I’m very late to this party, but it only came to my notice this week.
Emily the Strange is a pop-goth character: a little girl with sleek black hair, lots of cats and an antisocial attitude. Her likeness is used to sell T-shirts, wallets, pencil cases, stickers, handbags, socks, shoes, collars, i-pod covers, stationary, vinyl toys, etc, etc.
So, yeah. I never liked Emily the Strange, even when I was rather into that gothy stuff. She always struck me as a soulless cash-in, the spirit of teen rebellion extracted, dehydrated, repackaged and sold back to the misfits at a premium.
So it did not really surprise me to find that Emily’s birth is one of creative bankruptcy:
On the left, a page from Nate the Great Goes Undercover, a children’s book from 1987. On the right, one of the first Emily bumper stickers, 1991. Nice.
Analysis and commentary here, here, and here, and everywhere else. The legal side of this is looking muddy, but it doesn’t seem like there will be any kind of compensation for the original creators.
It got me thinking about brands, and how we choose to wear or endorse them. The basic rule is that if a brand is cooler than you, wearing it will make you cooler than you would be without it. If you are cooler than the brand, it works the other way around; the brand now sucks your cool, making the brand cooler than it would be if you weren’t wearing it. It’s like osmosis with street-cred.
After this revelation, I think it’s safe to say you are definitely cooler than Emily, whoever you are. Time to put that stuff on the e-bay.
Hat tip to @autojoy (twitter).
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