THE UNICODE

Inside Uniqlo's quest for global dominance.

- LAUREN COLLINS

Uniqlo conceives of itself as a distribution system for utopian values as much as a clothing company. It is the universal donor of fashion, intended to go with any aesthetic.

This year's Super Bowl was largely forgettable as an athletic contest, but it lives on in fashion history thanks to Kendrick Lamar, who presided over the halftime show in black leather gloves, a varsity jacket, and a pair of bleached-out, quad-accentuating low-rise denim flares. Fashion commentators declared that Lamar had achieved the impossible—reviving a style of pants widely believed to be lost to time and the liquidation of Wet Seal. Searches for “flared jeans” soared by five thousand per cent following the performance. The Cut declared that the pants, a twelve-hundred-dollar design from Celine, “stole the show.”

Lamar's backup dancers wore red, blue, and white casual wear. One commentator theorized that they represented American gangs—the Bloods, the Crips, and the Ku Klux Klan. Others saw references to prison jumpsuits, or even to “the sperm guys in that Woody Allen movie.” (More prosaically, the dancers formed the shape of an American flag.) The costumes were the perfect nondescript counterpoint to Lamar's trend-launching look. One would have been hard pressed to identify them until Uniqlo piped up on social media, claiming some of the white tops as its “Uniqlo U AIRism Cotton Oversized” T-shirts.