Lately, I’ve begun to take the entire fitness schtick more seriously.
Four days a week, I find myself pondering over what combination of the same three tanks and Spandex shorts I should don that’d make me not look exactly how I did yesterday (I end up looking exactly how I did yesterday).
And yet, what I long to look like is a late-2000s Madonna, leaving the gym with celebrity trainer Tracy Anderson and gal-pal Gwyneth Paltrow ahead of her 2009 Sticky & Sweet tour. “From the photos,” quips Liana Satenstein, “the vascular blonde trifecta appear as if they ran out of a burning penthouse, frantically pulling whatever they could find from their drawers.”
There’s sweat-stained Chloé and Christian Audigier; there are Nike Shox (I’m physically cringing) and Adidas tracks; there are Ed Hardy tees and Free City sweatpants doubled atop each other. It’s a delightfully random mishmash of logos-on-logos that’d definitely give Jenna Lyons a fit. And it makes the act of procrastinating on the elliptical machine feel ever-so-slightly more purposeful.
But what does the seemingly inconsequential undertaking of slathering our persons with a monogram (sometimes in questionable plurals) – be it the double-CC on a purse, The Strand insignia on a tote, an obnoxiously-emblazoned BALENCIAGA on a tee, or, for that matter, the discreet little Alo on my prized pair of short shorts – tell the world about ourselves?
Heck, what does that tell us about ourselves?
The Fashion-ification of Merch…
Enter: merch.
Originally short for merchandise, i.e., goods or products, merch has since come to encompass a meaning of its own in relation to the brand it represents. A t-shirt for a concert you’ve been to, for instance, constitutes merch, and so do branded totes à la Glossier, the New Yorker, or the WNYC.
Varsity jackets from your college, sweatshirts bearing the name of your neighborhood bodega, or caps embroidered with “The Met” in bold, red lettering similarly fall under the swag category—wearable, everyday objects that come at little to no cost and affirm your allegiance and affiliation to said label.
“Branded merch,” explains Brad Warsh, co-founder of the sleep-experience app Wave, “is an extension of the lifestyle your product caters to.” Type design studio Dinamo (who famously conceptualized the ABCROM font on Charli XCX’s Brat album cover and the SSENSE typeface) similarly refers to merch as “hardware,” a collection of physical objects that feature their “software” – the fonts and logos they develop, as well as their philosophy around design.
Byrne Hobart of The Diff adds: “Domain names are cheap, landing pages are easy, incorporation is invisible to the outside world, but the business card was a visible artifact.” And therein lies the purpose of merch – it makes it all real.
Like Madonna’s sticky designer sweats, a nearly-destroyed Nirvana t-shirt on eBay from a fan who witnessed the band firsthand, or a hulking brown Banana Republic bag on the arms of a lone ’90s Molly Ringwald (as seen on @gettyimagesfanclub), merch grounds us to reality, a lived-in experience.
Perhaps this is why fashion today is obsessed with the lot. As Satenstein writes of Balenciaga’s Fall 2024 presentation: “Cheeky, yes, but there is a point: If you shop at Erewhon but don’t have the bag, did you even shop at Erewhon?”
… And the Merch-ification of Fashion
“Merch” in fashion, however, as opposed to “clothing,” once carried with it a whiff of condescension. Something in the sheer simplicity—and at times, ubiquity—of it all seemed to exempt it from mainstream fashion.
But if you think about it, the rationale behind fashion as we know it and the rationale behind merch aren’t all that different. Historically, heritage houses have drawn references – or even stolen, as insights and cultural analyst Rachel Lee puts it – “from obscure subcultures and marginalized groups, something that mainstream trend-forecasting only exhilarates.”
Think of John Galliano’s smashing Margiela Artisanal collection last year that referenced the dark underbellies of Paris, or Marc Jacobs’ grunge lineup for Perry Ellis, a riff on the music scene (it helped to have Sonic Youth present too), or even Y2K as a whole, that draws just as much from Cher’s matching yellow plaid-set from Clueless as much as it is a nod to cyberpunk and Afro-American cultural cornerstones like butterfly-clips and lettuce hems.
Yet, ironically enough, merch itself has become fashionable now. As Daniel-Yaw Miller, editorial associate at The Business of Fashion, points out, “It’s kind of cool now to have that logo on your chest or your shoe.”
As a result, Saint Laurent, Louis Vuitton, and Acne Studios all have their (very expensive) iterations of the band tee. Ferrari sells an entire RTW and accessories lineup fashioned out of repurposed tires that ultimately serve to promote their automobiles. Even personal style has undergone the merch treatment by way of – as fashion theorist Rian Phin describes – the internet’s ‘authenticity wars,’ meme-ing “You don’t see me at the club? Ok, well, I don’t see you on page 76 of Ann Demeulemeester’s eBay searches.”
Indeed, your personal style has now morphed into a form of merchandise and could even be traced back to your favorite corner of FashionTok.
As fashion commentator Alexandra Hildreth commentates, “You can tell someone’s screen time from their outfit.”
Merch and Merchandising
But fashion merch, even if it increasingly makes you feel “like Julianne Moore in Safe except I’m being slowly poisoned by omnipresent logo-festooned trash!!” as the Substack Blackbird Spyplane quips, has its roots in marketing and merchandising – or in simple words, the promoting and selling of goods – because fashion, at the end of the day, is still strictly business.
And as a viral tweet from last year stated:
“The kids are joining running clubs, buying “dumb” phones, woodworking, rocking Walkmans, joining supper clubs, etc. because their lives have been swallowed by digital black boxes, and in this moment of uncertainty (tension re: war, AI, climate), they crave tangibility. It’s simple.”
So, the merch-ification of fashion, the much-memed Loewe Tomato or those Challengers-coded I Told Ya tees, or the various brat-cores or Barbie-cores or blokette-cores or ballet-cores, in all their physical glory, takes the user out of the aesthetically hyperabundant online slop that is the Internet these days towards IRL experiences—ironically via greater online engagement. Physical is the new frontier, and perhaps marketing truly has come full circle now.
But that’s not to say that online merch doesn’t exist – Travis Scott sold t-shirts for his avatar during his virtual “concert” in the Fortnite video game that reportedly netted $20m in earnings. Yet they defeat the primary purpose of having merch in the first place – their tangibility.
Because in merch-ifying and meme-ifying our menty Bs with Prozac and Zoloft tees or poking fun at the seriousness of fashion with a Balenciaga Lay’s Chips bag or a Judith Leiber hamburger – we try to escape our places as cogs in this machine. It’s our silent rebellion against the diktats of trends.
Like fellow PurseBlogger Anna writes, “Just like art experiences have gone immersive—we’re no longer content to gaze at a Vincent van Gogh from a distance but need to quite literally swim in it while attending the slew of immersive art experiences that have popped up around the country—so has brand dedication.
No longer can we pledge allegiance to a company that has nothing to do with fashion by using its products – we need to actually wear their logo on our skin.” We translate them into our lives and live in them; we’re no longer content with just looking at Jane Birkin, but we must channel Ms. Birkin herself through our own beaten-up, charm-bedazzled bags.
And it can be a beautiful thing to see someone else in the wild who’s doing the same. That, dear reader, is merch at its best.
💯 💯 💯 !!! Your articles are the best, Sajid!