Awesomeness about typefaces and origins of logos.
When the Packaging Makes it Perfect
By Alice Rawsthrorn, International Herald Tribune
For my goddaughter Delilah's ninth birthday, I gave her a Tiffany starfish pendant by Elsa Peretti. Not an original choice, I admit. But it's pretty, and so is Delilah. It's girlish, reducing the risk of confiscation by her brothers. It's timely, as her parents have just bought a weekend house by the sea. And it was delivered in a blue Tiffany box, which, as Delilah and her family have recently moved to Brooklyn from London, made it perfect for a Park Slope Princess.
Would I have bought that pendant without the packaging? I'm not sure, but the thought of Delilah opening that duck egg blue box tied with white satin ribbon certainly clinched my choice. Those boxes date to 1837, when Charles Lewis Tiffany decreed that all of the packaging and advertising of his newly opened Manhattan store should be in exactly the same shade of blue. Tiffany has since registered the boxes and Tiffany Blue as trademarks. Like Hermès's gorgeous orange boxes, a Tiffany Blue box is a rare example of packaging that is as covetable as its contents.
As good examples go, it is hard to quibble with one that has flourished for 169 years, making it all the more surprising that more luxury labels haven't taken Tiffany's cue by introducing equally seductive packaging.
Most have opted for one of two default design styles for their boxes, bags and logos (or visual identities, as graphic designers call them). One style belongs to what we'll dub the Voguettes. These are the brands with forgettably pleasant packaging, whose logos look more or less like Bodoni, the elegant serif typeface that Alexander Liberman adapted in 1947 to create the lettering that spells out Vogue's title on the magazine cover. Now that style seems very Vogueish, which is presumably why Giorgio Armani, Burberry, Dior, Piaget, Pucci and Vera Wang have adopted similar typefaces.
The second camp consists of the Chanelles, who have taken their typographic lead from (you guessed it) the crisp sans-serif logo and monochrome bags and boxes chosen by Gabrielle (Coco) Chanel for her Paris couture house. Now this was a woman who was so brand-savvy that a chandelier in her Rue Cambon apartment dangled with rock crystal figures of the number five, for No.5 perfume, and her company's double C insignia. Among the Chanelles are Balenciaga, Dolce & Gabbana, Marc Jacobs, Calvin Klein and Rochas.
There is nothing wrong with the visual identities of the brands in either camp, but there is nothing special about them either. Tellingly, Tiffany is a typographic Voguette, and its packaging isn't particularly striking, yet it distinguishes its visual identity by using that beautiful blue so cleverly. Whereas Hermès is unmistakably Hermès in every detail: the idiosyncratic shape of the letters in its logo, the choice of colors, the quality of the paper used in its bags and boxes and the beautiful embroidered ribbons that are regularly redesigned to reflect different themes. Only a few other brands have come to close to matching its high standards.
One is Yves Saint Laurent. Where would it be without the spindly initials, which were dashed off as a favor by the illustrator Cassandre for the young Yves Saint Laurent when he founded his couture house in 1962? Comme des Garçons deserves an honorable mention for subverting its Chanelle logo by adopting a five- pronged star as the cedilla, as does Azzedine Alaïa for the great archive boxes with buckled leather straps that he uses as shoe boxes.
A few brands come closer still. Take Martin Margiela. It was a gutsy move for a young Belgian designer to identify his clothes with nothing other than a blank white square of cotton attached with four clumsy stitches when he started out in the late 1980s. And it was equally gutsy of Margiela to package them in blank white cotton bags when he opened his stores. But both tactics work. Do you know anyone who unpicks those white stitches from their Margiela knits?
Then there is Net-a-Porter, the online fashion boutique whose packaging owes more to the grand days of deluxe department stores than to bubble- wrapped e-commerce. It is a happy moment whenever Net-a-Porter delivers. The No.1 reason: You have finally snaffled that elusive Marc Jacobs tunic. No. 2: you get to play the Dominique Sanda role in Bertolucci's "1900" by flinging open one of its enormous, tissue paper-stuffed, ribbon-tied boxes.
Net-a-Porter obsesses over every element of its packaging, not least because its founder, Natalie Massenet, realized that, in e-commerce, it is the company's only physical link with the customer. The boxes are designed so that people will want to keep them, with a logo that is big enough to remind them of the brand name, but not so big as to be obtrusive. The bags and boxes remain the same -another reminder of the brand - but Net-a-Porter freshens things up at the start of each season by changing the color of the tissue paper and the style of ribbon.
And now there is Lanvin. Until a few weeks ago it was just another Voguette, but then its creative director, Alber Elbaz, unveiled his new packaging, and it is beautiful. Everything is blue - not Tiffany Blue, but Elbaz's zestier take on the founder Jeanne Lanvin's favorite shade of forget-me-not blue, which she first spotted in a Fra Angelico fresco. The logo is a reworking of a 1907 drawing, by the illustrator Paul Iribe, of Jeanne Lanvin and her 10-year-old daughter, Marguerite, dressed for a ball. The new shoe boxes are shaped like antique library files and tied with black satin ribbon. It is not as though I've ever found it easy to resist the clothing in the Lanvin store on Rue Faubourg Saint- Honoré in Paris, but from now on it will be impossible.
Don't get me wrong. No packaging, not even Lanvin's, can ever matter more than its contents. But great packaging makes shopping more fun, and, as Tiffany has proved, occasionally elicits cash from impressionable people like me. And judging by eBay's thriving online trade in empty Hermès boxes, it can even be an investment.