Thatcher aprons and Starmer flip flops: Why is political merchandising so embarrassing?

TOAfter a week of tedium, it has become almost official: the elections will not take place in May. But it will happen this year and that is why we must be prepared. I don't mean this in a political sense, but – and more importantly – in a sartorial sense. We need to prepare for the return of political merchandising, political memes, and the slow march toward the end of the political slogan t-shirt.

Its death knell came in the form of “Sparkle with Starmer”, a limited-edition £20 unisex t-shirt intended to encourage us to “unleash [our] sparkle and inner glow”, and was published after a protester glitter-bombed Keir Starmer during the Labor conference in October. The stage invader was a member of People Demand Democracy, a campaign group advocating changes to the UK's voting system and the establishment of a “permanent citizens' assembly” to replace the House of Lords. As far as political attacks go, I don't think he's exactly the sexiest. Judging by the fact that the Labor Party website is still selling the supposedly limited edition t-shirt three months after its release, I'm not alone.

What happened? This was not always the case with the detritus and remains that make up political merchandising. It's not a problem specific to the left, either: the Conservative Party's online store also has some really painful deals, from Starmer-themed flip-flops (get it?), to Margaret Thatcher Christmas jumpers (no, no, instead of ho ho ho, get it?) and Thatcher aprons (“the lady is not for burning” written on the front, get it?). There's even a selection of the Tory leader's Toby mugs (bafflingly, they're not branded “Tory mugs”), featuring Thatcher again, as well as David Cameron, Winston Churchill, Boris Johnson, Theresa May and John Major. Presumably they decided not to bother making one for Rishi Sunak, even though he is the current Prime Minister. Needless to say, if you were a person with even an ounce of good taste, you wouldn't want to wear or display any of these things in your home.

And yet there is an eBay industry of political products dating back to the Reagan and Kennedy eras: “I TOLD YOU SO” T-shirts, sweaters, posters, and enamel pins selling for absurdly high prices. It can't simply be attributed to nostalgia or the impulse to collect vintage items: modern politicians can create good products too.

In 2016, Bernie Sanders' presidential run typography was so popular that it inspired Balenciaga; in fact, the fashion house's entire FW17 campaign was inspired by “Bernciaga.” “One of the things we wanted to create was a logo that gave a very vivid corporate vision,” creative director Demna Gvasalia said in 2017. “In my research, Bernie Sanders was more present at the time; That's why he seems so direct and obviously I was very aware of it. I wanted him to go [similar] – that was my message with this collection.” Bernie became, for a time, if not a presidential candidate, then an unlikely fashion sensation. So political merchandising can have cultural cache. It's just… not like that anymore.

However, when Sanders was inspiring Balenciaga, the political slogan T-shirt was at its peak of elegance in the fashion world. For her SS17 show, Maria Grazia Chiuri sent models down the Dior runway wearing T-shirts that read “We Should All Be Feminists.” That same year, Frank Ocean performed at the Panorama Festival wearing a t-shirt inspired by a tweet (which inevitably went viral on Twitter later in an ouroboros moment) that read: “WHY BE RACIST, SEXIST, HOMOPHOBIC OR TRANSPHOBIC WHEN CAN YOU JUST BE CALM? ”. And also in the UK, during the 2019 election and later during the pandemic, t-shirts with slogans supporting Corbyn and the NHS from the likes of Sportsbanger were quite ubiquitous. This was the peak of the 2010s.

And the peak of the 2010s is anathema to everything currently considered cool. Political swag, perhaps, has been mixed with “cheesy” and “millennial cringe,” a relic of a bygone era for Zoom-lovers who would never dream of stopping before starting to record a video about voting for Hillary Clinton. The slogan T-shirt itself, in the time between the last UK election and the next, has become the epitome of everything basic. Slogan T-shirts make us think of Clintonmania, girlbossing, 2016 feminism, spin tank tops that say “get up and grind.”

These slogans became a certain type of uniform for a certain type of woman, or at least a certain type of feminine ideal. They are or were, Katie Rosseinsky argued last year, the bastard endpoint of the protest T-shirt, the ancestor of preteen boys wearing Che Guevara T-shirts to school, the antithesis of the DIY fashion that Vivienne Westwood created in her first days in SEX. It is also unfortunate that in the same period the idea of ​​political “protest fashion” has become more strongly associated with the right. You couldn't imagine 10 years ago that anyone would have a problem with baseball caps made in Labor red, but after Maga (Make America Great Again) it would be political suicide to suggest making one (perhaps sensibly, the only red cap available in the country). The job website is a bucket hat).

That clearly millennial Banksyification of political thought, the feminine bosification of feminism, the fusion of art and fashion with politics, became so prolific and oversaturated in the era of Jeremy Corbyn and Joe Biden that even without the cast of unpleasant rogues that we are going to find us In the upcoming election season of 2024, perhaps we would inevitably have grown tired of the spectacle of political merchandise. It became so memeified that, like all memes at the point of saturation, it simply stopped being funny. It's also true that politics probably shouldn't be fun. Nor, if we want to stop electing populists, should it be easily communicable in a crop top.

Because, aside from their inherent brashness, the obvious answer to the decline of political merchandise is that slogan T-shirts, by their nature, advertise platitudes rather than communicating the kind of complicated, grudging support that the 2024 election season asks of us, in both sides of the Atlantic. You can't really embrace the spirit of “protest fashion,” nor can you use fashion to make a political statement, if the political statement you're making is “yeah, okay, whatever, whichever is least bad.”

In the UK in particular, the slogan T-shirt became during the last election, among other things, a way of communicating support for the underprivileged, which is depressing if only because it means that we have become accustomed to reality that in Britain, historically, Labor loses more often than it wins. But, as each new voting intention survey tells us, this time it might not be the case. Starmer's neoliberal nightmare of a Labor Party is no longer the party of the underdog, but it is that sentiment that his bright T-shirt clearly tried (and failed) to imitate.

The latest figures predict that the majority of young people in the UK will “never vote Conservative”, a party that millennials and zoomers associate with higher tuition fees, a feudalism-like rental crisis and growing certainty that many of us will never own property. . But hatred of one party does not automatically translate into enthusiastic support for the other. In 2019, 60 per cent of 18-24 year olds voted for Corbyn. Five years later, much of that same demographic is more averse to his successor than the brilliant Starmerites might expect. In the United States, where young people supported the Democrats, they voted for Biden with the same attitude. Most likely, his successor will enjoy continued, reluctant and grudging support. And if you can barely convince people to vote for you in a dreary local church hall on a rainy winter morning (an election in May would have at least made this process a little less miserable), then it's inevitable. that you really are I'm not going to convince them to pay £20 to wear a cheap t-shirt while they do it.