Merch Lived, Thrived, and Died in 2016

Merch was the biggest and most interesting shopping trend of the year—until it wasn't.

Not that long ago, you could only buy band merch (short for merchandise, in case you didn't know) at an artist's show, at Hot Topic, or via a hard-to-find link embedded deep within that artist’s janky website. And while the concert T-shirt/poster/overpriced anything booth hasn't gone anywhere, this year, tees from music's biggest acts are also being scooped up at three-day pop-up shops and mall chains—without a main stage in sight. In 2016, it wasn't just some of the major names in music dropping design-minded merch, but seemingly all of them; from Beyoncé to Rihanna, Kanye West to Drake, Justin Bieber, Chance the Rapper, The Weeknd, YG, Vic Mensa, Travis Scott, John Mayer, and too many more to list here. The central difference between the merch of yesteryear (those tie-dyed boy band sheets and skull-happy metalhead tees) is that today, with less revenues being made off of actual music, this new gear seems to be as essential to keeping an artist relevant as actually releasing new music. That's why artists have spent all year enlisting big name design talents and top-tier retail stores to help guarantee their tees become the next "it" item. But this bubble—and make no mistake, with a full bandwagon and a lot of money that made at lightning speed, this surely is a bubble—has all but burst. The Great Merch Revival is over as swiftly as it began.

You could argue Kanye West started this trend back in 2013, when he enlisted artist Wes Lang to help design his Yeezus Tour T-shirts and jackets. The gear wasn't just an instant hit, but signaled that customers could be challenged with unconventional branding (Metallica-inspired fonts and Grateful Dead-inspired imagery mashed together with the world of hip-hop) and higher prices. Meanwhile it indicated new merch could do what only vintage merch had been to previously achieve: That if the designs were cool enough, people would treat the clothes less as signifiers of one's concert attendance or brand allegiance, and more as legitimately stylish wears.

So when it was time for West to drop a new album this year, The Life of Pablo, he did it in tandem with a rollout blitz of brand new merch. He enlisted artist Cali Thornhill Dewitt, whose signature gothic-lettering looks cool, regardless of what it says. This led to a fair share of parodies and knock-offs, but as they say, imitation is the highest form of hypebeasting. The fact is, Dewitt's graphic designs proved pivotal in making West's T-shirts, dad hats, and jackets unified under a singular vision—a Pablo brand—as well as must-have items. First, the merch appeared for sale at his massive Yeezy Season 3 show in Madison Square Garden, where stands selling the wares boasted hour-long lines of eager shoppers. The lines continued at an NYC pop-up shop days after the MSG show, at music festivals where West was performing and West's own website. And, in the what was the ultimate merch throwdown of the year (and likely the moment the trend jumped the shark), Kanye West opened Pablo pop-up shops simultaneously in 21 cities across the globe back in August. As a result, it's easy to say Kanye West was the undisputed king of merch in 2016. (Despite the fact that his proper fashion label, Yeezy, continues to find its footing.)

In the case of Justin Bieber, the pop star wisely leveraged his global concert tour as a means to not only sell boatloads of $50 T-shirts, but help himself achieve a form of high-fashion street cred. Like West, the Biebs also opened a pop-up shop in New York City, and his gear likewise created lines that wrapped around street corners. Then Bieber put his branded wares in Barneys, three-day pop-ups across the world, and, eventually, in the mass outlets of Urban Outfitters and Forever 21. A few years ago, Justin Bieber merch would have meant posters of his smiling face and T-shirts with cheesy motivational speeches, but this time around, the prince of pop teamed up with an of-the-moment designer, Fear Of God's Jerry Lorenzo. Did it work in making Bieber a legitimate force in fashion? Well, we don't expect he'll be heading a fashion house any time soon and continues to make miscues in his day-to-day style, so not quite. But whether you support the aesthetic or not, fact is there are least a few people out there who dropped $1,700 on a Justin Bieber Purpose Tour leather jacket. That’s something that simply couldn't have happened in the days of $20 concert tees.

After the out-of-the-gate success both West and Bieber experienced, the flood gates opened and the graphic tees started flowing: Drake brought in a young Miami-based streetwear designer to create his Summer Sixteen Tour merch, resulting in another set of undeniably cool and instantly recognizable graphics. Rihanna's Anti Tour merch looked eerily similar red-hot fashion label Vetements, while YG teamed up with LA-based streetwear label (and original Cali Thornhill-Dewitt collaborators) Born x Raised. Future took the opportunity to make his merch one big Freebandz marketing opportunity, collaborating with Reebok along the way. The trend got so big in fact that we branded it "The Great Merch Wars of 2016." Things really got weird as hell interesting when in November, John Mayer (a not-so-secretive hypebeast to anyone paying attention) turned out covetable tees made with a niche graphic designer. And why wouldn’t he? It's obvious that merch was, and is, great way to make a lot of money fast.

Artists and their teams wouldn't be churning out T-shirts were it not for the business-friendly profit margins. Kanye West sold a staggering $780,000 dollars worth of Saint Pablo Tour gear on one night in September at Madison Square Garden. Now, that's likely just a revenue figure and doesn't reflect the amount West himself collected after T-shirts blanks were bought wholesale, employees were paid, and venues were rented. But what we do know is this: All year, West's merch was printed on either Gildan or Independent blanks, which at most cost West—and his extremely busy production team at Bravado—a couple of dollars each in raw materials. With the vast majority of Pablo tees priced in the $30-$50 range (with hoodies closer to $60-$100), you don't need to have a degree in business management to understand why the model became so popular.

Across the board, with the exception of things like the aforementioned exclusive Barneys Purpose Tour leather jackets and flannels, the one place that 2016 merch and its early aughts forefathers converge is that almost every piece sold in 2016 was a graphic-printed tee or hoodie. The problem isn't just that the vast majority of these tees are cheap in their fabrication and construction—they're cheap in style, too. Essentially, merch is just a different breed of fast fashion insofar as they are instantly recognizable pieces created to be visual signifiers of style or one’s in-the-know status—but nothing more.

The problem is that like fast-fashion, the success of merch is contingent on its initial buzz. But once that wears off, the next product comes along while the previous item is forgotten. And with relatively inexpensive, graphic-heavy items, over-saturation can quickly become a serious problem. For Bieber & Co., once the Forever 21s of the world started stocking Purpose Tour merch, each new tee began to feel less special than it was six months ago. (And there are only so many people out there willing to buy Bieber gear for irony's sake.) Zayn Malik's Mark Wilkinson-designed tees were a smart play for authenticity, but the fact is a Zayn Malik’s Iron Maiden-inspired tees will never be as cool as real Iron Maiden shirts. Similarly, Rihanna's gear was too dependent on a Vetements-y aesthetic of oversized silhouettes and irreverent slogans, which only reminded us that they weren't the real thing. Even for Kanye West's mighty record-breaking Pablo range of gear got so big and so ubiquitous that its Old English lettering began to teeter on the edge of between popular and fashion faux pas. (To at least to a certain percentage of West’s audience, this fact probably only got worse since his endorsement Donald Trump.)

The new merch wave, like 2016, is over. All of these tees and hoodies may one day again be cool, but it takes years before society's dark lenses of cynicism can mature into rose-colored nostalgia. There was a period in the mid '90s when a 1987 Iron Maiden tee didn't say "cool and vintage," it just looked old and out of touch. This idea is at the heart of the entire fashion industry—that new old is lame but old old is cool. Still, we won't rule out the possibility that some day people will appreciate Kanye West's Pablo gear and Drizzy's Summer Sixteen designs in the way people today hunt down old Stones concert tees on Ebay. If we're betting on it though, the trend of merch as legitimate fashion will likely join track pants, construction worker style, and those ubiquitous furry Gucci loafers as the reasons why 2016 was a confounding, confusing, and altogether weirdest year in recent memory.

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