A brand is not what a company declares itself to be. It is what three people who have never opened its brand book can recognise, without its assistance: a distracted customer, a prospective buyer and a judge.
The distracted customer looks at an object for a second. If they attribute it to the right maison, the identity has worked. The buyer — a fund, a group or a licensee — undertakes the same exercise with more time and a different question: what remains of all this when the team that built it leaves? The judge, or anyone called upon to assess an imitation, asks the most uncomfortable question: which choices, precisely, are yours?
Many businesses focus primarily on the first test, without systematically examining the other two. Here I address the other two, because that is where value is determined.
What the theories tell us, and where they stop
Four contributions approach the same issue from different angles: part of a brand’s value takes shape through the signs carried by its products.
Bourdieu and Delsaut (1975) interpret the griffe as a form of social alchemy: the couturier’s signature can radically change the social standing of an object without altering its physical nature.
Kapferer (1986), analysing retailers’ identities, proposed a prism of six interrelated facets, which subsequently became a more general model of brand identity. Among them, the physical dimension (physique) is the brand’s tangible expression.
Han, Nunes and Drèze (2010) introduce brand prominence: how conspicuously a brand appears on a product. In their data, some affluent consumers pay a premium for discreet goods recognisable principally to members of their own group. Their analysis of counterfeit handbags shows that counterfeiters predominantly copy the more conspicuously branded models; brand prominence, rather than the original product’s price, better explains which models are copied. The findings distinguish two phenomena that are often confused: logo visibility and brand recognition.
Romaniuk (2018) measures distinctive assets along two dimensions: fame — how many buyers associate the sign with the brand without seeing its name — and uniqueness — how exclusively that association belongs to the brand. She warns that varying an asset too much while it is being established amounts to creating several different assets.
These contributions explain how a griffe acquires social value, how an identity is structured and how its signs are recognised or measured. Their purpose is not to explain how one sign becomes forty components, each with a supplier, a mould, a tolerance and a dimensional family. That is a manufacturing question, and it is where maisons preserve or lose their identity. Hence the proposition: the identity of a maison is a governed bill of materials.
Style and grammar
Style is the sum of what has already been done: it can be photographed, referenced and imitated. Grammar is the rule that makes it possible to create something never made before while remaining recognisable.
A mature brand is not one that repeats its most successful objects. It is one that can create a new object and have the customer attribute it to the house immediately. The test is simple: if you launched a category tomorrow that you had never produced before, would it be recognisable? If the answer depends on who designs it, you have a style rather than a grammar; and style is an asset held by people. Codes transform style into grammar because they make the rule written, transferable and verifiable.
From griffe to code: the Vuitton lesson
For Bourdieu, the griffe is an almost magical act: the signature transforms the object. But the magic works only while the signature remains credible, and the market learns to copy it. Vuitton’s history offers a miniature account of what a brand does when it realises this.
Vuitton’s response to imitation is documented in four stages. Copies of the grey Trianon canvas prompted Louis Vuitton to introduce a striped canvas in 1872, protected by a patent in 1877. Imitation continued. In 1888, Louis and Georges created the Damier, incorporating the inscription ‘Marque L. Vuitton Déposée’ into the pattern. The Damier, too, was copied: in 1896, Georges designed the Monogram, combining the LV initials with floral motifs. Formal protection had not eliminated copying. The maison responded by building a signature ever more deeply into the object’s surface: a sign no longer merely added to the product, but made part of its material language.
Hermès, too, has built a language around print. Its first silk carré, bearing the design Jeu des Omnibus et Dames Blanches, debuted in 1937. Since then, printed silk has become a category with an idiom of its own.
A repeating pattern serves another purpose: it can travel where a logo cannot. It appears on a lining, tissue paper, carrier bags or the fabric of swimwear. It allows a house to enter a new category, or a licensing arrangement, without reinventing its identity. It can become an efficient means of preserving recognition as objects and categories change, provided its use is governed.
The applied mark: the material alphabet
So far, I have discussed codes intrinsic to the product: form, proportion and construction. There is a second register, often overlooked: the codes the brand applies to the product. These include zip pulls in different sizes for large and small zips; electroplated finishes for belt fittings and buckles; hardware for leather goods and luggage; buttons for jackets, coats and jeans, whether metal, laser-engraved or hand-enamelled; branded rivets; labels embroidered in silk or made from metal; bar tacks in the brand’s Pantone colour; undercollars; linings with proprietary textures; tissue paper, carrier bags and boxes.
These codes occupy three stages.
The public stage is what an observer sees: the zip pull, buckle, rivet or button. The intimate stage is what only the wearer sees: the lining, the inside of a belt with its hand embroidery, the almost invisible bar tack, the line of enamel around the edge of a button. They are not intended to communicate publicly. They are for the owner and for those who need to verify authenticity. The ritual stage is packaging, at the moment of handover.
On the public stage, the applied mark follows a three-step progression of maturity.
Declared logo. Large, frontal, embossed. It buys visibility immediately and uses it up just as quickly. Integrated logo. Engraved on a zip pull, laser-marked on a button, tone-on-tone. The mark has learnt to inhabit the object. Logo translated into code. A colour in a precise position, a pattern, the shape of a zip pull. The name is no longer visible, yet the brand remains recognisable.
Research on brand prominence provides a useful empirical reference for understanding discreet signals, although it does not, by itself, establish this progression of maturity. Han, Nunes and Drèze cite Gucci’s bamboo detailing as an example of a recognisable code that does not require an explicit logo, and describe the role of subtle signals in recognition among particular consumer groups. Intimate codes take the same logic to its limit: they are the quietest level, and reproducing them may require skills, controls and access to a supply chain that cannot be inferred from a photograph alone.
There may also be a legal dimension to a well-specified code. The Louboutin case concerns a sign identified by a colour and its position on a shoe sole; applying a precisely identified colour to a consistent position on a product offers a useful analogy for codification, but does not automatically create a registrable trade mark or an exclusive right.
Surface and depth
Not all codes have the same status. An important economic difference lies in the cost and capability required to reproduce them.
Form, proportion and visible detail are surface codes. They can be read from a photograph and, today, reproduced from one using tools that have brought the cost of visual imitation close to zero. Materials, construction, behaviour and the work of the hand — enamelling, embroidery, finishing — are depth codes. They reside in supply-chain choices, tools and workshop knowledge. A photograph may reveal their surface, but not necessarily the specifications, tolerances, processes and know-how needed to reproduce them consistently. Replicating them may require building a supply chain.
In a market where surface can be replicated at almost no cost, defensible value moves towards depth. And depth is not a creative matter: it is an industrial one. That is why identity cannot remain solely within the remit of creative direction.
The law requires the choices to be identified
Two European judgments, delivered seven years apart, make the same point from opposite directions.
In 2018, in the Louboutin case (C-163/16), the Court of Justice ruled that the red-sole sign did not fall within the prohibition concerning marks consisting exclusively of a shape: its principal element was a colour designated by an internationally recognised identification code. The judgment clarified that a sign consisting of a colour applied to a particular position on a product is not, for that reason alone, a sign consisting exclusively of the product’s shape. Precision of description matters, but the ruling does not amount to a general guarantee of protection for any particular colour code.
On 4 December 2025, in the joined Mio and konektra cases concerning works of applied art, the Court reiterated that the aesthetic effect of an object is not, by itself, sufficient to establish originality, and that the national court must identify the creative choices expressed in the object’s form, without imposing stricter requirements on applied art than on other works. Documentation of creative choices may assist in proving originality; it does not replace the legal assessment of the requirements for protection or of any infringement.
Meanwhile, the design framework has been updated: the European design reform provides for a first phase applicable from 1 May 2025 and a second from 1 July 2026.
One clarification is necessary. Copyright protects free creative choices, not choices dictated by technical constraints: where technical considerations, rules or other constraints leave no room for free creative choices, the resulting subject matter lacks the originality required to qualify as a work. For this reason, depth codes, which are often technical, may also need to be safeguarded in other ways: through the cost of replication, supply-chain contracts and ownership of moulds. Copyright protects creative choices; industrial depth also depends on organisation.
The different forms of protection — trade marks, designs, copyright, trade secrets and contracts — protect different elements, subject to specific conditions. None, on its own, replaces governance of the grammar that generates them. The rule must be written, assigned, applied and monitored: organisational capability also makes it more practical to identify and protect what is legally capable of protection.
Governing a bill of materials
If identity is a bill of materials, it must be managed as one. Every code — public, intimate or ritual — requires a specification covering six points: what it is and what purpose it serves; Pantone reference, material and finish; position on the product; dimensional family; supplier and ownership of the mould; permitted variations and who may authorise them.
Governance generally fails at three points.
Dimensional families. The pull for a large zip and the one for a small zip must belong to the same family: the same proportions, finish and formal logic. Otherwise, there is a catalogue rather than a system. The uncontrolled catalogue. Hardware proliferates from season to season and supplier to supplier until no one knows how many different zip pulls exist. Romaniuk’s warning applies: vary an asset too much and you create different ones. Ownership of moulds. If tooling for bespoke hardware remains with a supplier without clear contractual safeguards, the brand’s most recognisable code becomes hostage to that relationship.
There is also a specific risk for intimate codes: the first round of value engineering removes them. No customer has ever asked for them, so they appear against no revenue line, while they do appear as a cost. They are also the only details that, once removed, nobody will know how to explain. They must be decided upon as a strategic choice, not treated as a cost item to be negotiated season after season.
The buyer’s test
An identity that lives in one person’s head is worth only as much as that person’s continued presence. A business owner selling a company may discover during due diligence that what they thought they were selling — an identity — is actually a personal relationship with the designer. Someone integrating a brand into a larger platform discovers that, without written codes, every season begins again from scratch. Written codes do not guarantee continuity, but they make it much more likely.
I encountered this issue while building and managing a cashmere maison and, subsequently, while working within a capital-backed platform. Across these different contexts, the distinction arose from the same question: had the codes become transferable rules, or had they remained intuitions entrusted to individuals?
Five questions for the board
- Which of your codes would survive being reduced to a photograph, and which would survive a change of supply chain?
- Can you list them in writing, distinguishing those that are non-negotiable from those that may evolve?
- Do you have a controlled catalogue of hardware, labels, linings and packaging, with defined dimensional families, finishes and Pantone references — and do you know who owns the moulds?
- Which invisible details are at risk in the next value-engineering exercise, and who has the authority to stop their removal?
- Who can say, ‘this is not ours’, and is that authority independent of the collection cycle and the budget?
Those who can answer these questions govern the product. Those who cannot address them delegate their identity to whoever happens to be in the room.
The most natural objection remains: what about storytelling? It matters, but it works for the first judge, the distracted customer, who must learn to connect a sign with a story. It is not, however, the asset that survives the other two. A story without codes can be told, but it cannot be defended or transferred. A code without a story can be recognised, but not desired. A strong identity holds both together and takes them through the same bill of materials.
That is the function Virgili Studio’s Creative & Product Office performs for businesses. Recognition is the final stage of the sequence, and within the business someone must be accountable for that sequence as a whole.
Principal sources
- Bourdieu, P., and Delsaut, Y. (1975). Le couturier et sa griffe: contribution à une théorie de la magie. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 1(1), 7–36.
- Kapferer, J.-N. (1986). Beyond positioning. ESOMAR Seminar, Retail Strategies for Profit and Growth.
- Han, Y. J., Nunes, J. C., and Drèze, X. (2010). Signaling Status with Luxury Goods: The Role of Brand Prominence. Journal of Marketing, 74(4), 15–30.
- Romaniuk, J. (2018). Building Distinctive Brand Assets. Oxford University Press.
- Louis Vuitton. Heritage: A History Since 1854. Official house archive.
- Hermès. Six Generations of Artisans. Official house archive, 1937 section.
- Court of Justice of the European Union, 12 June 2018, C-163/16, Louboutin and Christian Louboutin.
- Court of Justice of the European Union, 4 December 2025, Joined Cases C-580/23 and C-795/23, Mio and konektra.
- EUIPO. Design Reform Hub, application phases in 2025 and 2026.