CITIZEN: The Good, The True, and The Beautiful
2022
Brand Identity, Apparel Design, Conceptual Branding, Social Commentary
A conceptual streetwear brand forged at the formal collision of Brutalism and Transcendentalism. The brand mark derives from the aerial plan of a Spomenik — a Yugoslav abstract war memorial — an eye centred at its structural axis. The identity system deploys across hoodies, long-sleeve tees, posters, and print collateral in black, white, and red, accompanied by a series of debriefing questions that operate simultaneously as post-combat protocol and mystical interrogation.
Brutalism makes state power legible — mass, concrete, the institution rendered as material weight you can stand under and feel. Transcendentalism insists the individual can perceive truth directly, through and beyond institutional form. CITIZEN is a streetwear brand concept built from the collision of these two positions.
The brand mark is derived from the aerial plan view of a Spomenik — the abstract modernist war memorials commissioned throughout Yugoslavia from the 1960s onward, designed to embody anti-fascist struggle and progressive socialist hope through forward-looking concrete forms. Viewed from directly above, a Spomenik reveals its internal structural logic: radial, geometric, organised around a central axis. An eye occupies the axis point, where the monument's weight converges. Spomenik (brutalism, progression, collective vision) + Eye (transcendentalism, authority, the gaze) = CITIZEN. A © appears on the mark.
The subtitle — The Good, The True, and The Beautiful — names Transcendentalism's three properties of being: the qualities the Eye at the centre of the monument either protects or destroys, depending on whose hand the brand is in.
A palette of black, white, and red carries the system across hoodies, long-sleeve tees, posters, and print collateral. The mark appears in four colour combinations — red on black, black on grey, black on white, red on red — each shifting the symbol's register from aggressive to bureaucratic to clinical to nearly invisible. On the hoodies, "CITIZEN" sits small on the chest; the back carries a 2×3 grid of eyes, pale on dark fabric. Not one watching eye but six.
The brand's voice runs alongside the mark as a series of debriefing questions — interrogation language crossed with spiritual evaluation:
“Was the use of force necessary in completing your objectives. Were any specters or phantoms present. Will you choke the divine. Have you been having strange dreams. Did you achieve a state of euphoria. Are you sure the only you is you.”
The last question is the sharpest. Under surveillance, the observed self and the real self diverge. The brand asks whether you've noticed.
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