Lately, I’ve found myself more interested in hats. Don’t ask me why. Maybe it’s anticipation of a bald-headed future, or just a fascination with an accessory as old as the loincloth, carrying a history just as rich in design.
As a result of this mild obsession, I recently noticed a resurgence of the iconic New Era baseball cap. Specifically, wearers proudly sporting the original “sticker of authenticity.”
Even glimpsed from the corner of my eye, it jars. The shiny sticker disrupts visual harmony and irks me. But the sticker was never meant to create aesthetic harmony – it was always intended as proof.
This trend, beginning in the 1990s, signifies the cap as brand new, or “fresh.” In a culture that places a high value on pristine and authentic apparel, the sticker became a visual testament to the hat’s unworn condition.
It also served as a clear indicator that the cap was not a counterfeit, with the shiny, often holographic, sticker being a difficult feature to replicate.
Over time, the reasons for leaving the sticker on have shifted. And now, as we reach the zenith of the slop epoch, any marker of originality gains currency.
The Getty watermark flex
A few months ago, I read a post about Getty’s watermark becoming a coveted cultural artefact, an intriguing digital parallel to the New Era sticker. Again, a conscious blemish embraced for its symbolic value.
“Is the Getty Images watermark about to become the new flex?” Nick Tran asked on LinkedIn. “It taps into a very real shift in how we treat images. As proof, not just visuals.
“The irony is we used to mock people for posting unlicensed watermarked images. But soon, we might see brands intentionally keeping it in for that little boost of this is real, we didn’t fake this.”
“Labelling is here to stay, because reality itself now demands a premium.”
The drivers of this shift feel obvious.
All corners of reality have grown plastic, unreliable, mushy. We can no longer easily separate dreams from nightmares, reality from fabrication. In imagery, in discourse, in economics, and of course, in politics, certainty is slipping away.
Against this backdrop, provenance grows more valuable. It provides not just proof, but grounding. Something to cling to. This is real. I can touch it. I can prove it.
My daughter, like most 12-year-olds, went through a phase watching Is It Cake?, the hit TV show where players (and viewers) must guess whether objects are what they appear to be, or are, in fact, cakes in disguise.
After only a few minutes I saw the allegory. This show is our reality. Watching another catastrophe in the news – is it cake? Scrolling through people and things in my feed – is it cake?
The changing role of lamp posts
Of course, this is maddening. The growing mental health crisis suggests industrial-scale gaslighting is taking a heavy toll.
We’ve lived with a sense of reliable reality for a long time – that things would be where we left them, that gravity would do its thing, that objects would conform to expectation, unless disrupted by earthquake, fire, or flood.
Under those conditions, lamp posts and paving slabs don’t seem valuable. But when the world tilts unexpectedly, and you’re sliding down its surface in your jeans, suddenly those lamp posts become lifelines. Solid. Real. Anchors of truth.
Labelling, then, is here to stay, because reality itself now demands a premium.
Those who can afford proof will pay for it, and those committed to seeking truth will signal it, clustering together in the process.
As I wrote in a previous column, the DPP legislation introduces mechanisms for authentication that could accelerate this shift: a quantifiable, reliable stamp of originality.
But beyond the mechanics, the cultural signal is clear. In an age of ambiguity, the value of “real” is rising.
For designers, this presents a challenge. Looking polished, according to design conventions, is no longer enough.
We need to revisit semiotics, Freud, and the symbolic modes people use to navigate their emotional realities. If AI’s cauldron keeps stirring aesthetics into flawless but homogenised broth, stripping them of symbolic charge, then new markers will need to emerge.
The sticker on the New Era cap. The Getty watermark. The DPP code. The question for brands is no longer how do we perform authenticity, but how do we authenticate?
Tension = possibility
I’ve been enjoying Jasmine Bina’s perspective on brand tension. She argues that great brands hold a tension at their core, and it’s this that gives them allure and cultural gravity.
Right now, that tension feels ripe with possibility.
We have a chance to break free from tired design tropes and the flattening effect of algorithmic averaging. To fuse raw, irrefutable markers of origin with a new symbolic language, one that doesn’t lean on nostalgia, but creates fresh templates for the present.
A language that deliberately carves a firebreak between the present and the last few decades of training data.
The real opportunity lies in embracing tension itself – the pull between aesthetic harmony and the need to signal honesty by breaking with it.
Is that anti-design? Maybe it’s just a necessary prevailing aesthetic to ground things again. Beauty and anti-aesthetic sparring for attention, and, in the process, signalling that brands, like us, are grappling with orientation.
Nicolas Roope is a designer, creative technologist and entrepreneur who previously co-founded Poke, Plumen and The Lovie Awards.
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