Discreet by design

Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Dolce&Gabbana and many other top fashion brands are famous for their eye-catching logos. For most Chinese consumers, printed logos on bags, shirts or a metal buckle logo on a belt were how people learned about these big brands. However, the trend of the big logo has been fading away in recent years.

"In 2005 and 2006, Prada and D&G were still selling products with big logos as their leading seasonal trend but coming to 2008 and 2009, one of my classmates in college already produced a thesis on how big logos in design were on their way out," said Jiang Zhuo, a designer from the Chinese brand Exception de Mix Mind.

Although the fashion winds of more low-profiled designs with smaller logos began blowing several years ago in Europe and the US, it has only recently swept across China.

Fad fading away

At the end of May, Patrizio di Marco, CEO of Gucci, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television that the logo era has gone forever. Almost at the same time, Coach renewed their stores internationally and released the information that they are going to reduce its logo products from 30 and 40 percent to 20 percent in the coming years.

A report on the 2012 Chinese market for luxury products by Fortune Character Institute, a research and consulting organization based in Beijing, published corresponding results, suggesting Chinese consumers' attitudes toward big logos had changed over the years.

Public acknowledgement of logos has been through six phases, from no basic understanding of luxury trademarks at all to being in love with or obsessed by products with big logos. Later, the public disliked big logos and finally began preferring things with no visible logos at all. The report also indicated that the more the consumer earns, the less likely they are to select products with big logos.