Chaos Can Be Its Own Discipline
I stood in the basement of Dover Street Market on Tuesday in front of a wall where thirty-odd years of torn magazine spreads had been stapled directly on top of each other — no frames, no dates, no wall text explaining the order, the way flyers accumulate on a Kanda utility pole rather than get curated off it.
That wall belongs to SIX, the Comme des Garçons magazine a Wallpaper* review called "beautifully chaotic" this week, and the detail worth sitting with isn't the mess, it's the discipline hiding inside it. SIX has run since 1988 as an image-led study of architecture, design and film, and in almost four decades it has barely used its own pages to show clothes from the label that pays for it. A fashion house that owns a magazine and refuses to let it sell fashion is making a far stranger argument than any rebrand I've reviewed this year.
Most of what lands on my desk this season is the opposite instinct. A mark gets its corners sanded down. A press release explains, at some length, the "simplicity" a company has just paid a studio to arrive at. Confidence used to mean you didn't have to say so. Lately it means hiring someone to say it for you, in a sans-serif.
The flyers on that Kanda pole do SIX's job in miniature, for free. Nobody curates them. Nobody removes last March's lost-cat notice before stapling April's izakaya flyer over half of it. The pole has never once explained itself, and the overlap itself is the only information anyone needs: this is a place where things get posted, read, and left. That is a harder trick than it looks, and most rebrands I see this year are trying — expensively — to fake it.
What the magazine wall and the utility pole share is a refusal I don't see enough of in identity work: neither one is trying to prove it has changed. The chaos isn't a style choice dressed up as authenticity. It's just what thirty, forty years of actually doing the same thing, undisturbed, looks like from the outside.
I walked back to the station past three more poles, each one a foot thick with other people's paper, and for the first time in a long time a flyer looked more confident to me than a logo.
On the wire this week
Ren Arakawa grew up on the Adachi bank of the Arakawa and spent five years drawing identities in a Ginza studio before deciding that writing about type was more fun than kerning it. Ren reads Tokyo as a typeset page — station signs, rice bags, receipts — and edits Hakken from a desk above a Kanda print shop.