The logo, of course, never went away completely. There were the Helmut Lang t-shirts with his name on the back. Originally created for Lang’s fashion-show crews, eventually, in an ironic gesture, they migrated onto the backs of his devoted followers (I still have one, black on black, so you have to squint to see it).

And, of course there was the pinnacle of the logo for the cognoscenti, Martin Margiela’s four white stitches, that held the blank white label inside. Margiela meant for these to be cut off with the label after a purchase, but, in one of the great fashion’s moments of misunderstanding, they had become the secret handshake of the artists, gallerists, architects, or simply people with understated taste, who nevertheless wanted to carefully signal it to the select few who were in the know. This was particularly relevant for men, because Margiela’s garments looked fairly basic at a first glance. They required a much closer look in order to see their ingenious construction, but who had time for that?

Margiela’s four stitches was the first logo that signaled something other than material status – it subtly let others know that you belonged to a club not necessarily based on money (though Margiela’s clothes were certainly not cheap), but on knowledge accessible to a relatively small number of fashion sophisticates. How many of us have exchanged the stories about how our dry cleaner wanted to cut off the label (the irony being that he was right)?