.” To acquire an afro, Wikipedia recommends having coarse, curly hair. It also offers the following historical context: The afro style gained popularity in the 1960s and 1970s, in connection with Black Pride and Black Power and as a repudiation of the use of hair straighteners to mimic the straightness of Caucasian hair. During the later half of the 1970s, the style passed into the cultural mainstream and for many people became simply a fashion that sometimes even Caucasian men (and women) with looser, less curly hair adopted.

The afro faded out of the mainstream pop cultural picture by the 1980s, only to be replaced by more stylized hair statements (see insert to right) that fit the sensibility of new wave fashion. I do not have a clear answer as to why, now, the afro seems to be making a comeback, at least amongst the population of Caucasian males in their 20s in New York City. As with every movement, there is likely a multitude of drivers grounded in both the past and the present that have set the stage for the afro to make a resurgence. But, I do have some thoughts:

For the past two years, there has been much press over the emergence of a metrosexual movement, in which males are starting to spend as much time primping and grooming themselves as do women. Recently, an article featured in the New York Times Style section announced a countertrend has has emerged, in which men are adopting beards and scruffy, unshaven facial appearances in rebellion of the emasculating metrosexual lifestyle.

At first blush, I thought- eureka! The afro has always been about rebellion against norms. Today's afro movement must be part of this metrosexual countertrend. Afros are scruffy, unkept, and appear to be virtually maintenance free. It is everything that a cleanly-kept, product infused male hairstyle is not. Then I thought about it a little further. What it seems to me, is that this “neo” afro look, is a culmination of both the metrosexual movement and its countertrend. Yes, it is anti-product, anti-stylized, anti-”give a s%@t”. But it is also perhaps culminating out of the feminization of our culture, which is a factor driving the metrosexual movement. It is a statement about men being able to make a statement when it comes to their personal aesthetics and to put thought into the way that their hair looks, even if that look appears to be primp-free. Big, long hair essentially becomes ornamentation, and a concept that is more often than not associated with women. This is in contrast to beards, which have always (for the most part) been in male domaine.

I would be remiss not to mention the irony of white guys starting to re-adopt a predominantly black hairstyle of the 1960s. But then again, perhaps it is not so ironic after all. That is, in our culture more than ever before there is a blurring across the demographics that previously drove lifestyle choices. 40 is the new 30. Kids are growing up in a melting pot of cultures. And, boys are pretty comfortable with wanting to look good, whatever that means to them, without their masculinity being threatened. So, perhaps a hairstyle that was once “black” does not now have an ethnic delineation, as it is now owned by no one ethnicity, gender, or age.