There are few brands who have had such an immediately visible impact on contemporary fashion as Supreme, the American streetwear brand that has made it cool to queue around the block for launches and resurrected the value of scarcity, collaborating with everyone from Comme des Garçons to Louis Vuitton. Last year, they released a red clay brick stamped with their Box logo – and, priced at $30, it sold out within minutes. Today, they are dropping a new batch of branded novelty goods in stores alongside their autumn/winter 2017 collection, the likes of which includes a set of chopsticks, a collapsible shovel and a sled. It is the ultimate example of fashion merchandise: essentially, banal basics printed with a logo and put on sale before they subsequently fly off the shelves.
The merch phenomenon is hardly limited to Supreme; at the start of this week, Raf Simons started selling a roll of duct tape – the sort that fastened together the clothes of his autumn/winter 2017 catwalk collection – for $200. It comes in black and white, with the phrases “RSVP YOUTH PROJECT” and “WALK WITH ME” printed upon it, and is strangely covetable (if only for its strangeness). When Balenciaga took over Coletteduring Paris Menswear Fashion Week, they produced a bespoke series of mugs, sleepmasks and lighters which sold out within a matter of hours, designed in the same spirit as their autumn/winter 2017 collection which riffed on the theme of branding; Louis Vuitton currently has everything in store from monogrammed yo-yos and ping pong bats, to skipping ropes and spinning tops. Virgil Abloh of OFF-WHITE even designed a tracksuit sold on Travis Scott’s tour earlier this year reading the word itself: “MERCHANDISE.” While the success of a monogram is nothing new, explicitly branded luxury goods are clearly trending like never before, and building the same cultural cachet as insider band T-shirts – but why?
“Merchandise allows individuals to be aligned to a particular sect or tribe... it’s a very direct and immediate way to communicate,” explains Yang Li, whose capsule brand SAMZIDAT is explicitly inspired by the ephemera commonly found at gigs, and translates that aesthetic into garments alongside the novelty goods that are catching on so readily: mugs, lighters, patches. “That’s just part of the offering of a well-equipped merch stand at any gig,” he says, “it’s become part of the culture for bands to propose odd items.”
“Music is always a thread running through every element of the fashion industry,” continues Heather Gramston, Selfridges’ Womenswear Buying Manager, who is at the fore of the department store’s Music Matters campaign, an initiative that has been designed to explicitly tap into the merchandise phenomenon. “We’ve seen the relationship between fashion and music become closer – and in some ways more literal – over the past three or four seasons with the success of tour merch, but also with high fashion brands playing with recognisable merch codes and references in their ready-to-wear collections.”
It seems that what contemporary consumers are demanding from luxury fashion is a visible affiliation with a group of people, something once reserved for people wearing Nirvana T-Shirts or tour hoodies. These certainly aren’t necessities, or even practical purchases – who even knows what a collapsible shovel is – but queuing around the block to buy one invites you into a world of like-minded consumers, allows you to stamp your interior, your paraphernalia, your entire world, with the markers of your chosen tribe. Such a statement is a tangible and explicit shorthand for your personal values and it appears that, in the digital age, that sense of intimate, physical connection reigns supreme.
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