The funniest thing about the original Goncharov post is that I have seen people do exhaustive amounts of research in order to discern that it’s a misspelling/mistranslation of Martin Scorcese’s “Gomorrah” and then go “well this explains everything” while never once questioning why it’s on shoes
I forgot most people wouldn’t understand it on sight, tbqh. Professional blindness.
The thing that matters is not that it was on a shoe, but that it was on a machine embroidered (or machine woven I wasn’t looking that close) label.
What happened is, someone at the labels-for-boots factory ran a cool looking piece of text in a language they didn’t understand through either an OCR program, or any number of similar software to convert text in a photo to a digital format that can be fed to the embroidery machine.
It came out with good visual balance so off it went, to be sewn onto boots.
The text was from the English language poster of the film Gomorrah.
It was run through an OCR intended for use with both Cyrillic and Latin alphabets, but was not set to recognize English properly, hence some dead giveaways like ‘production’ becoming 'prdhhhco’ and, y'know. The title. Goncharov.
It might have been ripped from a JPEG online but given age of Gomorrah, I would bet it was scanned off an old movie cover or movie poster.
It’s on a shoe because shoes often need a big fancy label or decal to make them pass for branded products at a glance. It’s the same principle as those “CUGGL” shirts in the “GUCCI” font.
Anyway this happens all the time when clothing is made for both English and Russian speakers by people who do not read either language. It’s a lot of fun to browse AliExpress and try to guess what the original text was.
@vergess That all tracks! I’m chasing down my own product lead on this right now - I found an extremely similar but apparently unrelated Goncharov tag/label at a small Japanese embroidered patch and tag retailer, like, a quirky English phrase fashion house essentially. Markets where nobody speaks English but English on clothes is “cool” are also clearly part of this equation - this fashion house has thousands of these things.
I emailed them to ask about the Goncharov tag specifically and they said they had sourced it from “somewhere in Asia” and would reach out to their supplier (though since it’s an old product - they got theirs in 2018, unlike the boots, which were from 2020 - they cautioned that their contact might not remember where it came from). The two tags/labels have similarities that make it clear they’re from the same source, but enough differences that it’s also clear they were made for different purposes or designed at different times, and I find that fascinating too. You were talking specifically about Russian markets and Cyrillic OCR, do you think it’s more likely that these tags came from the Cyrillic sphere (Russia, Central Asia) and migrated east to “English is trendy” markets, or do you think it’s likely that there are also workshops in east/southeast Asia doing similar things for their local markets?
I’m also curious about the possibility of physical media being involved, how does that kind of stuff even get sourced for work like this in the first place? At least if it was digital, you’d assume they’ve got bots doing a lot of the work and just feeding back images of cool-looking text from extensive image crawls, but the idea of ordering like, lots of physical media (from where? where is it kept? does it just die there after it’s scanned?) and parsing through it for text is wild.
