Tanda dan Simbol Amerika yang Mengubah Budaya

The Peace Sign

“Whenever blood is shed unjustly,†says 1960s luminary and longtime peace activist Wavy Gravy, “the peace symbol becomes as provocative as it ever was.†Derived from an ancient runic symbol of despair and grief, it became the logo for Bertrand Russell's Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the 1950s. The logo's first widespread U.S. exposure came when it surfaced in the 1962 sci-fi film The Day the Earth Caught Fire, and it soon symbolized the entire counterculture. “It was a way of telling what side you were on,†Gravy says. “No one who wore the sign was into any kind of militancy.†—L.C. Smith

Levi Strauss Jeans

A Bavarian immigrant named Levi Strauss, then living in San Francisco, first patented his denim “waist overalls†in 1873, but that little red tab on the back right-hand pocket didn't pop up until 63 years later. By then, miners and cowhands had embraced the lean, mean work pants reinforced with copper rivets, and Levi's suddenly had to contend with a rush of imitators. So in 1936, a company salesman dreamed up the tab with the word Levi's stitched in white. The first 3-D trademark, it later sat atop the new frontier of cool when a 501-wearing James Dean broke down in the 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause. (Oddly, no one at Levi's knows why they're called 501s. In 1906, an earthquake ravaged Levi's headquarters, destroying the company's records.) These days, the logo's allure has to do with more than just cool. As Levi's archivist Stacia Fink points out, “We've been around a lot longer than the Nike swoosh.†—L.C.S.

The AIDS Ribbon

During the Persian Gulf War, in 1991, when yellow ribbons were tied around virtually every tree in America, a group of New York AIDS activists realized a ribbon would be a way of raising awareness of the disease that was ravaging urban gay populations. After Jeremy Irons wore one on his tuxedo at that year's Tony Awards, interest in the ribbons grew so great, the group had to enlist the help of a women's shelter to satisfy demand. “It was meant to open up public dialogue,†says Allen Frame, a photographer and a member of Visual AIDS. “Before, I knew people who were HIV-positive who were ashamed to ask for help. The ribbon totally changed that.†—L.C.S.

The Smiley Face

It's tempting to think that the smiley face was a genial effort to buck up America's sagging spirits at the start of the Seventies. Truth is, it was the brainchild of two guys looking to make a buck. “We wanted to start a fad that would be as big as the peace symbol,†says Bernard Spain, who at the time ran a Philadelphia head shop with his brother Murray. The Spains estimate they had sold nearly 20 million buttons by 1972. Meanwhile, Harvey Ball, the smiley face's designer, toiled in obscurity. A Massachusetts graphic designer, Ball had dreamed up the face in the early Sixties for a local insurance company. His fee: 45 dollars. —L.C.S.

The @ Symbol

Computer engineers pride themselves on elegant solutions, and few have been as perfect as that hit upon by Ray Tomlinson in 1971. Tomlinson not only sent the first email — on an Internet predecessor known as Arpanet — he also came up with the idea of using the @ symbol in the email address. It was one of the few characters on the keyboard that wouldn't show up in anyone's name. And it meant, well, “at.†“It became the dominant symbol for the whole wired world,†says John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a lyricist for the Grateful Dead. “It was everywhere at once. And it happened quite naturally.†—L.C.S.

The MTV Symbol

When Manhattan Design was asked to come up with a logo for a nascent cable network named MTV, the firm was told, “It could be anything, even a dog vomiting, as long as the call letters were readable,†says Frank Olinsky, a company partner. Inspired by graffiti art, the firm fashioned a fat yellow M and spray-painted “TV†onto it. “We wanted MTV to look like an underground station,†says Tom Freston, one of the network's founders. “We never thought we'd have any memorable shows, but at least people would remember our name.†—L.C.S.

The Pac-Man

In 1977, pinball-machine designer Toru lwatani went out for pizza and changed the face of gaming. “I helped myself to a slice,†Iwatani said, “and what was left was the idea for the Pac-Man shape.†Pac-Man arrived in U.S. game parlors in 1980 as the first arcade contest aimed squarely at pre-adolescents. The manufacturer sold an astounding 100,000 cabinets in the next two years. The game inspired the hit song “Pac-Man Fever†as well as several game sequels, some good (Ms. Pac-Man), some not (Professor Pac-Man). An original Pac-Man now resides in the Smithsonian Institution. —L.C.S.

The Rolling Stones Lips

In the early Seventies, Mick Jagger's mouth was “an affront to human decency,†as one London newspaper put it. But Jagger originally approached designer John Pasche with another set of lips as the basis for the Rolling Stones' logo. “He had this image of the mouth of the Hindu goddess Kali that he really liked,†says Pasche. “I thought the Indian influence would be a passing fad, so I did Mick's mouth instead.†The tongue-and-lips logo debuted on the 1971 album Sticky Fingers. “That design said everything you needed to know about the band,†says Courtney Taylor, lead singer of the Dandy Warhols and a Jagger look-alike. “Plus, it was the poster mouth for the world's best oral sex.†—L.C.S.

Polo by Ralph Lauren

The Grateful Dead Skull

“It became an emblem for a tribe of misfits,†says Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir. “We all identified with it. That lightning bolt pertained to enlightenment, whether it be chemical or musical.†Co-designed by legendary Dead soundman and LSD chemist Augustus Owsley Stanley as a sticker to identify his equipment, the skull and lightning bolt went public after appearing on the Dead's 1976 live album Steal Your Face. The logo, says Weir, “embodied the band†far more than another popular Dead mascot, the dancing bear: “I never thought of us as cute and cuddly.†—L.C.S.