013! Future Relics: The Coolest Merch of 2024
Featuring Bijan Shahvali from Intramural
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A few weeks back, I was buying tickets to the upcoming Massive Attack show here in New York, and I came across the “merch” they were selling at their recent Act 1.5 event in Bristol. It’s a white t-shirt with a black and white photo of Wham! (Yog hive stand up!), and underneath, the simple slogan “Thank God For Immigrants”. The shirt is made by British artist Jeremy Deller, with all the proceeds going to Doctors Without Borders. It’s not Massive Attack merch per se, but it’s adjacent enough. And it inspired me to think about where music merch is at in 2024, and why this kind of offering felt so right on.
Everyone and their dog has merch. My local restaurant has merch (I bought a mug). Our presidential candidates have “cool” merch (more on that later). Accessibility to making or consuming merch is at an all-time high and the turnaround for making a cultural moment into a t-shirt is mere hours. Taylor Swift reportedly sold over $200 million dollars worth of merch at her Eras Tour, meanwhile the merch market is projected to grow 7% year-on-year to $4.3 billion dollars annually by 2027. That’s a lot of shirts (and decorative vinyl).
Earlier this year, GQ published a piece about merch being dead, and how overly accessible it is: “Merch once made us feel unique. Then it made us realise that we’re not so unique at all.” Supposedly, we’re tired of being read by other people, not to mention tired of the swiftness with which the zeitgeist turns around. A few months later, The New Yorker printed a cover that ridiculed two millennial parents for wearing artist merch while out with their child, who is deeply cringing:
Usually when someone declares something cultural “dead” it means the cool people don’t think it’s cool anymore. So I thought I’d ask merch and memorabilia connoisseur Bijan Shahvali what he thought. He runs the ever tasteful online vintage store Intramural, but also acts as a consultant to brands in the clothing and object space.
“I think there is some merch exhaustion, but I think there’s still always gonna be a desire to wear something that you’re into. In this world where everyone is wearing the same thing and has access to every lookbook and trend report, everyone knows about every cool thing that’s happening in Dimes square, whether they live in Alaska or Milan, to wear a vintage mercy piece that you’re into is a pretty easy way to differentiate yourself and personalise your look so i think there’s always gonna be room for it.”
But, I wonder, will today’s merch stand the test of time, and which will become future nostalgia? I hoped he might have a crystal ball.
“When Sean Paul or Gypsy Kings [editorial note: Bijan is currently on a nostalgia wave for his parents’ music and mentioned Gypsy Kings numerous times in our chat] were making merch, they weren’t thinking of it as a huge revenue stream, they were making their money from album sales. So that’s now much more rare. But if you’re Kanye, and doing pop-ups and bringing in designers for every show, I don’t know if those shirts are going to be that rare in the future”, says Bijan.
It’s impossible to predict the trajectory of an artist’s career or their ultimate place in culture, but it’s exciting to think about how the next generations will view acts through a totally new prism. If you’re creating merch now, you’re also gambling on the chance of your work becoming an artefact for the next gen. Once an artist or album has been solidified as classic, the merch carries new meaning. “Maybe it’s my vintage brain rot, but I feel like I’ll be more excited by a [current tour] t-shirt in 10 to 15 years. And that’s the way to make it special now, as a stamp in time. Like with an original Nirvana shirt, that should be in a museum, but you’re wearing it. It’s a relic of culture.”
At some point, you might reach the stage where your merch almost supercedes your music as brand, like with merch pioneers The Grateful Dead, or even Bob Marley, and your work enters into private trading spaces (like eBay) where you no longer profit from it outside of its iconography.
Looking around at current pop merch, it’s clear that you can pretty easily get anything made. The doors are open for whatever product you think might serve your community. I have to admit it is a bit of a trashpile of t-shirts and badly designed items there to make a quick buck, designed by a junior designer at a major (no shade to them!). It was also interesting to see that, contrary to Bijan’s idea about scarcity or a stamp in time, a lot of archival album merch was still available years after the fact.
If the design itself can be a stamp in time, then perhaps 2024 is defined by the realtree camo and orange text combination, seen here in the ultimate cross-section of merch: the Harris Walz campaign cap, Chappell Roan’s “Midwest Princess” cap, and the collab between Online Ceramics and Born x Raised:
It’s hard to say if this was a “trickle up” effect from music to politics, in the way that brat made its way into Kamala’s campaign earlier in the summer, or whether some colour combinations (even if they are a deliberate nod to gun-toting Middle America) just make sense.
Charli XCX’s brat merch is ultimately some of the most bootleg-able merch (except when you look closely, it’s absolutely not, like the touch on the straps of this IKEA-style bag). Becoming iconic, you could argue, is impossible without bootlegging. It’s impossible without outside forces taking up your image, sometimes against your will. Once your brand has reached cult status (like The Dead or Bob Marley), it takes on a bootleg life of its own. That’s how culture moves and reiterates itself, outside of the hands of the artist. Charli’s “brat” was 2024’s version of this - a life force of its own.
Bijan’s excitement for current merch was very much in the future nostalgia zone, though. “I went to the Sun Ra Arkestra show in Central Park, and it was Marshall Allen’s 100th birthday, so I was excited to see the merch celebrating that. You had to get it that specific year, so it felt special.”
But it was also interesting to hear that despite being “bullish” on music merch, he pinpointed the indie movie company A24 as being one of the most interesting merch producers of recent years [full disclosure, they have worked together before, and Bijan has put together a vintage movie memorabilia collection with them]. “They do a great job of tapping into what excites people about merch. It’s like doing concert merch but transferred to film”. I agree it’s entertaining to think of movies as worlds you can jump into - like buying a Midsommar incense, or the sausage fingers from Everything, Everywhere All At Once. A24 actually could be said to inhabit the space where an independent music label might have existed in years gone by.
The most compelling merch, to me, is the merch that knows itself and its audience well, and has tapped right into its niche, and has personality. That’s why the Jeremy Deller x Massive Attack shirt hits hard, because it’s so layered: it’s a shirt that gives you George Michael, Doctors Without Borders, Jeremy Deller, a pro-immigration stance, a Massive Attack climate action event. That’s a venn diagram I can get behind.
Looking around at what came out of the more indie world this year, here are my favourite offerings:
Two Shell - “Boring Rock”
I’ve spoken about Two Shell’s antics before, and here’s something that feels straight out of the KLF / Aphex school of nonsense. They started selling these rocks, an actual rock, at a price of just five pounds in late 2023. As more sold, the price increased, and here we are at what may be the final price - of one thousand pounds. Upon breaking the rock, fans will discover a USB hidden inside.
KLF - Mu Mu Reflective Road Signs
Speaking of The KLF, when I was writing up the latest newsletter, I went on their website to see what was available. I’ve long coveted an original KLF logo or Trancentral t-shirt, but alas they are impossible to find. Still, I discovered they are selling road signs for £250 a pair.
Oneohtrix Point Never - “Again” Blu Ray disc
The kind of person who likes OPN is probably interested in quality audio, and quality objects. That’s what this highly designed (and quite expensive) Blu Ray brings as an object - quality. I also am here for the collaboration with Online Ceramics for all the apparel side of his merch.
Aphex Twin - Selected Ambient Works Vol II (2024 reissue)
You know we are fans of The Aphex Twin in this house. Warp are reissuing his 1994 classic (an album inspired by lucid dreams), on a special edition vinyl and t-shirt.
Online Ceramics x Sun Ra collection
Online Ceramics are a beloved merch institution at this point, and their drops usually sell out pretty quickly. There’s a long history of brands starting as bootleggers and then becoming legit, and they now often do drops with artist’s estates. I appreciate their appreciation of mysticism, maximalism and a deliciously web 2.0 site.
I look forward to seeing them all in the merch museum in 2050.
And lastly, some random things I’ve been enjoying lately:
This piece on the unreleased 9-hour Prince documentary. We need it!
This documentary about preparing astronauts for for their journey to Mars.
Related, and more funny: the Björk frat.