06/30 - Adorned

So many people,

no one wants to be the same.

Put a bird on it!


Yesterday at Uniqlo I bought myself a new polo shirt. Like the majority of Uniqlo's products it was cheap, yet well-made and of pretty good quality. It's super lightweight to handle the humid summer here and it's lovely and soft. Uniqlo often seems too good to be true. On top of the shirt I also bought two iron-on badges that they sell as part of their "My Uniqlo" campaign. They sell different letters, symbols and characters that you can iron onto your clothes or bags. They also sell ribbon striping that you can have stitched onto your shirt in the store. The idea is that you can customize your own clothes so that they are different, even though they are mass produced and are sold at a store that has a location almost every block and several in most of the main train stations. It is even common to see Uniqlos inside other stores. I thought the idea was pretty cool, but also contradictory. A much more contradictory aspect of Uniqlo is the current line of clothes designed by Pharrell. The tag line is "The Same is Lame". Which is absolutely dumbfounding when you see a display of hundreds of the same items adorned with the phrase. The two badges I bought were of Woodstock, Snoopy's little buddy, and of the Buzz Lightyear crest.

Tonight, I ironed the Woodstock badge onto the pocket of my new shirt. I didn't realize until afterward that I had done exactly what they do in the famous Portlandia sketch and "put a bird on it." This made me laugh not just for the obvious reason, but also because I realized it easily be applied to a store I pass almost every day in Ikebukuro Station. The store sells tons of different nice products, all made by other companies, that have had the same fairly blandly drawn cat added onto them. There are clothes, bags, notebooks, many from brands you would immediately recognize, resold with only the cat added.

Kawaii desu ne - It's cute, isn't it!