Overflowing from racks, teetering at the top of endless sliding shelves, and in every color and two of every size. Product is everywhere. “Product “ is anything, it’s bug spray and tennis balls, assorted nuts and a windbreaker. I work at a store that does not primarily sell clothing, yet our selection of “product“ in this category seems like an expanse compared to the rest. My adjustment to retail jobs usually involves some reckoning with its capitalist excesses - each job seems to carry its own relation to waste.
Recently, I’ve seen brands like North Face or Patagonia (two brands we sell in-store) proclaiming new reuse and repair programs. One sign in our store proclaims that these garments are designed to be worn until they are old, repaired, and cherished by new generations. This is a sentiment I wholly agree with. It’s why I’m obsessed with scouring flea markets for old streetwear and the internet for clothing that fulfills and reflects old stories and senses of self. I suppose it’s an idea I can accept when applied to a buttery Patagonia fleece or a slick North Face shell, but what of their endless heather grey branded tees? What of the mountains of stuff both brands design as “basics“ that don’t seem to have any technical or social need to exist outside of a branding opportunity? Is it not enough that I must stare at gauchely overbranded hoodies and faux-hippie “graphic design is my passion“ bubble text? Now my kids have to as well?
These heather tee shirts have meaning in the way an AI Wes Andersonned Star Wars does, or even the way a Disney+ Star Wars show does: they exist as content. Their purpose is to be consumed through reference, as something safe and calculated, and done with little regard for context or history. These products exist as strange intermediaries and placeholders. “You need a white shirt? Why not make it North Face!“ These products hold little attention to any sense of design. North Face does not want to make the perfect white tee and they don’t need to. The boldest signs from this garment will always be the brand and the white tee shirt - its degree of functionality or “perfection“ is inconsequential. In fact, these standards are deemed more expensive than actually useful for these brands to uphold. In other words, what difference is it that you can repair it if it’s so devoid of purpose, function, and design?
My frustrating revelation, sorting fluorescent On Clouds and Fjallraven flannels is that good design is sustainable too. What good is something that lasts if you don’t care about keeping it? What good is Ashoka if its only promise is to reproduce an animated character in CGI and a little flesh and maybe reference another animated show? Is that concept worth almost 100 million?
Ashoka doesn’t stop me from loving Star Wars, and the North Face tees don’t stop me from expressing a romanticism for clothing. I still believe the garment is an unappreciated medium of vast power and emotional weight, with the ability to reflect and mold the self and the cultures we participate within. The reason I write this substack is because I believe clothing is meaning-making. The cynicism inherent to prolonged exposure to product is temporary, if not completely separate from this love.
When I first became interested in clothing I felt that most logo-centric garments fell under the category of product. A garment that utilizes a logo as its primary, or at least most conspicuous sign signified status either through its obscureness or its associated cost. A Supreme Box logo tee tends to cost more than that season’s graphic logo reinterpretation. Here’s an example I actually wrestled with in high school:
One tee is pure logo spelled out in multiple letterings and a graphic. The other features a design intrinsically tied to a brand, but may not be necessarily or immediately defined as a logo by those ignorant of that brand. One shirt speaks and writes its brand out explicitly, the other is a (slightly) more complex device. This distinction defined the way I bought clothing for years. Supreme and Off White, for instance, were so culturally saturated that even their comparatively discreet symbols (Futura, Helvetica with quotation marks, a shade of red, zip ties on laces, etc.) were defined mainly through their brand.
A contrasting view may suggest that variations on a logo can create just as diverse a range of meanings and narratives. A Supreme box logo set against a Bape camo represents something rarified, an impossible mixture of connected subcultures from a less globalized world. A Golf Wang logo in pride colors may reference Supreme’s branding, serve as its own branding, and also initiate a discourse of Odd Future’s history of homophobic language as shock value employed by queer artists. The yellow Billionaire Boys Club logo tee seems like a slight color variation of many branded clothes. The shirt is actually part of the BBC 20th anniversary collection, and was produced in low numbers in 2003 and was rarely reproduced in the same colors. The running dog tee shirt I found so special is reproduced once, if not multiple times a year in varying styles.
Meanings begin to complicate here. The yellow BBC logo tee may puzzle the group that recognizes its logo. Some may continue the cycle of logoism and recognize the shirt for its worth via rarity, but others may see the questions that arise from its subtle differences, or perhaps simply an untraceable sense of nostalgia from its color and fit.
I believe a shirt like BBC’s can function like this because of the fine line between recognition and oversaturation. People will ask fewer questions about a Supreme logo with an odd box design because Supreme’s recognizability marks any deviating product as rare and therefore expensive. While the BBC shirt is sold out, most weren’t explicitly interested about 2003 BBC shirts until the company presented the narrative that framed its worth.
I long for this kind of alchemy, in which product morphs into piece, and storytelling invigorates and enlivens the empty garment.
Alexandra Hildreth recently wrote about the post pandemic rise of vintage buying and its association with archive fashion ID’ing as a form of status that has replaced gatekeeping mentalities. She writes:
One could pair this analysis with the economic strategies of many fashion brands in recent years that have relied on the safe nostalgia of legacy handbags (The Gucci Jackie for instance) and the popularity of lauded runways-past (Dolce or Balenciaga when they get bad press, post-Michele Gucci, etc). Many brands in the archive circle have opted to recreate the garments many search for or collect so ardently, often in extremely limited quantities.
The popularization of vintage, the expansion of ID’ing (no matter how problematic), and the recognition of brands that their rarer and storied products have long afterlives provide a fascinating situation. Using limited resources to call back to acknowledged and unacknowledged pasts alike can lead to the valuing of garments previously discarded. The focus isn’t a 10 dollar tee being sold for a thousand dollars, its a shirt at goodwill or a flea being saved from a landfill or a dusty shelf because value is seen within it. It is the opportunity to transmorgify product.
This concepts has its potential flaws as well. Old Stussy tee shirts occupy the niche of desirability by vintage nerds and hypebeasts alike, a fact the now Tik-Tok-mainstreamed Stussy has attempted to capitalize on. They took an oft moodboarded and valued Nintendo 64 bootleg Stussy tee shirt and reproduced it in a myriad of colors. It sold out immediately of course, involved more product being created than it did avert attention that was already there. Capitalization on what is already desired tends to only result in more colorways, more slight variations, more stuff.
To the cynic, this path ends with a recognition of inevitable capitalist greed and excess. Good becomes a side effect of greater evils. This may be true, but it’s a dynamic that also reveals the power of small stories and meanings to transform the unmemorable, perhaps a slice of light amidst the darkness of fashion’s rabid consumption.