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The End Of Merch

It's Merch Week at GQ. Check out our 41 Most Iconic Pieces From the Golden Age of Merch, and read Why Does Gen Z Love Nirvana Tees, Thrasher Hoodies, and Bass Pro Shops Hats?

Recently, I was reorganizing my dresser drawers when I discovered a thick layer of graphic T-shirts buried under my solid white standbys, undisturbed for many months. As I unfolded the creased garments, I found mementos I had bought as far back in 2017 at concerts, restaurants, and from random people on Instagram, all of which I wore for a while then all but forgot about. It was a stockpile from the years when merch occupied a special cultural position, when graphics were the language of style and fashion embraced souvenirs and novelty. I placed my minor collection into a plastic tub for long-term storage. I can't imagine getting rid of any of it. But I also can't really imagine wearing any of it anymore.

For about a decade starting in 2013, merch was everything in fashion. Definitions of "merch" are subjective, but a good place to start is any branded item of clothing or accessory that is distributed to promote something, like a New Yorker tote bag or a Beyoncé Renaissance tour tee. Whatever the subject matter, merch is a way to endorse things you admire, to establish yourself as a member of a fandom or subculture. Merch "signals people who are like-minded," says the artist Andrew Kuo, an avid collector and longtime designer of merch. "It's a way to come together," he says.

There's ordinary merch—and then there's the merch that constitutes the one-time hottest trend in fashion. A Yankees hat is the former, a Yankees x MoMA ballcap the latter. The addition of an embroidered MoMA logo on the side of a Yankees hat turns an iconic accessory into a style statement and, more importantly, a vector of taste. The modern merch wave was driven by these collectible signifiers. For those with the merch bug, a hat that says your interests meet at the intersection of modern art and the Bronx Bombers hits much harder than any old team colors.

And as it turned out, there was no event too big or small, no spot too grand or unassuming to get its own merch. Your morning coffee spot stocks beanies, the MTA sells socks and baby onesies for every subway line, the New York Times sells Connections tees (you missed out on the NYT x Sacai gear in 2018), your job comes with a custom Stanley cup, your date notes that the restaurant lists a dad hat on the menu, and she's wearing a Paris, Texas sweatshirt designed four decades after the Wim Wenders film's release. The funny tweet you hearted earlier? It's already splashed across a sweatshirt on Etsy.

We don't need all of this stuff, but merch scratches a distinctly modern itch. "Not to get too philosophical about it, but we're all brands now," says Alix Ross, who cofounded sprawling merch empire Online Ceramics with Elijah Funk in 2016. In the online age, Funk explains, merch offers a succinct and legible way for people to define themselves. "It's such an easy way to communicate to strangers, Hey, we might have something to talk about. It is social collateral." Merch, Funk says, is part of "a conversation that's happening actively everywhere all the time."

The rise and fall of trends is a predictable cycle. Early adopters get a style popping, and by the time it has trickled down to the masses those on the bleeding edge of cool have long since moved on. Merch had a long, steady rise. It was cheap, plentiful, and often incredibly compelling. The low barrier to entry—all you needed to make your own line of tees was Photoshop and a screen-printing plug—meant there was always a new wave of exciting original graphic design, as well as a constant stream of new iterations of an increasingly gonzo aesthetic.

But the decline of merch was extraordinarily swift. By the time pandemic restrictions were all but a memory, we reentered the world with a specific kind of anxiety. In an increasingly chaotic cultural landscape, our merch was ourselves, how we fixed the boundaries of our identity. But at a certain point it felt like our niche combination of interests, or at least the heavily stylized graphic garments that advertised them, was simply one big trend that had gone way too far.

"When I was younger, if I saw another guy in a Rancid And Out Come the Wolves tee, I would be like, Holy shit, we can have a conversation about this," says Lawrence Schlossman of the menswear podcast Throwing Fits. The most fundamental dynamic behind the end of merch is this: We once got excited to see other people wearing our interests on our sleeves. And then it began to terrify us. "Today," says Schlossman, "if you're walking down the street and see somebody wearing Erewhon merch or something, you're not going to stop and talk to that person about whether or not they tried the Hailey Bieber smoothie."

It's hard to avoid the feeling that all of the merch we've collected doesn't add up to much more than a fuzzy bicoastal identity. When everything became merch, what did any of it mean? When you see other people wearing these specific but ubiquitous signifiers, continues Schlossman, "if anything, you're thinking, Ugh, I thought I was so smug and special, and here's this other fucking idiot who also thinks they're so smug and special." Merch once made us feel unique. Then it made us realize that we're not so unique after all.

The merch boom started with a "fart."

That's how the artist Wes Lang describes the amount of time it took for him and Virgil Abloh to come up with the designs for Kanye "Ye" West's 2013 Yeezus tour merch. "It was like: This is it," Lang recalls. "There was no time from the ask to do it until the night of the first show. It just happened." Thus began the trend we know as merch.

Lang, who says he was "born in a graphic T-shirt," was nonetheless an unlikely collaborator for an enormous rap tour. The Los Angeles painter's previous merch credits included making Grateful Dead bootlegs for a small group of friends; he went official in 2012 when he used the spooky skull-and-roses iconography that permeates his eminently tattooable work to design a Grateful Dead box set (merch included). But Abloh, who at the time ran Ye's Donda creative studio, was a visionary when it came to graphic tees. In 2010, he launched the DJ collective Been Trill alongside Matthew M. Williams and Heron Preston. Been Trill threw a great party, but is best remembered by the Goosebumps-core tees they passed out from behind the booth.

By the time the Yeezus tour kicked off in the fall of 2013, Abloh had launched the proto-fashion line Pyrex Vision and was well versed in remixing diverse design languages to sensational effect. Still, the tour merch, which juxtaposed a vampiric Yeezus logo with skeletons pulled from Lang's canvases and the words "God Wants You," was a rare kind of alchemy.

"It didn't just change high fashion," says Lang of the Yeezus merch. "It changed everything."

The Yeezus merch sparked a movement. "It was a mic drop from the first night of the first show," Lang recalls. Fans were cleaning the merch stands, sure, but the real innovation came a few tour dates later, when the Yeezus gear hit PacSun. You no longer had to fight through the crowds at a concert to get your hands on it—you could just go to your local mall.

Lang was living in Hollywood at the time, and recalls a time when he would see people wearing Yeezus merch every time he left his house. The mass distribution didn't render it uncool. In fact, it made it even more of a status symbol. "I got hit up by every person I ever met asking me for that shit," Lang says. In fusing a luxury streetwear sensibility with a zeitgeisty musical project and Lang's heady iconography, the Yeezus merch signaled that you were hip to the scene at the center of the rapidly converging worlds of art, music, and fashion. At the time, there was nothing cooler.

The merch arms race was now officially on. Tour merch was beginning to represent a much-needed revenue stream for artists in the digital age, but for those with ambitions in fashion, it could also function like their own clothing line: a platform for collaborations with designers, and an arm of their image-making campaigns.

Come spring of 2016, when Beyoncé dropped "Boycott Beyoncé" tees to hit back at the reaction to her "Formation" video, merch was a thriving subgenre of fashion itself. Many artists worked with rising designers, like when Justin Bieber collaborated with Fear of God's Jerry Lorenzo (who also worked on Yeezus) on a line of upscale Purpose tour gear that was sold at Barneys and VFiles that summer. When Rihanna released her punkish Anti merch at legendary boutique Colette in Paris at around the same time, merch was officially welcome on the luxury-retail racks.

Not to be outdone, the next month Ye—the alpha and omega of fashion merch—set up his own immersive retail experience, launching his Cali Thornhill DeWitt–designed The Life of Pablo merch into the stratosphere with a simultaneous 21-city pop-up shopping experience that Vogue compared to a "social experiment-cum-art project."

It's no coincidence that Ye, Abloh, and Lorenzo were three of the main instigators behind the streetwear revolution that turned the fashion industry upside down in the mid-2010s. At the time, there was a real celebration of subcultures in the air as hip-hop and skateboarding defined what was cool in the broader fashion world. The corollary was that everything was up for grabs. If merch is a way to find the like-minded, it's also about excluding others. Which is now impossible, says Andrew Kuo. "If you can just go online and consume all of Black Flag's records in an hour, you have the agency to wear a Damaged T-shirt, or the logo, you know?"

In the free-for-all merch arena, menswear Tumblr guys wore Been Trill T-shirts and Abloh wore Grateful Dead bootlegs. Anyone could walk into Supreme and buy a Scarface or Nan Goldin tee—what used to look like poser behavior became a mark of good taste. To keep up with the shifting cultural understanding of cool, the layers of references in the merch system became extremely intricate, which made the whole scene even more subversive and interesting. Vetements put a yellow DHL deliveryman tee on the runway, a commentary on—what, exactly? Nobody could be sure, but it launched a spirited debate about the nature of luxury, not to mention countless memes.

By 2018, when Abloh—who redefined graphic T-shirts as luxury objects and preached appropriation as a design ethic—became the creative director of Louis Vuitton men's, the abstract aesthetic of merch was a more important statement than the content itself.

In this new paradigm, merch was fashion. Few understood this better than Ross and Funk, who were the leading edge of a wave of young designers who built names for themselves with inventive merch during this period. The friends from Ohio didn't intend to run a clothing business; they were Deadheads who wanted to be fine artists. Their first designs were bootlegs that they sold outside Dead & Company shows to pay their way along the band's tours.

If there was a visual thread running through the golden age of merch, it stretched from Stanley "Mouse" Miller and Alton Kelley's '60s jam band posters to Wes Lang's grinning skulls to Online Ceramics. Ross and Funk employed recognizable Dead iconography, but added their own totally imaginative spin. As Abloh once said, "Graphic tees are vibes." Ross and Funk's were the vibiest; their graphics felt like portals to a singular and strange dimension, a world narrated in gothic typeface and filled with dancing flowers, spooky scarecrows, and skeletons absolutely shredding the guitar. (Abloh was an Online Ceramics customer and fan.)

Ross and Funk quickly found themselves at the sharp end of a rapidly evolving industry. In 2017 they went official with Dead & Co, collaborating with bandleader John Mayer on a drop of tie-dye hoodies, and by 2018 they were partnering with culty film studio A24 on merch for the horror flick Hereditary, which spawned a cottage industry of official and unofficial movie merch. Jonah Hill and Emily Ratajkowski and Ty Dolla $ign bought Online Ceramics tie-dyes, and Zendaya wore an Online Ceramics x Fela Kuti hoodie in Euphoria. The pair worked with the edgy artist Jordan Wolfson and the estate of spiritual guru Ram Dass and everyone in between.

"Ever since we've discovered that every person wants merch, and people know that we're the guys that do the merch, we've been in this super exploratory place of like, Oh, what can we make merch for now?" says Funk. "Which also opens up this complete can of worms, which is that anything can have merchandise. But it's made our job pretty entertaining."

Despite Ross and Funk's hyper-specific references, there is a remarkably universal appeal to the Online Ceramics aesthetic, which toes the line of sincerity and satire. One of their most popular tees depicts the earth inside a cartoon heart under the phrase "WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE." By the time of its release in 2020, the Yeezus edge had been replaced by a more nuanced and ironic message, one that spoke directly to the catastrophic moments we were living through. During the Trump years, as global events rushed toward a pandemic and social media became another vector of the chaos, it had become all the more urgent to align ourselves with the things that meant the most to us. But at a time when sincerity felt grossly trite, the best merch fed into our irony-pilled personas. Were you wearing a frog-covered Online Ceramics "Toadal Chaos" tee as a joke? Was the joke on you? Did it matter?

As merch became more ubiquitous, and its meaning more multilayered, it became increasingly impossible to understand who someone was based on what they wore. Cynthia Lu of Cactus Plant Flea Market has designed some of the most memorable merch of the past decade for artists like Pharrell, Ye, Kid Cudi, Playboi Carti, André 3000, and the Rolling Stones, and brands like Comme des Garçons, Denim Tears, Stüssy, and Nike. Lu's bubbly designs, which resemble the "Life Is Good" universe on acid, have become a fixture of the modern streetwear landscape.

Last year, Erewhon released a line of charming Cactus Plant merch. This came six months after McDonald's—perhaps the greatest spiritual enemy to Erewhon's organic empire—released a line of its own Cactus Plant gear. Lu's trippy aesthetic world is remarkably consistent, and all of her designs share a distinct graphic language. From afar, it would be hard to tell if you were a raw water enthusiast or on your way to pick up a McFlurry.

With the onset of COVID, merch became a lifeline for venues and restaurants—and maybe for ourselves. I bought a ball cap from a beloved local tapas restaurant. In a stark political moment, there was plenty of cool political merch to choose from. I bought a Black Lives Matter fundraiser T-shirt from Online Ceramics, and a T-shirt bearing an image of Bernie Sanders and the phrase "Rage Against the Machine" from the LA artist Sonya Sombrieul. I was mostly sitting at home, but boy did it feel like I was doing something. The pursuit of merch gave life meaning. I remember spending hours browsing the websites of merch-y fashion labels Beepy Bella, Denim Tears, Awake, Sky High Farms, Noah, Bianca Chandon and many other smallish fashion labels that I figured could use a little extra business while physical retail was all but closed.

An early sign that the merch trend was heading toward a cliff was the widespread adoption of preorders. Merch was once tied up with ideas of exclusivity. It was ephemeral and limited edition. You wanted to be one of a small hard-core group of fans to have earned those stripes. And then merch operators small and large embraced preorders and drop-shipping e-commerce models, meaning the only thing limiting merch quantity was how many people were willing to buy (and then wait several weeks for) a Bernie "Rage" tee, a Dark Brandon coffee mug, an Astroworld hoodie, or a Cactus Jack x McDonald's pillow in the shape of a chicken nugget. The scarcity model, once the key to the intertwined rise of merch and streetwear, was becoming a thing of the past.

And the more merch we bought, the more merch flooded the market, and all the energy that had built the trend began to vanish. "It happened so fast," says Andrew Kuo, "that I think it really zapped the endorphins from the movement." A lot of the merch I amassed reflected something genuine about my life: I love going to the Odeon and bought a cap embroidered with the Tribeca boîte's logo at the bar. My somewhat extensive Online Ceramics collection spoke to my love for the Grateful Dead and admiration for Ross and Funk's work.

But the truth is merch was coming to resemble a physical manifestation of the algorithm. For every original and visually compelling merch design that perfectly aligns with my interests, there is a boatload of sweatshirts bearing a one-liner delivered by Gwyneth Paltrow in a Park City, Utah, courtroom, or coffee mugs emblazoned with Donald Trump's mugshot, the cynical merch version of fast fashion. "Merch used to actually mean something," says Lawrence Schlossman. "Now, it's more of a broad-stroke signifier that represents some type of nonspecific message about what you care about. A billboard that says you live in New York or spent two weeks walking around Silver Lake, or whatever."

Fashion isn't always great at being a mirror of our times. But the luxury establishment knows a thing or two about how to create desire through exclusivity, and in the past couple of years the industry executed a hard pivot toward understatement and elegance. The graphic tees that had dominated fashion runways for years vanished, replaced by cashmere sweaters in sophisticated tones. People began saying things like "texture is the new logo." The most lasting visual legacy of Succession is the quiet luxury sensibility of the show's Loro Piana–clad plutocrats, not the Waystar Royco branded vests that were for sale in HBO's online shop.

Of course, the death of merch might be news to the hundreds of people who camped out next to a six-lane highway in the rain to get their hands on Taylor Swift merch before an Eras Tour show last spring in Tampa. Some were there for literally days to secure an unexceptional (but purportedly rare) blue Eras Tour crewneck. Similar scenes played out in cities across the world. Swift's US tour alone is estimated to have brought in $200 million in official merch sales, which nets out to just shy of $4 million per night, and doesn't even count the cash going to the bootleggers in the parking lot. As a category of consumer goods, merch is undoubtedly bigger than ever.

Still, I have yet to see a single Eras Tour merch design in the wilds of downtown NYC—not even as part of an ironic outfit collage in Dimes Square. Neither the biggest tour in human history nor Beyoncé's Renaissance tour launched an enduring fashion moment offstage. There is no "Boycott Beyoncé" T-shirt of 2024. And even if there was, it might not be clear which side you were actually on.

Around when I started writing this essay, I received a delivery at the office. It was a gift from the fashion brand Loewe. Inside, I found the T-shirt of the moment if there ever was one: a luxury replica of the "I Told Ya" tee worn in Challengers by Josh O'Connor and Zendaya. Loewe's buzzy creative director, Jonathan Anderson, did the film's costumes, and based the T-shirt off one that JFK Jr. Wore in the '80s.

As Andrew Kuo told me, at some point the merch craze "is going to get fired back up." Kuo, who makes bootleg artist merch under the brand name Shrits, is a merch optimist. "All it takes," he says, "is one or two tees. All we need is something to inspire us again."

If the merch decade was launched by Yeezus, couldn't it be revived by Challengers? I put the tee at the top of my dresser drawer. Whatever effect it might have on the wider merch world, it had a profound effect on me. For the first time in recent memory, I couldn't wait to wear a T-shirt that tied together a bunch of threads I found meaningful: menswear history, Anderson's work, and the sweaty tennis ménage à trois movie that makes me want to wear plaid shorts all summer. The feeling didn't last long. The first time I threw mine on, I was barely out of my front door when I saw another guy wearing one just like it.

Why Does Gen Z Love Nirvana Tees, Thrasher Hoodies, And Bass Pro Shops Hats?

It's Merch Week at GQ. Read The End of Merch, and check out our 41 Most Iconic Pieces From the Golden Age of Merch.

Costume designer Jordy Scheinberg noticed a trend on the set of You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah, last summer's charming Netflix family comedy that saw Adam Sandler play a pseudo-fictional dad to his real-life daughters, Sunny and Sadie. On camera, Scheinberg had dressed the film's young cast in dialed-up, thematically considered versions of a contemporary Los Angeles tween's wardrobe; in this case, that meant lots of fast-fashion party dresses and tie-dyed Online Ceramics T-shirts.

But whenever production wrapped for the day and the kids would gear up to go home, she clocked that they would all change into similar variations on the same outfit: pajama pants and a hot-pink Nirvana crewneck sweatshirt. The latter featured a rainbow-sherbet-toned version of the Seattle grunge band's logo—a blissed-out, slack-tongue smiley face with Xs for eyes, first seen during the 1991 promotional cycle for the trio's landmark sophomore album, Nevermind.

Given that all of these kids were born in the aughts, Scheinberg (a younger millennial, not even quite old enough to justify feeling truly possessive of Nirvana's prime) felt confused. When she asked the kids if any of them listened to or liked any of Nirvana's 30-year-old output and heard nos across the board, she felt totally vexed.

"Every single one of the kids—the boys, the girls, even some of the moms—had this sweatshirt," the costume designer recalls, still reeling these many months later. In particular, the capitalism and Kurt Cobain of it all didn't sit quite right. "It got to the point where I hated [this sweatshirt] so much that I had to lie and say that the legal team at Netflix wouldn't let me put it in the movie, because so many of the kids wanted to wear it. I was like, 'Oh, we don't have the clearance for this band.'" As Scheinberg saw it, Gen Z regarded band shirts as little more than zesty—or even neutral—graphic tees.

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As it turns out, this particular electric-pink Nirvana sweatshirt—which the cast members reported buying from Urban Outfitters, that mall-brand stalwart of alt-flavored garb, where it retails for $79—had already taken on a life of its own on TikTok. Across dozens of posts, users gleefully malign the pink sweatshirt wearers on their inability to name three to five Nirvana songs, while the pink sweatshirt wearers neg back with the purposely inflammatory no-thoughts-head-empty gag that Nirvana isn't a band, it's a clothing brand. Writer Sarah Stankorb detailed the phenomenon for Slate last fall, recounting her dismay to hear her young daughter describe her peers who wear Nirvana shirts as "preppy." In other words, this pink Nevermind smiley sweatshirt is the band-merch equivalent of a Stanley cup.

"I would've been humiliated if somebody had asked me, 'Oh, do you even like Nirvana? Name any song,'" says Scheinberg. "I would've clammed up because that's the culture I grew up in—like, you can't rep something unless you know something about it. And I feel like that does not exist anymore."

Echoing Scheinberg, the writer Casey Lewis, who examines youth consumer trends in her popular newsletter "After School," agrees that broadly manufactured merch has simply become part of a young person's uniform.

When I pose the idea to Lewis, she wonders: "Have bands like Nirvana been flattened to the point where they're basically no different than a brand's logo?"

This week, GQ is considering the state of merch. We sourced a showcase of the coolest, most thoughtfully crafted pop-culture merchandise put to market in the last decade or so, relics made by and for 21st-century trendsetters, small-run society brands (including the aforementioned LA company Online Ceramics), enterprising multihyphenates, niche publications, and local eateries patronized by the martini-and-french-fries set. In his accompanying essay, my colleague Samuel Hine sounded the death knell for this particular milieu of merch that had come to define the last decade-plus of menswear—arguably nowhere more so than here at Gentleman's Quarterly. We henceforth exalt and release these treasured, if heavily designed and increasingly plotty, hoodies and T-shirts that double as objets d'art and, as Hine writes, generally convey "a fuzzy bicoastal identity." But what about their mass-produced counterparts?

As Hine concedes in his essay, merch as a consumer good—a pure money-moving product—is as booming as ever. Blockbuster tours by Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, and Harry Styles generated their own multimillion-dollar merch economies. Name a platform—Instagram, TikTok Shop, your nearest mall, or your local bodega—and there is a near-certain chance it will offer printed sweatshirts, tees, mugs, and other ephemera for sale. Procuring a piece of mass-produced merch with a licensed logo, such as a Nirvana sweatshirt, is about as uncomplicated as buying a Diet Coke or a box of tissues.

Indeed, you can buy a Nirvana band T-shirt for under $50 from almost any major apparel retailer you can think of: Urban Outfitters, Gap, H&M, Hot Topic, Target, Old Navy—hell, even Abercrombie & Fitch sells one. And it's not all mass-market, either: In 2019, Marc Jacobs remixed the smiley-faced Nevermind tees in a redux capsule based on his storied "grunge" collection for Perry Ellis in 1992—around the same time Grace Coddington styled a then modern "Sliver" tee in the pages of Vogue—which ignited a series of lawsuits regarding the design's usage. (The band's company, Nirvana LLC, copyrighted the X-eyed smiley face in 1993, and its subsequent ubiquity has spurned many disputes about its true provenance.)

Despite Nirvana's broad popularity 30 years ago, the omnipresence of its merch marks a sharp bent toward the mainstream for the band's legacy—or, at least, the legacy of its graphic design. In 1993, Walmart wouldn't stock physical albums of In Utero because of the album's anatomically lurid artwork; nowadays, the retailer sells In Utero tees in nearly two dozen colors. While rare, true vintage Nirvana merch has its own thriving ecosystem, the widespread availability of cheap, new licensed stuff is appealing to consumers who were born years if not decades after Nevermind hit shelves. Whether or not they like the band is essentially besides the point.

Social media sociology tends to "typify" people by a shared personality—there's always lots of talk about types of people, whose generalized personas are based on material points such as possessions, behaviors, or interests. A popular garment that becomes linked to a "type" of person can quickly turn into a meme-ified trend. A licensed Nirvana shirt is one, although there are other pieces of widely manufactured merch that stand out from the last several years, each with its own iconography that offers a tinge of counterculture, with all the comfort of monoculture.

In the late 2010s, the branded Thrasher sweatshirt—a piece of memorabilia commemorating the 43-year-old California skateboarding magazine, whose logo featured a tilting, bright yellow typeface often bordered by cartoonish flames—was a boon to late-stage Tumblr users, ascendant Instagram-native nepo babies, and sartorially minded stars like Justin Bieber, Rihanna, Tyler, the Creator, and A$AP Rocky. In 2016, prototypical Gen Alpha celebrity North West, who was then two years old, wore a pint-size Thrasher tee while her parents accompanied her to Build-a-Bear at LA's Westfield Mall. Unsurprisingly, the popularity of Thrasher merch among nonskaters didn't thrill the skating community: "We don't send boxes to Justin Bieber or Rihanna or those fucking clowns," the magazine's late editor Jake Phelps told Hypebeast in 2016, chiding the stars' lack of skater bonafides. "The pavement is where the real shit is. Blood and scabs, does it get realer than that?"

Nonetheless, by 2017, Vogue had declared Thrasher tees an off-duty-model staple, and nowadays, Thrasher sells its wares on Amazon, where a hooded sweatshirt runs around $70, as well as at mall retailers like Zumiez and Pacsun. (An annual Thrasher subscription, which costs about $30, also comes with a free logo T-shirt. All told, probably not such a bad revenue stream for a traditional-media company.)

More recently, young consumers fixated on brightly hued polyester, mesh-backed logo trucker hats from Bass Pro Shops, a national sporting-goods chain that began in the early 1970s as a small fishing-tackle operation out of the Missouri Ozarks. The caps come in sporty colors like cobalt and blaze orange, and feature the brand's red-and-goldenrod logo with an illustration of an agape spotted bass, and the stores have sold them for around $5.99 for years; as one TikTokker put it, the caps are "clean, timeless, and one of the only things other than the AriZona iced tea to beat inflation." By the early days of the pandemic, TikTok was rife with "Bassholes," and the caps were common among the platform's most popular (usually male) creators: the countless proverbial sons of Sway House, the app's since-disbanded bastion of lip-biting bad-boy influencers, at the height of their Saddle Ranch prowess. The professionally unlikable YouTuber turned prize-fighting boxer Jake Paul owned Bass Pro caps in several colors.

The Wall Street Journal attributed their popularity in part to the high-crown trucker hat's nostalgic mid-aughts silhouette, and while Spy writer Jonathan Zavaleta zoned in on how the caps followed a wider, post-Trump "appropriation of blue-collar, middle-American sensibilities and workwear by cool teens and white-collar creatives," such as John Deere merch, Carhartt double-knees, or RealTree camo.

For a certain kind of young consumer, the prevailing TikTok connotations all imply the same cynicisms: If you're wearing a Nirvana shirt (and especially if you're a girl), you probably can't name five Nirvana songs. If you're wearing a Thrasher hoodie, you've likely never set foot on a board. And if you're wearing a Bass Pro hat, you've never seen a live trout in all your life. It's an extension of what feels like a tale as old as time: cross-generational ire playing out on the battlefields of gate-kept band T-shirts.

The antidote to these hyper-online implications, though, is the hard reality that wearing culturally or temporally anachronistic merch simply because it looks cool is a time-honored tradition. It is also a sign that the internet is still capable of doing one of the best things it's best at: introducing people to references outside of their usual scope, whether it's the decades-old music of a band like Nirvana, or the high-physical-barrier-to-entry world of skateboarding, or the somewhat site-specific pastime of hunting and fishing.

Casey Lewis views this as the continued softening on the value proposition of authenticity about one's identity-making interests, which remains a defining value and distress point among Generation X and millennials.

Looking back to her formative years in the '90s and early 2000s, Lewis remembers the "shame associated with being a poser, where I think if you wore a band tee that you weren't actually a fan of, then people would call you a poser. I would see that play out in teen magazines, or you'd see it play out in movies." Few insults stung worse. "But now [many] of the 'trending aesthetics' we see are kind of the definition of poser: cottagecore, fairycore. People are trying on these identities that they aren't, but there's no shame associated with it now."

"Something about these days with micro-trends and TikTok, and you can try on different identities much easier," Lewis says. "Now it's like you don't even have to wear that look to your high school to experiment with your style. You can literally just post a video of yourself on TikTok to see how it fits, how that look suits you." Life is but a department store beauty floor of possibility—why wouldn't you care for a spritz of eau de counterculture?

According to New York Times critic and longtime merch connoisseur Jon Caramanica, cross-generationally popular merch is merely a sign of the source material's potency. "Whether it was Nirvana or Thrasher or whatever, they won. They formed a cultural identity that was so powerful that it outlasted the actual thing," he says.

"I'm going to assume if you're wearing a Nirvana shirt in 2024 and you don't know the band, maybe you have a sense that they were edgy. Maybe you have a sense that they rebelled. Maybe you're trying to tell some part of that story," Caramanica explains. "It's not that different, frankly, from kids of my generation wearing Ramones T-shirts. None of y'all saw the Ramones." Not dissimilarly, in 2015, GQ asked Fear of God founder and heavy-duty vintage band-shirt collector Jerry Lorenzo if he thought someone ought to be a card-carrying fan in order to rock a Nirvana tee; he said no, if only because "having played a small role in Kanye's Yeezus tour merch, I'm just excited to see people wear it."

The potential for discovery outweighs the preciousness of hard-wrought fandom. "Out of a hundred kids who are under 20 wearing a Nirvana shirt, maybe five of them go research the band and they find something fascinating and get really into it," says Caramanica. "That, to me, is far more interesting than being on the churlish end of things and being like, 'You don't know In Utero.'"

20 Funny Movies That Aren't Considered Comedies

Comedies come in all shapes and sizes, genres and flavors. You can pick from any number of comedic subgenres, from slapstick to farce to raunchy to ridiculous. But sometimes the funniest movies aren't actually comedies, but are sprinkled with moments of wonderful hilarity. With these films, the laughs come out of nowhere and hit their mark. There's nothing like a movie that makes you laugh when you least expect it. Here are 20 films that do just that.

 

1 of 20

Goodfellas (1990)

Warner Bros.

Funny how? Like a clown? Martin Scorsese's mob flick is filled with violent action, bloody spectacle and extremely dark humor. The jokes aren't jokes, per se, but you end up leaving with a huge smile on your face anyway.

 

2 of 20

Midnight Run (1988)

Universal Pictures

Robert De Niro in another comedy? As long as it's not one of those geriatric comedies he's been churning out lately. The actor has the capability of being genuinely hilarious, as he is in this buddy flick about a detective taking a criminal to jail.

 

Focus Features

In Bruges is about a couple hitmen stuck in the picturesque Belgian city of (you guessed it!) Bruges. They bicker over pints, wander the city like ghosts and occasionally bond over their mutual disdain for the Kardashians.There's not much more to it, except some of the sharpest dialogue ever written.

 

Warner Bros.

Everyone talks about the looks of Ryan Gosling, which set off flash-flood warnings in movie theaters. I almost brought a poncho to my showing, which was packed with very amused moms. But what stood out to me most was the humor. Greta Gerwig's script had me laughing more than any other movie to hit theaters in years. Thanks to her version of Ken, this thing is indelibly funny.

 

5 of 20

Dead Poets Society (1989)

Touchstone Pictures

Anything with Robin Williams is bound to have moments of hilarity. Even his worst movies are boistered by his unbelievable commitment to the part. The actor brought an honest, unwavering sympathy to his roles, and his commitment to the role of poetry professor is a fine example. He gives this film its heart, its soul and yes, its humor.

 

6 of 20

Dazed and Confused (1993)

Gramercy Pictures

Alright, alright, alright. It's one of the best examples of a non-comedy being hilarious. Richard Linklater's story of the last day of high school is packed with iconic lines, many of which make us laugh out loud. 

 

7 of 20

Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

Focus Features

Wes Anderson has a style that doesn't make us bellow with laughter but does make us chuckle in amusement. (The exception being Rushmore, which is one of the funniest movies ever made.) His tale of children on the run is not exactly hilarious, but it does have some silly moments.

 

8 of 20

Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

A24

A movie that tries to cram everything everywhere all at once into a single sitting should have some comedy, right? Glad you agree. Because without the comedy, the film just wouldn't be the same. There would be no fanny-pack fights, sęx toy battles or talking rocks, all of which add to the operatic absurdity of The Daniels' epic.

 

9 of 20

Notting Hill (1999)

Universal Pictures

It's a rom-com, silly. Of course there's going to be comedy. Well, yes. But most rom-coms don't have the same laugh ratio as many raunch fests. Notting Hill  is extremely funny, perpetually piling on the jokes at Hugh Grant's expense. He's never been better and Julia Roberts — who smiles like she's posing for a toothpaste ad — has never been better as well.

 

Walt Disney Pictures

Disney has turned into a robotic studio of late, going through the same motions of live-action remakes. It makes you long for the days of WALL-E, when even the studio's robots were alive with heart, humor and invention. The robot left on Earth to clean up trash could very well be picking up copies of Disney's remake collection.

 

11 of 20

Frances Ha (2012)

IFC Films

Before Greta Gerwig was a director, she was a luminous gem on the indie scene. Anytime she showed up in a movie, you wanted to see what she was going to do next. The actress' wistful energy was never more realized than in Frances Ha, a small film about a woman's midlife crisis that made a giant impact. 

 

12 of 20

Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986)

Paramount Pictures

Bueller? Bueller? Bueller? Anyone? It's hard to imagine Ferris Bueller's ditch day being this iconic if it weren't so funny. While it might not be a comedy, it's up there with the best of them. There aren't many films that make me laugh like this one.

 

13 of 20

The Incredibles (2004)

Walt Disney Pictures

Family arguments, middle-class malaise and childhood confusion — all of it crammed into spandex? Disney delivered one of their funniest movies with this tale of everyday superheroes, the slapstick of banality being the humor's grounding force.

 

14 of 20

The Big Lebowski (1998)

Gramercy Pictures

There aren't many characters who have made me laugh like Walter, the best friend of The Dude and the most patriotic man you've ever seen. The Coen Brothers' endlessly quotable film isn't a comedy, but Walter is funny enough to support an entire comedy on his own. If the entire film was just him yelling, it would still be an instant classic.

 

15 of 20

Harold and Maude (1971)

Paramount Pictures

Nothing says comedy like a boy staging his own death over and over again, right? The story of a suicidal boy and a senior citizen might not sound like it would be funny, but Hal Ashby's script is noose tight, delivering hilarious moments that choke you with laughter.

 

16 of 20

Hard Boiled (1992)

Golden Princess Film Production

Sometimes a movie is so ridiculous, you can't help but laugh. At the sight of an assassin holding a baby in one arm while shooting villains with the other, there's no way you don't chuckle in awe. Hard Boiled is super cool, super funny and super, super ridiculous. A masterpiece in mass execution.

 

17 of 20

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019)

Columbia Pictures

This is one of those movies that qualifies as a bunch of different genres, yet remains comedic. Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio get into all sorts of amusing situations as they try to thrive in 1960s showbiz. The final scene is one of those jaw-dropping moments you can't help but laugh at.

 

18 of 20

Police Story (1985)

Golden Harvest

You thought Tom Cruise strapping himself to a plane was cool? Wait until you see what Jackie Chan does here. Hanging from a bus, hopping off a roof and dispensing of hundreds of villains, Chan delivers stunts so impressive they become hilarious.

 

19 of 20

The Holiday (2006)

Columbia Pictures

The Holiday is one of those films your mom likes to watch, and when you sit down to watch a little with her, you're shocked at how good it is. It helps to have the indelible talents of Kate Winslet, Cameron Diaz, Jack Black and Jude Law, who give their relationships the life they need. And the film is actually funny! Turns out some of the movies your mom watches on a quiet afternoon are actually quite good.

 

20 of 20

The Princess Bride (1987)

MGM

Is there a funnier fairy tale out there? Inconceivable! This tale of a kidnapped princess and her true love is genuinely hilarious. It's a wonderful film with tons of laughs.

Asher Luberto is a film critic and entertainment writer for L.A. Weekly and The Village Voice. His writing has appeared in NBC, FOX, MSN, Yahoo, Purewow, The Playlist, The Wrap and Los Angeles Review of Books.

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