Anti-Fashion Branding: Framing Technology in Uniqlo and Allbirds

Abstract

Although technology has long been integral to the fashion system, executives from both Uniqlo and Allbirds are placing a renewed emphasis on it. In press interviews, company leaders argued that the clothing and shoemaker, respectively, are not fashion brands, but “technology” firms and their true competitors are the likes of Apple. Understanding that both fashion and branding are created from public discourse, this paper takes a critical discourse approach to the statements by executives, their related press coverage and their brand messaging. The paper argues that such statements discursively set the brands’ products outside of the fashion system and create their own sense of temporality. However, such statements play into contemporary discourse structures that prioritize technology as a “serious” endeavor, while concurrently degrading the associations with fashion and personal appearance. Moreover, this paper suggests that the use of framing within fashion discourses might be a productive future research endeavor.