a source familiar with the matter on Nostr: Mandela Effect - Fruit of the Loom There's a phenomenon in which many people remember ...

Mandela Effect - Fruit of the Loom

There's a phenomenon in which many people remember something but documents generally or universally indicate something else.

For example, many people remember that Nelson Mandela died in prison and were surprised when he went on to be released and become president of South Africa.

Many of these can be explained as people applying normal rules of language to unusual cases, such as "Fruit Loops" vs "Froot Loops". Others legitimately occurred in both forms such as the "Berenstein Bears" and the "Berenstain Bears". Finally some like the Mandela case or the film Shazam probably reflect different events around the same time being mistakenly conflated.

One of the more puzzling and surprising ones for me was Fruit of the Loom. The modern logo is some fruit and leaves without any basket or horn of plenty, and the company claims it has always been this way.

Many people remember learning what a cornucopia was from the Fruit of the Loom logo. A 1970s musical album called Flute of the Loom features a flute shaped like a giant cornucopia and the illustrator has confirmed this was to imitate the underwear logo's cornucopia. A Forbes article on how Fruit of the Loom was using the early internet to manage its supply chain references the brand's "well-known cornucopia". Confusingly, no photographs seem to exist showing this version of the logo.

I happened to be looking into this today and realized that Fruit of the Loom has not only changed ownership multiple times, but it has also licensed the brand to outside third parties such as Union Underwear Company.

Some investigators posit that a knockoff brand featured the cornucopia, but this doesn't explain how it could become well-known in the United States as the official logo of Fruit of the Loom. I suspect that some third party (probably Union) had their own version of the logo on packaging, while using the official version on the underwear itself. Since very little underwear packaging from decades ago survives to this day (even if some garments do) this would lead to many people seeing the cornucopia version of the logo but very few (if any) physical copies surviving.

#MandelaEffect #FruitoftheLoom #CERN