Can brands reclaim symbols and transmute their meaning?

Can brands reclaim symbols and transmute their meaning? Who decides what symbols mean and how we change them? Is making a prettier version of the symbol sufficient? Selkie's latest American Woman collection is an example of brand vision falling short in the marketing execution across product and messaging. Selkie is a slow fashion brand that is best known for their very whimsical, floofy, over-the-top, like, princess-core dresses. And they very much have championed progressive and inclusive values as a woman-owned company. Selkie decided to release their new collection in the first week of Pride month with an American flag-themed collection. In a time when, um, things aren't going so great in America, um, people, people had questions. The founder of Selkie has been very adamant that her entire vision for this campaign is a means for progressives to reclaim the symbol on the flag away from MAGA and far-right ideology. So if the goal of this marketing campaign was reclamation of a symbol, then this is a marketing failure. Because if the people you're trying to reclaim a symbol from can still wear your version of it without flinching, you haven't reclaimed anything. You've just made them a nicer outfit. This failure of reclamation really boils down to two things in marketing: the product and the message. In order to reclaim a symbol, you have to transmute it entirely. Not transform it, you have to change the very nature of it. And the nature of the dresses are really composed of three things in this collection: frills, feminine shapes, and stars and stripes. Frills are the oldest shorthand we have for girlishness. There's the feminine colonial-esque shapes which hearken to a yesteryear gone by that the right is constantly, like, pining for. And the American flag in 2026 carries the meaning that it carries. So I want to ask you the question that the dresses is asking you, which is are traditional codes of girlishness combined with colonial aesthetics paired with the American flag offering a reclaimed and radical view of American womanhood? As the meaning of the symbol actually transmuted something? None of those three ingredients fight the flag's current meaning. In fact, they very much reinforce it. The frilly, pageant-coded, star-spangled banner gown is not going to be illegible to the far right as a reclaimed symbol of the left. It's their aesthetic. It's rodeo queen. And unfortunately, Ballerina Farm could probably wear this dress to a barbecue and she would, like, unironically slay. A symbol doesn't carry the meaning that its maker stuffed into it. The meaning gets released at the moment that somebody else looks at it and decodes it in context to culture. Nobody, including Selkie, gets to install a meaning just by announcing it, which is exactly what their entire campaign's premise was built on. Which leads me to the message, which is just to say that there wasn't one. Launching during Pride month alongside imagery of white suffragettes was confusing in and of itself as a strategy, but behind that strategy there was also no cohesive or coherent message that Selkie's customer base was supposed to latch onto. There were just dresses that were giving Betsy Ross and a vibe and people were decoding what that vibe was based off of what that symbol means to them in context to culture today. After the campaign dropped, they also announced that they were going to be doing a nonprofit donation after everybody was up in a tizzy about it, which, like, didn't really help the overall brand image. A reclamation that you can't tell apart from the thing that you're trying to reclaim from is not a reclamation. It's just poorly done merch. You can't take a symbol back by making it prettier to wear. The only way to reclaim a symbol is by making the old way impossible to wear. Selkie just made it easier.