I'd be lying if I said I've always dreamed of having my own menswear label.
But I've met enough designers to know it beats actually working for a living, so I can see the appeal. Duties involve sitting front row at fashion shows, rubbing shoulders with A-listers, wearing expensive clothes and going to parties with people who look like supermodels because they are supermodels.
Even the behind-the-scenes stuff sounds fun. Who among us hasn't yearned to compile a "mood board" using stills from On The Town, clippings from back issues of Horse & Hound and archive shots of the Bon Accord Silver brass band that won the 1985 Scottish Quartet Championships? Thought not.
Best of all, though, would be choosing the name for my putative brand. The wave of upmarket fashion labels that came along in the wake of the post-war couture revival tended to play safe and simply use their founder's name. Christian Dior did it in 1946 when he launched his eponymous company and Ottavio and Rosita Missoni followed eight years later when they founded theirs. Since then designers Gianni Versace, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Karl Lagerfeld and Ralph Lauren have all continued the trend.
Of course with a name like mine, that's not such a good idea. I'm going to have be a little more creative and look elsewhere for inspiration. By naming her company Comme Des Garcons, Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo threw a curveball into the fashion label naming game that others have been happy to follow and I think that's probably the way for me to go too.
Of course there's danger here. Some of these "curveball" names are truly terrible. Other don't even make sense: just this week Bollywood star Farhan Akhtar signed up to endorse a menswear brand called Code By Lifestyle. What does that even mean?
There are others which are equally awful, such as the Swedish quartet We Are The Superlative Conspiracy, Acne, Cheap Monday and Uniforms For The Dedicated. But don't think I'm picking on the Swedes alone. With labels like A Bathing Ape and Black Weirdos the Japanese are no better and in New York you'll even find one called Troglodyte Homonculus.
Of course where there's a human to cock something up, there's an algorithm able to do the same and so it is here. Putting in "dad", "scruffy", "overweight" and "beer" as my keywords in an online brand name generator I get dozens of suggestions, the least bad of which are Goover, Gaydad and (my favourite) Undefeated Dad Likes Beer Of The Opera Granola.
I know I can do better/worse than that on my own, so over a cup of tea I come up with Dad Knocks Off At Six Prompt, Argh! We Can See Your Tummy Mummy (a women's range, obviously) and, because it would come up in search engines and covers all the bases, Fashion Urban Streetwear Style Designer Wear Apparel. But after much consideration I've gone for something a little snappier, something that does at least give a flavour of the sharp fashion brain behind the designs. So here it is: Dudz By Baz. Good, eh?
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