We are i for INCOGNITO - an independent, Welsh streetwear brand inspired by greatness, made for the people. 🏴
By definition, being Incognito is having one's identity concealed or avoiding being recognised. We launched our first tee brandishing this name on 2nd Feb 2021 which was when we started playing around with these ideas. We know full well that people buy our clothes because they want to stand out and we aim to stand out in every aspect of our products. The design, the quality, the story. We see these three core factors being second to none in each of our pieces we’ve released. For us, it’s all about using superior materials, having the perfect fit, creating the best designs on the market and telling a story about how we got there.
Yes. It does. We know that people want to stand out with their streetwear. We know that people want to gain some kind of identity when they wear our clothes. And we know that people want to feel connected with the community they are a part of through our clothing.
Well, if you look at the logo, we’ve literally flipped the word upside down. And in doing so, we’ve flipped its meaning too. We use this inverted, inside out technique in a lot of our work (the most obvious example is our use of washing symbols as a design feature). We also use the slogan “Hiding in plain sight” to draw more attention to this concept of being hidden but standing out at the same time. We love playing with this notion of something being the wrong way around, out of place or even just making something that is usually nothing into something prominent or the focus point. As a community, we feel as though we’ve been overlooked our whole life so doing this makes us feel like we’re not being ignored anymore.
Once we had the initial inspiration to create a design with “Incognito” as the base we worked back from there. We needed a smaller, accompanying design for the front of the tee. So we took the first letter of the word, kept it lower case and thought about how to rework it. This is usually consistent with our design process, more often than not we take a starting point and ask ourselves how we can strip it down and make something new out of it. So we thought - how do we rework the letter “i”? That classic letter that’s always straight?.. You get the idea.
The only problem was that someone asked us once “what does the i stand for?”. On a tee with Incognito written in massive letters on the back, we thought it was obvious. But maybe we weren’t thinking about it from someone else’s perspective. A fair-weather viewer’s perspective. When we were looking to rebrand from 'Join the Hustle' we knew we had to make the new name memorable and simple. And that’s exactly how we ended up as 'i for INCOGNITO'. Now we have an instantly recognisable symbol, logo and brand image all in one, captured by the wavy natured "i" logo.
The truth is we got our name from a few different inspiration points. Thinking back to its very first inception, we got the word itself from a Token song called Flamingo. We loved this song when we discovered it and didn’t stop playing it when we were in the design studio. The song uses the word incognito predominantly in the hook which got us thinking about how we could use that to make a design.
It’s no secret that Virgil Abloh (and subsequently Off-White) has been a key inspiration to us and our creative approach. The deconstructive reworking of The Ten collaboration with Nike is still an enormous source of inspiration for us today and prompts us to think outside the box and do things differently or unexpectedly. With this creative bell ringing in our ears, we started playing around with the word and how it was written and laid out etc. This, of course, led to our inverted logo.
Like we mentioned, we needed something for the front of the tee. We knew we wanted to use the first letter of the word. Because of this, it was hard not to think about Kendrick Lamar’s iconic “i" cap he wore around the release of our favourite album of his, To Pimp a Butterfly. We remember wanting this cap so badly and it represented such a huge piece of rap history that we knew we had to make a subtle nod to it in our logo.
All these reference points culminated in our current logo and name being immortalised. We speak a lot about our roots being deep in Hip Hop and sneaker culture. Hopefully this gives you a window into what we mean by that. References like these can be found in every design we release. We choose not to make direct, in-your-face references to make the game more interesting. We release standalone products that take subtle cues from our love for Hip Hop and sneakers because these things inspire us the most.
Our Mocha tee has sold out and our Grey Longsleeve is getting a lot of attention too. The change in direction has given us more motivation, creative freedom and confidence. We got a lot more on the way.
We have more exciting designs in the vault, including items we’ve never stocked before and the return of a summer classic.. Plus, we are currently on the lookout for new partnerships and ways of working to make our brand as engaging and rewarding as possible for you (check out our rewards platform while we’re on the subject). So yeah, this is going to be an exciting year for us and as a proudly independent streetwear brand, we’d love it if you were part of the journey.
Keep hiding in plain sight,
i for INCOGNITO.