Thatcher aprons: Why is political merch so embarrassing?

Roisin Lanigan, The Independent

After a week of tedium, it’s become near-official: the election will not happen in May. But it will happen this year, and so we need to be prepared. I don’t mean that in the political sense, but — in a more important way — a sartorial one. We have to gird ourselves for the return of political merch, political memes, and the slow march towards the end of the political slogan tee.

Its death knell came in the form of “Sparkle with Starmer”, a limited edition and unisex £20 tee meant to encourage us to “unleash (our) inner shimmer and shine”, and released in the wake of Keir Starmer being glitter bombed by a protester during the Labour conference in October. The stage invader was a member of People Demand Democracy, a campaign group advocating for changes in the UK’s voting system, and the establishment of a “permanent citizens assembly” to replace the House of Lords. As political attacks go, I don’t think it’s exactly the sexiest one. Judging by the fact that Labour’s website is still selling the supposedly limited edition tee three months after its release, I’m not alone.

What happened? It wasn’t always like this for the detritus and tat that make up political merch. It’s not a problem specific to the left either: the Conservative Party’s online shop has some truly painful offerings too, from Starmer-themed flip-flops (get it?), to Margaret Thatcher Christmas jumpers (no no no instead of ho ho ho, get it?) and Thatcher aprons (“the lady’s not for burning” written on the front — you get it?). There’s even a selection of Tory leader Toby jugs (bafflingly these are not branded “Tory jugs”), featuring Thatcher again, as well as David Cameron, Winston Churchill, Boris Johnson, Theresa May and John Major. Presumably they decided not to bother to manufacture one for Rishi Sunak, despite the fact he is the current prime minister. It goes without saying that if you were a person with even an iota of good taste, you would not want to wear or display any of these things in your home.

And yet there is a potted industry on eBay for political merch from as far back as the Reagan and Kennedy eras — tees to sweaters to posters to enamel pins reading “I TOLD YOU SO”, selling for absurdly high prices. It can’t just be attributed to nostalgia or a vintage collecting impulse either, modern politicians can make good merch too. In 2016, Bernie Sanders’s presidential run typography was so popular it inspired Balenciaga — the fashion house’s entire FW17 campaign was inspired by “Bernciaga”, in fact. “One of the things we wanted to create was a logotype that gave a corporate vision very vividly,” creative director Demna Gvasalia said in 2017. “In my research, Bernie Sanders’s was most present at that time; that’s why it resembles it so directly and obviously I was very aware of it. I wanted it to be (similar) — that was my message with this collection.” Bernie became, for a time, if not a presidential candidate then an unlikely fashion sensation. Political merch can have cultural cache, then. It just… doesn’t anymore. When Sanders was inspiring Balenciaga, though, the political slogan tee was at its apex of chicness in the fashion world. For her SS17 show, Maria Grazia Chiuri was sending models down the runway at Dior wearing T-shirts reading “We should all be feminists”. In the same year Frank Ocean performed at Panorama Festival wearing a t-shirt inspired by a tweet — which inevitably went viral on Twitter afterwards in a full ouroboros moment — reading “WHY BE RACIST and SEXIST”. And in the UK, too, during the 2019 election and later into the pandemic, slogan tees in support of Corbyn and the NHS from artists like Sportsbanger were fairly ubiquitous. This was peak 2010s.