I started thinking about brand anonymity while my friend Ellen and I were flipping through the J. Crew catalog and came across a pair of psychedelic print mini-shorts.

“You should get them!” I suggested brightly to my leggy co-shopper.

Ellen dismissed my suggestion out of hand. “No,” she said. “Everyone would know they were from J. Crew.”

The objection struck me as odd. It wasn’t as though she had said, “Everyone would know they were from Forever 21.” Presumably nobody would be embarrassed to own something from a relatively high-end chain like J. Crew, and the shorts were far too outrageous to ever become overly trendy. So why the hesitation? Why the sudden aversion to being branded?

This stigma may seem illogical. We buy all sorts of things for the sole purpose of having others know precisely where they came from. Longchamp bags, for example, are everywhere on campus, and easily identified by their preppy vinyl and pebbled-leather straps. So, too, are Jack Rogers shoes, True Religion jeans and countless other distinctively styled items.

The distinction lies in the subtlety of the branding. Compare trends now to those five and 10 years ago, when the most sought-after items literally spelled out their makers for all to see.

Those ubiquitous black nylon Prada bags served basically as billboards. Their sole ornamentation, the iconic black triangular logo stamped PRADA, the minimalist purses held no distractions from their brand identity, which was legible and obvious enough that nobody needed a subscription to Vogue to suss it out.

Today, it’s a different story. Perhaps due to the backlash against the deadly rainbow-and-white leather concoction that was the Louis Vuitton “Monogram Multicolore” collection of 2003, recent “it” items have taken a decidedly more understated approach.

High-end denim illustrates this trend well. An avid upscale shopper can effortlessly identify the impostor pair of Paper denims from a lineup of seemingly identically clad posteriors. But to a layman — or just those of us used to shopping at stores that don’t charge a quarter-grand for things made of cotton — the differences are all but imperceptible.

Nowadays the only people who know “who you’re wearing” are probably wearing the same thing — or, at the very least, aspire to.

On some level, this is a good thing. That people can identify brands based on the placement of a pintuck or the color of a contrast stitching suggests a higher level of appreciation for fashion as a work of skill and artistry. Beneath the surface, however, there seems to be something more insidious at work.

To me, the subtlety represents a far deeper and more dangerous level of snobbery and class-consciousness then a gaudy logo ever could. The new branding, the “Everyone will know this is from J. Crew” phenomenon, implies the wearer’s social circle includes only people at the same economic level. “Everybody” includes only those well-off enough to have spent a lot of time and money on M Street or at Saks.

Gone are the days of the Abercrombie name craze and logo-happy Gucci and Louis Vuitton handbags. People no longer long for the brand labels. The Hollisters and American Eagles still survive, but the emphasis on branding is dying.

After shooting down my shorts suggestion, Ellen took the magazine back and resumed flipping through the pages. I can only assume that she was searching for that elusive article of anonymous-yet-name-brand clothing, pleated and stitched so that only the discerning could identify it. Because it wasn’t actually shopping at J. Crew that she was opposed to — it was letting people know she did.