Logos, Luxury and Polo...

Polo is going to outfit the U.S. Olympic team, bringing a preppy look to sports once again. Maybe this will help improve America's image abroad, says David Lauren in a WSJ article today.  Polo first started dressing athletes in 2005 at the U.S. Open and then at Wimbledon (when the logo grew to HUGE proportions - all the better to be seen by the tv cameras).

With the recession here, I'm not sure if luxury goods will be wanted by American consumers, who comprise 69% of Polo's sales.   The flattening of the product, the mass consumerism of branding is making luxury or designer products available to all.  A "warehouse" store for Polo in Durango, Colorado, had shirts with the HUGE logo on them (below).  The idea of logos everywhere, as with this Polo shirt with the entire design being the Ralph Lauren pony logo, at right, strikes me as over-the-top logo-ism and I'm repelled by it on one hand yet culturally interested in the cachet of people being attracted to something that shouts logos and branding in such an overt way. 

I was struck with (and appalled by) the HUGE logo  when my daughter wanted the over-sized pony logo right as we moved to NYC, and I wrote about it earlier.

The big logos were on the sales racks in the U.S.  However, I have admired how Lauren has marketed an original American look and he tapped into the American West as cachet.  I guess I'm an American West elitist. Perhaps he might help clean up our image.  America rebranded.