Julien Boudet and the Culture of Aspiration
From symbols of Western luxury to the desirable kitschiness of bootlegs, cultural critic and StyleZeitgeist founder Eugene Rabkin deconstructs the secret messages contained in Julien Boudet’s new photo series.
Eugene Rabkin is a fashion and culture journalist based in New York City. Reconnecting with longtime friend and creative collaborator Julien Boudet, Rabkin breaks down the hidden cultural references in Boudet's 'The Power of Logos.'
I witnessed the slow lifting of the Iron Curtain while growing up in Belarus in the early ’90s. Cultural artifacts started to trickle in, from rock records to MTV music videos, soon followed by big brands. To Westerners, Coca-Cola may have been a barely noticeable fact of life, but to us, it was a romanticized symbol of a vastly richer world with infinitely more color than ours.
People lined up for hours when the first McDonald’s opened in Moscow’s Pushkinskaya Square. Awareness of clothing brands eventually followed, driven by bootlegs. As my town’s local state-owned department store began leasing space to private peddlers, the first thing I remember being excited about were T-shirts with logos embroidered on them. They had no rhyme or reason to them; fake Gucci was next to fake Reebok and cost the same. Genres that we don’t think twice about today, like luxury and sportswear, were anathema. These fakes represented the same thing: symbols of Western cool and aspiration.
Meanwhile, Julien Boudet was growing up in Sète, a picturesque but gritty port town of 40,000 people in the South of France. Populated by fishermen, blue-collar workers and North African immigrants, Boudet’s working-class childhood was a world removed from the genteel luxury (or le luxe à la Française) that is typically associated with the country. Like it was for millions of kids around the world, aspiration was in the air, with dreams of luxury goods one could never afford, or even see in real life, contrasting with the reality of a well-worn adidas tracksuit. When people couldn’t afford it, they would fake it. “There were a lot of bootlegs in the markets,” says Boudet. “We would go to Marseille and they would have all these fake Louis Vuitton bags and belts. Now these copies have become so common that we ignore it, but back then it was fresh. No one had the real stuff.”
Julien and I met in New York a decade ago when he was studying photography at Parsons. While working together in the early days of StyleZeitgeist, we’d invariably talk about our upbringings, and realized that on some levels they were similar. For both of us, there was nowhere to look but up. This series of photos is about retrospection and a way of giving back to bootlegging and a culture that may be seen as low by many, but that holds a special place in the hearts of those who were brought up in it.
“It’s about cars and motorcycles, which I’m passionate about, and about my obsession with logos and the bootleg stuff I grew up with,” says Boudet. Besides, in the 21st century, some collaborations use the inherent kitschiness of ersatz products as an aesthetic reference point or as a way to comment on cultural values—see Gucci’s official bootleg tee from 2016 or Balenciaga’s unabashed tie-up with adidas from 2022.
The mashing of logos is a hallmark of Boudet’s work. “Streetwear is very hot right now, but [brands] collaborate with everyone; nothing really makes sense anymore in this industry,” he says. “So I think it’s quite fun to play with this.”
For the past couple of years, Boudet has been traveling to places like the United Arab Emirates and Georgia, photographing all kinds of vehicles, but especially the kinds of luxury cars that he dreamed of as a teenager. Of these, the most striking images come from the supercar purgatory found outside of Dubai, where scores of abandoned Rolls-Royces and Lamborghinis are mothballed before being resold at invitation-only auctions.
“I bought this bootleg Nike cap in Casablanca and took the logo off of it. When I saw this car, I put the logos together,” says Boudet of the most incongruous image in this series, which depicts the trunk of a dead Bentley with the Nike logo right below the car’s emblem. A mashup that makes little sense at first glance serves in reality as sharp commentary on today’s consumer culture, in which the primary meaning of a logo is to denote something desirable or cool, with the product often of secondary consideration. For a large swath of the world’s population, it doesn’t really matter whether you fantasize about a Bentley or a limited-edition Nike sneaker—either way, it’s a distant dream.
As Boudet says, today’s collaboration culture often does not go beyond putting two logos together. You can easily imagine that, sooner or later, Bentley and Nike will come together on a car that will never be produced, instead serving as a vessel for both brands to explore each other’s creative behaviors. Together, the images become footnotes in the aspirational compartment of one’s mind.
Another striking image in this series is that of a rusted wagon that says “cafeteria” in Russian, with a Rolex logo superimposed on it. The clash between the dinginess of the wagon and the logo of the prestigious Swiss watch manufacturer is jarring and unsettling; its incomprehension is jolting. The two things shouldn’t be together, yet they are. To me that image says that even in the most remote places, aspiration remains.