The Ultimate Cultural Artifact

Creation, consumption, and the complex meaning of merch

This week’s post is researched and written in collaboration with

Campbell Ruggles

, a co-founder of Assembly - a premium merch provider with extensive fashion manufacturing experience. 

Every young kid who’s tried starting a fashion brand with a couple of graphic tees and a dream knows the feeling of imposter syndrome that comes with the question “so have you done any cut and sew yet?” Despite the streetwear movement and brands, like Supreme and Stüssy, forever changing the way we consume and think about fashion, some industry insiders still often refer to making simple branded garments as making “merch” rather than “clothing” with a whiff of negative connotation. Even the people in the brand marketing universe that used to fawn over the genius of pink Glossier hoodies and lifestyle marketing, are turning their backs on simple brand tees and questioning whether merch has become too ubiquitous to carry any real meaning, cultural power, and viral potential. 

And yet, merch production is booming with everyone from Apartamento and Art Basel to VC funds in Connecticut placing orders for soft sweatshirts and vintage dye t-shirts with their logo on it. Plus, as the emphasis on brand building in the fashion industry and its appetite for commercial opportunities in adjacent industries grows, we are seeing more sports, cinema, and resort themed luxury pieces that could be categorized both as clothing and merch. 

Merch or clothing? Loewe x Challengers ‘I TOLD YA’ collection, Puma x F1 collection designed by A$AP Rocky, and Jacquemus x Four Seasons Beach Towel

"When a music artist designs a merch collection, they want it to be a physical extension of their work. T-shirts, hoodies, and hats are more than just something for fans to buy, it's a physical manifestation of the emotion and the art that they've created. The merch is supposed to connect with their audience, not the bicoastal fashion elite,"

Campbell Ruggles

, the co-founder of a premium merch provider Assembly told me when I first asked her to partner up with me on this piece. The company that spun out of Rovo, one of the top fashion manufacturers in Portugal that makes garments for brands like Stüssy, Supreme, and Denim Tears, sits right in that tricky intersection of fashion, branding, and merch. 

At the same time as Campbell and I launched a joint investigation into the state of merch, my friend Sean was going viral for tweeting a similar statement: 

“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.” 

Of course, it’s ironic for a tweet about craving offline grounding to attract so much online engagement, but the sentiment behind it still rings largely true. Last month, a top trend forecasting firm WGSN published The Great Exhaustion report stating that consumers, and specifically Gen Z and millennial women, are entering a phase of collective burnout caused by financial uncertainty, technology, constant flow of promotional content, and eco-anxiety among other things. In response, we are starting to allocate more money towards products connected to joyful experiences and communities, like zines, print magazines, and running club merch, than shoes and bags that pop up on our FYPs. Plus, as AI seeps into the design and production processes across industries, consumers are turning away from products with traces of AI, like the Collina Strada x Baggu bag, towards the ones that are tactile and human. And what is more human and tactile than a graphic t-shirt designed by a friend of a friend or a hat with a joke that runs inside your summer book club embroidered on it? 

Brands that understand this inkling transition in consumer behaviors are not only increasingly looking for commercial opportunities in the real world, like beach clubs and sports venues, but also creating products that serve as a physical representation of their brand identities and digital products in search of higher fulfillment and physical validation of their digital work. One of Assembly’s long-standing customers, a type design studio Dinamo (yes, the one behind the ABCROM font on Charli XCX’s Brat album cover and the SSENSE typeface) refers to their merch as “hardware.” It’s a collection of physical objects that features their “software” - the fonts and logos they develop, as well as their philosophy around design. Byrne Hobart has a great quote about using merch for physical validation of companies and projects in The Diff: 

“One reason to start using swag is that it's a way to feel like the company is real. There used to be a ritual for this: you were messing around on a side project, or consulting, and at some point you printed up some business cards as a visible indication that you were working on something that you expected to last. Domain names are cheap, landing pages are easy, incorporation is invisible to the outside world, but the business card was a visible artifact.” 

Dinamo Hardware (shirts and hoodies are produced in collaboration with Assembly)

In a cultural environment overrun by fleeting trends and cheap marketing tricks, ordering a hundred nice t-shirts with an embroidered logo does feel like a power move. It shows both you and your customers that you are committed to seeing your project or company all the way through. It also shows which of your friends and supporters have

emily north

’s level of self-assurance to stand by you even if one day, they see your brand’s merch on Nolita Dirtbag and five other people on Orchard Street. 

On the other end of the spectrum, brands whose primary business model is offline communities and experiences are experimenting with using merch as a way to make them more memorable and unique. Looking to attract a younger customer and encourage casual visitors, the largest art fair in the world Art Basel opened a concept store that carries AB by Art Basel, a bespoke line of hoodies, tote bags, and other custom products, at its Swiss fair this summer. Sarah Andelman, the founder and creative director of the iconic Parisian boutique Colette and the mastermind behind Art Basel’s bet on retail, told Vogue last month that none of the AB by Art Basel products from the Swiss fair shop will be available online or be repeated in other Art Basel stores as the fair travels around the world. 

AB by Art Basel x Assembly at the Art Basel concept store in Switzerland

Obviously, for a commercial art event, like Art Basel, a concept shop featuring custom merch is also an opportunity to diversify their revenue stream by creating products with a more accessible price point than rare art and luxury collaborations. MoMA Design Store’s booming business clearly shows there is an opportunity there to grab. But even as you zoom out of pop art and design towards fringier contemporary artists, like Anne Imhof, you will notice that more and more of them are also embracing merch as an alternative canvas and a way to connect with their audiences: 

“I’m very interested in surfaces in the way I’m doing my paintings,” Imhof told BoF last year. “A T-shirt is also a surface you can put things on, and somehow the two worked very well together. What I put on a painting is what I put on a T-shirt. I like sacrificing my precious art practice. It poses the question, ‘Is that devaluing anything?’ I don’t really put something high or low. It just feels pretty much the same. It’s about people seeing it in some way or another, and building a relationship with it.”

Anne Imhof’s EMO, Faust, and Wish You Were Gay merch produced by Assembly

It’s no accident that Imhof’s EMO merch was picked up by the fashion retail temple Dover Street Market last year and displayed alongside prominent fashion designers that inspire her, like Rick Owens and Balenciaga’s Demna. The merch for her latest exhibit, Wish You Were Gay, looks like a proper streetwear drop. And in return, Imhof’s earlier work reminds me of Rick Owen’s most recent show in Paris that felt more like a grandiose artistic statement about the current cultural and political climate than a fashion show. In a sense, purchasing a piece from Rick Owens’ SS25 collection is claiming a piece of this artistic performance, Owens’ philosophy, and the community associated with it. 

For Owens and Imhof specifically, the confluence between fashion and art speaks to the evolution of their personal creative expression. But in the broader context, it’s also representative of the complexity of how we create, express ourselves, consume, and live. In the past decade, a simple graphic t-shirt has lived many, many lives – a cheap mass produced garment, a status symbol, a luxury collector’s item, a marketing growth engine, and a community token – just to name a few. And while in all those senses it might be dead today, it may be becoming a curious cultural artifact that documents contemporary culture and proves that you, your work, and the communities and experiences you choose to engage with are real. And in that sense, it’s never been more alive. 

Thank you for reading all the way through! If you want to check out sample t-shirts, hats and hoodies from Assembly, you can use the code FREECORNER at checkout for free worldwide shipping :)