Buying In - (Page 13) buying in 13 some kind of empirical, provable reality—that if you burrow down behind it, you will find exactly the things that the symbol purports to represent. Think of it as the difference between a trophy obtained by winning a race and an identical trophy obtained by forking over a few bucks at a pawnshop: One is clearly authentic in the way that the other is not. So maybe the Apple brand connects with consumers because its products really are innovative and different, and Nike’s brand is authentic because it can be tied directly to the company’s roots as an enabler of athletic achievement. Any symbol that fails this basic authenticity test, according to this line of thought, will fail with the new Consumer Economicus. But who really decides what’s authentic and what isn’t? Just across the street from the Las Vegas Convention Center, in a temporary building that was the size of a house, I found an interesting case study in how complicated the answer to that question can be. The structure was emblazoned with the stark silhouette of a rhinoceros: the logo of apparel brand Ecko Unltd. The Ecko rhino, on T-shirts, baggy jeans, and other garments, has become a widely recognized symbol, familiar in dozens of rap videos and on streets (and cul-de-sacs) all over America, and in five thousand retail locations, from specialty shops to malls. Its most explosive growth has occurred in the years since the turn of the twenty-first century—right alongside the growing rhetoric about logoproof consumers. American hip-hop culture, with its roots dating back to the gritty realities of the Bronx in the late 1970s, provides a particularly interesting backdrop for discussing authenticity. Clearly, hip-hop has long since gone mainstream and as both a musical genre and a recognizable visual style is widely consumed outside of the tough urban environments where it first flour-
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