The Other Uniform

Pharrell was running around closing deals everywhere. First adidas got announced, then UNIQLO wanted him for a collection just as they were opening their first store in Berlin. The collection was called i am OTHER and it was supposed to be the death of normcore.

You could feel the contradiction in it. UNIQLO is basically the uniform—same cut, same price, you put on what everyone else puts on. Pharrell’s entire thing is the opposite of that. So the pitch was: take our basics and make them yours. Stop dressing like you’ve given up. Stop using minimalism as evidence of taste.

By that point normcore had become almost religious—this belief that trying hard was embarrassing, that the height of cool was looking like you weren’t trying at all. The quietly expensive basics. The studied carelessness. It had inverted so thoroughly that not trying became its own kind of performance, and a pretty exhausting one.

I remember thinking the collaboration was just marketing, which obviously it was. Use UNIQLO’s reach to sell people on individuality through the infrastructure of conformity. But there’s something honest about not pretending you can burn down the system from the outside. You get inside and you remix it. You take what everyone has access to and you tell them to do something unexpected with it.