MRTHOMASWHITEHEAD

Kanye West’s enthusiasm for the design of high end toys has rather overshadowed his predecessor Pharrell William’s almost Warholian zeal for the brightly coloured, cartoonish and iconic. Predating Kanye’s Takashi Murakami collaborations, Pharrell’s work with Nigo for his Bathing Ape imprint pushed the mainstram rap world’s patronage of brightly coloured, blocky cartoon animas. Pharrell went on to bring Western cartoons Eastward, releasing a Spongebob Squarepants “Bapesta” trainer

“What I love about SpongeBob,” Pharrell says, “is that he’s basically a six-year-old.”

Pharell may well indeed feel some affinity with character’s childish exuberence, but it is a canny association nonetheless. He is not alone in the world of commercial fashion in his appreciation. i-D magazine has used its space for a full bleed Kaws adaptation of the character and since made him a kind of joint coverstar with Lily Allen. In incrementally higher fashion circles, the designer Marc Jacobs went so far as to have the yellow chap tattooed on his arm- justifying it by saying:

“I just think the colors of that particular cartoon are really beautiful and really sophisticated and interesting,”

Aside from the colour, a few degrees paler than Simpson, Spongebob Squarepants as Design Icon has one massive, massive advantage over his cartoon friends. He is, by definition, square, and thus fits the dimensions of all sorts of modular spaces onscreen, and more profitably, off*. Added to this, this lack of defining outline means that he fits the shape of almost any other space, with a flexibility of scale. As the leading image shows, even as the yellow space around his features grows, he never takes on the creepy “small features” look.
Bart Simpson is yellow, and instantly recognisable. You could, in fact, argue that Spongebob is a (d?)evolution of the Simpson brat. But without his zigzag buzzcut and precociously furrowed brow, he loses nearly all of his character. Take Mickey’s trademark ears off, and you have a face indistinct from any other cartoon characters of his era. Whilst the ears have been a powerful marketing identifer for cheap, fun trinkets and souveniers, in terms of their application to desirable consumer products- clothes, trainers etc, their vestigiality becomes a nuisance.

Fossils of sponges exist from 580 million years ago. They clearly have a simplicity and malleability which is difficult to supersede.

*You could even argue that in the era of greenwash, the fact that his products tesselate neatly is a plus in transportation and packaging terms