I Hate A24 Merch

Look, I like some of the A24 films. I’m sure there’s a number of them firmly in my Top 100 films (not that I can be assed to check). And I love me some merch, band tees, record shops, a shirt for a random running shop that I’ve never even been to. The point is, I love to be a walking billboard, especially for things that make me seem cultured. But, A24 merch is trash. Look, I get it, merch is generally hot right now and A24 fans are absolutely the type of people who want to culture signal, half of them probably own New Yorker totes as well. 

I know it’s pretty hypocritical of me to sit here and preach against shallow displays of culture, but please at least think for a moment — would you wear a shirt for Paramount or Disney? Absolutely not. But you think wearing a frankly boring A24 shirt is somehow different because, what, they’re an “indie” studio? I mean sure, they technically are but it’s a multi-million dollar company that has churned out a large number of hyped, widely accepted films. From a design perspective, the product offering is largely lame as hell, it’s more often than not just a logo or name printed across the chest. It’s about as shallow as looking down the barrel of a Louis Vuitton monogram. Wearing an A24 shirt doesn’t signal anything about your taste except that you call movies “films” and have a hard-on for Wes Anderson. 

And the ongoing Online Ceramics collaboration, sheesh. When the collab first kicked off with shirts celebrating The VVitch, I was intrigued, the graphics with pictures of children and skeletons felt original, not great but interesting. However, it felt like the collaboration pieces quickly devolved into largely random stills from the films set against eighty different fonts in a way just as unoriginal as other A24 merch items while presenting a maximalist approach antithetical to the brand’s previous endeavors. At the end of the day, it feels to me like a lazy coming together of two trendy brands with an end product that feels more like “how do you do fellow kids” than an actual creative effort.

Somewhere out there, someone is about to buy and LL Bean Boat & Tote with “A24” embroidered on it and it’s our job to stop them‬.

There’s a lot of hate in this world. Garfield hates Mondays, Drake hates when girls turn 18, and me? I hate just about everything. This is a weekly column dedicated to the many and varied objects of my loathing. The goal is not to just sit here and say I hate things but to communicate my exact reasoning as to why because hate is unproductive, but hate with reason starts a conversation.