Don't Like - Buying Into The Hype
In an event that will surely surprise no one, there’s been some discourse lately. This time it was about Samuel Hine’s recent GQ article called “The End of Merch.” It’s a good history of the last decade of fashion, or at least one predominant strain of it. The article covers a lot of major brands and designers from Virgil Abloh to Jerry Lorenzo to Online Ceramics to Come Tees and more. It basically says that we’ve hit peak merch and things don’t feel as fun right now as they once did.1
This has unsurprisingly been met with responses about how merch is actually still good and people should just wear whatever they like and want. And that’s perfectly fine but it misses the point of the article, which asks: what do people really want? Why are we buying the things we buy? Is it because we think they’re cool? Is it because we know that other people think they’re cool? Or some combination thereof? It’s a bit impossible to know and there isn’t an entirely right answer. People like what they like in the context of what other people like around them. This throws the merch debate back onto the individual who chooses to wrestle with it, which they don’t have to do. In fact, I’m sure that right now there are still plenty of people buying merch and being pretty happy about it. Are they late to the last trend or early to the next one? Then again, will finding new ways to feel good about buying stuff ever be all that original? That’s something we have to figure out for ourselves.
When the Dodgers won the World Series in 2020, I bought the only piece of Online Ceramics2 I own. It was the “Lucky Number Seven” Championship Tee featuring their signature twist “The Los Angeles Dosers.” I bought the shirt in a slight delirium as I wanted to buy bootleg things to celebrate the World Series win. I didn’t look that hard because this shirt came up in my feed and I had seen the original blue “Los Angeles Dosers” shirt, which originally struck me as cool. When I clicked “pay” I felt very excited about my purchase. Half of that was the heady swirl of the Dodgers winning their first World Series in my lifetime and the other half was knowing that I was buying a shirt from the cool shirt brand. But I’ve only put it on once or twice and have never worn it out. Truthfully, I’m kind of embarrassed I own it. I don’t do acid. Dancing skeletons aren’t my thing. I don’t ever listen to the Grateful Dead. Online Ceramics mostly feels like a joke to me—although maybe the joke is on me. Once it arrived, I wondered why I’d bought it. That’s a shitty feeling to have about a shirt you just spent $60 on. But it was also an instructive one. People should wear whatever they like. But that requires having an idea of what that is, which is more important than with our extremely rapid trend cycle.
Fun for who? That’s the immediate question. Perhaps Samuel Hine is out of touch. I am sure there are plenty of people out there who still get excited about certain new releases.