Duolingo’s new clothing line will remind you to pronounce ‘Hermès’ and ‘Loewe’ correctly
Fashion's trickiest names just got a wearable cheat sheet.
New York Fashion Week has plenty of unwritten rules, but Duolingo would apparently like to add one more: learn how to pronounce the designer you’re wearing. The language-learning company has launched a fashion capsule collection turning notoriously tricky luxury brand names into wearable pronunciation guides, because there’s hardly a bigger fashion faux pas than an awkward attempt at saying “Hermès.”
Dubbed The Phonetic Collection, the campaign debuted on September 8 alongside New York Fashion Week. Adweek reports that designer Megan O’Cain, who competed on Season 2 of Netflix’s Next in Fashion, created the pieces around familiar silhouettes while plastering phonetic spellings of famous fashion houses across them.
The well-pronounced fashion line looks like a more stylish way to earn that owl’s approval. One lime-green handbag spells Hermès as “air-mess,” while a jacket tackles Givenchy with “zhee-vahn-shee.” Consider the dress code educational and multilingual.
Duolingo Just Made Pronunciation Part of the Dress Code
The campaign isn’t simply based on Duolingo assuming everyone secretly panics when confronted with a French fashion label. According to Yahoo, research conducted by the company with YouGov found that 62% of Americans felt confident they could pronounce Hermès correctly, but only 15% actually could.
Gen Z reportedly has a somewhat better ear for designer names, coming in more than three times as likely as Millennials, Gen X, or Boomers to pronounce one correctly. Even then, fewer than three in 10 respondents from the generation managed to get the names right.
“There’s something very human about avoiding a word because you’re worried you’ll say it wrong,” Duolingo Chief Marketing Officer Manu Orssaud said. And really, there are few places where confidently saying something completely wrong feels more dangerous than accidentally wearing yesterday’s trending fashion item. Turns out, apart from watching The Devil Wears Prada 2, one of the most effective ways to become fluent in luxury fashion is to wear that pushy Duolingo owl on your sleeve.
Fashion Week Is Getting a Language Lesson
The clothes were created as part of a wider New York campaign that will put The Phonetic Collection across the city during Fashion Week. Duo, the company’s famously threatening green owl, isn’t the main star of the collection itself, although he is scheduled to appear in an advertisement on Canal Street.
The collection also made a two-day appearance at boutique and gallery Null Object on September 9 and September 10. Visitors can apparently bid their Duolingo streaks for the chance to win a piece, which might be the first time forgetting your Spanish lesson has potentially cost you a handbag.
The campaign is ultimately an advertisement for Duolingo, of course. Orssaud said Fashion Week gave the company an opening because some of fashion’s most recognizable names also happen to be among its hardest to pronounce. After all, carrying an Hermès bag must be so much more rewarding when you don’t get lost in pronunciation.
Still, wearable phonetics might save someone from confidently butchering a designer’s name from the front row. Duolingo has officially turned “Who are you wearing?” into a question the outfit can answer for you.
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