Places make brands. Brands make places.
Travel has always been my way of understanding places. Not through landmarks or luxury hotels, but through the everyday cultures that make a city feel like itself. I'm just as likely to spend an afternoon in a record shop or an independent bookshop as I am in a gallery.
In Brisbane that might mean stopping for coffee at Naim in Paddington before losing an hour crate-digging at Dutch Vinyl, heading down to James Street to find something beautifully colourful and optimistic in Gorman before wandering The Valley and catching a gig at The Triffid. In Melbourne it means disappearing into Brunswick St Bookstore then dropping in on local pastry scientists Lune, before strolling west to the shady avenues of Carlton where brands like ELK are inventing the future of design. In Copenhagen it might be a morning at Coffee Collective followed by checking out some clothes at Motorious or just wandering the meat packing district to see what tastes good, before noticing that the same commitment to thoughtful design runs through everything from furniture to Lakrids by Bülow.
These places aren't just collections of good shops and cafés. They're ecosystems where ideas circulate.
Brands as cultural production
Most people talk about creative cities in terms of music, architecture, literature and art. Nobody would try to understand Seattle without grunge, Manchester without Factory Records, or Copenhagen without its particular strain of modern design. I don't think you can fully understand Melbourne, either, until you've understood Crumpler, Lune and Proud Mary. Not as businesses that happen to be based there. As expressions of the same values, aesthetics and social currents that produced the city's artists, musicians and designers in the first place.
I don't think this is a stretch or a marketer's trick for making commerce sound more interesting than it is. A record label and a chocolate brand are both doing the same underlying work: taking something that's in the air in a particular place at a particular time and giving it a form that can be bought, worn, listened to, tasted. Factory Records didn't invent Manchester's post-industrial bluntness and DIY refusal of polish. It gave that sensibility a sleeve design and a bassline. Gorman didn't invent Melbourne's particular brand of optimistic, slightly eccentric colour. It gave it a dress.
What fascinates me is that brands belong in a city's cultural ecosystem every bit as much as bands, galleries or neighbourhood restaurants do. They're cultural artefacts as much as commercial ones. Seoul's immersive beauty flagships, Stockholm's obsession with functional design, Montreal's outdoor innovators like Norda, New York's food brands like Fishwife and Ghia. All of it emerges from a distinctive local culture before it becomes a commercial success. The most interesting local brands often tell you more about a city than its tourist attractions do.
The pull in both directions
Here's where I find myself genuinely ambivalent, in the proper sense of the word of being pulled in two directions at once.
Part of me wants these brands to stay exactly where they are. To remain Melbourne's, or Portland's, or Seoul's, in the way a great local band belongs to the scene that made it before anyone else has heard of it. There's something that gets lost the moment a thing built for a specific place starts being built for everywhere.The in jokes flatten out, the rough edges get sanded down, the thing that made it feel like it belonged to here starts belonging to nowhere in particular.
But another part of me, just as strongly, wants more people to experience them. I want someone in Sheffield to taste what Lune is doing, the way I want someone in Portland to hear a Brisbane band they'd never otherwise come across. That instinct isn't really about commerce at all. It's the same impulse that makes you send a friend a record, or drag them into a bookshop you've just discovered. You want to share the good thing.
What reassures me, most days, is that culture doesn't actually work like a fixed pie, where global success for one thing means less of it left over locally. U2 left Dublin and went properly global, and Dublin kept producing bands anyway. Fontaines D.C, Lankum, Madra Salach, beyond them now doubt more. The scene that makes a thing doesn't run out. It just keeps making the next thing. Brands seem to work the same way, if you let them. Aesop left Melbourne's suburbs decades ago and now sits in close to twenty countries. Melbourne, last I checked, has not run short of interesting skincare.
Culture evolves. Brands evolve.
I don't think there's a tidy resolution to this, and I'm suspicious of anyone who claims to have found one. The ambivalence is the honest position. I want Gorman to stay unmistakably Brisbane even as more of the world gets to wear it. I want the next Lune to still feel like it could only have come from precisely one set of streets, one set of cafés, one particular argument happening in a particular city right now, even as I hope, quietly, that it ends up somewhere much further from home.
Maybe that's simply what it means to love a place through what it makes, rather than through what it has always been.