When Did We Become Walking Billboards?

There is a question worth asking about the large interlocking letters on the front of the handbag, the embossed logo on the belt buckle, the brand name running in repeat across the silk scarf or down the trouser leg of a pair of joggers; the embroidered initials on the lapel, the label worn on the outside rather than the inside. The question is: who is this for?

Not for the woman wearing it. She already knows what she has paid for it. She does not need reminding.

It is for everyone else. It is a message broadcast outward, to strangers, to acquaintances, to anyone who happens to glance in the right direction at the right moment. It says: I own this. I can afford this. I have made this particular choice and I would like you to know about it. The garment — the bag, the belt, the scarf, the coat — is secondary. The logo is the point.

This is, if you think about it for a moment, a remarkable arrangement. The woman has paid — in many cases, paid very substantially — for the privilege of advertising a company's products to everyone she encounters. She is a walking billboard. She has purchased that role, willingly, and she carries it with her wherever she goes.

The fashion industry did not invent this arrangement by accident. It is, from the brand's perspective, one of the most efficient marketing strategies ever devised. Every customer becomes an unpaid ambassador. Every outing is a campaign. Every crowded restaurant, every school run, every occasion at which the logo is visible is a piece of media — produced at no cost to the brand and paid for entirely by the woman wearing it. The brand spends nothing. The customer does the work.

This is what has changed. There was a time when a label was a private thing — a mark of quality and provenance found on the inside of a garment, placed there for the wearer rather than the room. The maker's mark was between the maker and the person who wore their work. It was, in the most literal sense, personal.

At some point — and the shift accelerated dramatically from the 1980s onward — the label migrated. It moved from the inside to the outside, from the private to the public, from the intimate to the conspicuous. The mark of the maker became the mark of the owner. And the owner, in displaying it, became an instrument of the brand.

The rise of social media has made this more explicit rather than creating it. What was once a passive form of advertising — you walk past someone carrying a recognisable bag — has become an active one. Every photograph posted, every outfit shared, every occasion documented and uploaded extends the billboard further and reaches an audience the brand could never have paid to access. The women doing this are not, in the main, compensated. They are customers who have become, without quite deciding to, a part of the marketing apparatus of the brands they wear.

We think a label belongs on the inside. We think the coat — the cloth, the cut, the way it fits and moves and lasts — is the point. And we think the woman wearing it should be the subject of the story, not the medium through which someone else tells theirs.

At EdNerat our label is on the inside. It is embroidered in East London in silk. Why in East London? Because we don't have to over-produce them and just order what we need. And why in silk? So it sits softly against the wearer's neck. It is there for her. It is not there for the room, for the photograph, for the stranger on the street or the follower on the phone. It signifies who made the coat and nothing else. Explore our collection here — and judge us, as we would prefer, by what we make.