It was Roger Federer’s white jacket in 2006 for me. Golden initials embroidered on the breast pocket, as he lifted the Wimbledon trophy. The elegant monogram suggested an aristocratic elan that I craved. Was it possible to grab some of his pedigree, without the achievements or money, but with some simple stitching? I wondered if I would feel like a fraud.
Twenty years later, such personalisation is attainable, and everywhere. Monograms and other distinctive touches, formerly the preserve of the rich, can be anyone’s. Zara, H&M and Uniqlo offer embroidery options in-store. You can buy personalised phone cases, keyrings and socks through Etsy, Glenfiddich whisky bottles labelled with your name, and Converse Chuck Taylors with your face on them. Buying a shoe tree the other day, I was asked if I wanted my initials etched on the heel knob. Oxford Street’s newest pop-up, Hus of Frakta, offers a monogrammed Ikea bag. We personalise football shirts on stag dos and birthdays, and print ironic T-shirts with the faces of loved ones. What’s with all the self-regard – and is identity so easily bought?
To finally answer the question I have been wondering since July 2006, I road test a few custom pieces. First up – a baseball cap with my name on it from Etsy for £21.95. I’ve never enjoyed my name. Everyone spells it wrong. It’s like being lumbered with an administrative burden. Anyone foreign will understand the alienation of tourist attraction gift shops that sell name keyrings. There’s no point looking for Rhik, or Tadhg, or Xiu. (It’s like we were never even at Space Mountain.)
But now I have my own cap, my name picked out with hot pink thread. I wear it in the streets and on public transport with a COS raincoat. People universally love it. Someone tells me I look like I’m running a film set. People don’t mind that it says “Rhik” on it. It grows into a gentle joke; people asking where they can get one, also with my name on. I wriggle like a puppy in the attention. I have merch. I’m someone!
Being someone is important. Monogramming dates back at least to ancient Egypt, where pharaohs used hieroglyphs to mark their possessions. Craftsmen in the middle ages marked their initials on pots, weapons and tools, as an assurance of quality. In the industrialised 20th century, personalisation became an important means of self-expression. Customisation gathered all these meanings, as it became democratised.
Cut to today and the social-media age encourages self-branding, the curating of ourselves as aspirational figures, whatever our budgets. We enjoy the quiet luxury of a customised jacket, or an exclusive trainer design that can’t be bought off the shelf. Except it sort of can. There’s an unavoidable irony in luxing-up mass-produced items, putting a monogram on a Matalan shirt. The most effective personalised pieces acknowledge this, playing with the aura of celebrity in a cheeky way.
Take, for example, the trend for putting our faces on T-shirts. Tribute tees became upmarket street fashion in the 2000s, worn by off-duty models and celebrities – most archly Kieran Culkin and Ryan Gosling. Their roots actually lie in the southern US hip-hop scene of the 90s: bootleggers would sell colourful, DIY tees of popular rap stars, using ombre text above a collage of faces, a look that came to define the music. By 2023, the style resurfaced as a popular template on Etsy, but with customers promoting their own faces and names. The same year, it became a TikTok trend to present one’s significant other with a tee of this type, and film their reaction. We are all little pharaohs, we are all Lil Wayne.
Another personalisation touchstone is the Carrie necklace: an affordable gold nameplate, introduced in the second series of Sex and the City, which aired in 1999. Stylist Patricia Field had noticed kids in New York wearing them. Off the back of the show, they became ubiquitous. (My friend Isolde is wearing her name on a chain when she tells me this.) The Carrie necklace is cute. Yet the show’s impact obscures the importance of nameplates in Black and Latino culture, where owning your ethnic name can be a powerful defiance against white power structures. In the show, Carrie refers to her penchant for un-serious gold accessories as “ghetto gold, for fun”.
I love 90s rap, so here goes nothing. I order a custom rap tee from Threadheads, which features five pictures of my face, with lightning strikes and sparkles. I don’t look as devastating as Tupac, but I wear it around town anyway. The reception is … good? A bartender says I look awesome. The receptionist at a cold-plunge facility volunteers that she loves the top. Isn’t it odd I’m wearing my face five times? “It would be odder if it was someone else’s face,” she says. “Self-love!” chimes her colleague. I enter a delusion in which I am a cool guy. Then I remember these people work in the service industry, and would probably say I looked great if I was wearing a spatula in my buttonhole.
This all strikes me as a sea change. When I was young, personalised licence plates on cars were seen as a status symbol – the status symbolised being that you were a complete bell. I dread being perceived as vain yet, halfway through the experiment, I attend a party full of poets who don’t know me. It’s a bad place to wear a T-shirt of myself. The most successful practitioners of the least commercial writing form are as acid as you’d expect.
“Who do you think you are? Are those lightning strikes?” grimaces one girl. Some of the wordsmiths use blunter tools. “It’s weird, man!” yells one guy I haven’t even been introduced to. Someone calls me a trout, which I don’t understand. “It is obnoxious … ” demurs Amy. “But it’s also ugly.” The tee hasn’t been an unqualified success. “Only children and narcissists wear a T-shirt of themselves” concludes my friend Amish Tom, later.
He’s right, there is something childish in personalisation. Many of us wrote our names on pencil cases or over and over in notebooks as children. We were developing our egos, learning to take up space. Young people carve initials in trees, experiment with graffiti. The smaller we feel, the more necessary to assert our identity. It’s probably no coincidence that the more we’re swept around by global forces, the more furiously we market the brand of ourselves.
AI too represents a severe threat to our identity today. In a world where robots may take your job in two years, and your head could star in a nonconsensual pornography clip tomorrow, it makes sense that we’re drawn to anything that celebrates our particularity. Writing “Lucy” on your beanie won’t slow the Skynet hordes, but it may give you a boost of self-esteem, and help you feel real.
For my final piece, I purchase a Stanley Cup – the brand of voguish flasks now offer a personalisation option. I can’t bear to see my own name any more, but do need cheering up. I use the bespoke text option and, a few days later, a Federer-esque textured cream bottle arrives bearing the words, in gold, “Dogs don’t like reggae / They love it.” The headline to a piece I wrote years ago, it crystallises the absurdity of my job. I use the words as a mantra, a personal memento mori. They feel stronger now, being physicalised. People like my bottle, it tickles them. Although, interestingly, they appreciate it less once I’ve explained the joke. My bottle’s words don’t need to be understood to be cool. I’ve stumbled into relevance, which is nice.
Ultimately, we put faces on clothes for the same reason we put a dog’s name on its bowl, though they can’t read. A sense of ownership is a personal bond, and that feels special to us. One could argue these tailored touches mask a disappearing sense of connection, as well as a vanished social mobility; a marker of luxury substituting for real prosperity. On the other hand, it’s no bad thing for a mass-produced item to feel unique, and thereby less disposable.
I have to say, personalisation is a bit of me. Customising your clothes is refined yet playful, and surprisingly textured. Your own name, face or catchphrase can be sweet, defiant, an expression of private feeling or public self-love, or just plain weird, depending what you do with it. It also depends what people read into it. If they’re not a hip-hop historian, or up to date on TikTok, there’s a risk an offended poet might call you a trout. Let the people chatter. It doesn’t bother me, because I’m very successful and very, very humble.
