Hello,
What do you think about Harry's new merch for coachella? Or his merch in general?
When I see it, it's so aesthetically "un-appealing", boring etc. That I wonder what's the point of that merch? It makes me think maybe they don't put the effort because they (or someone) don't want the money going there? But that makes no sense, and also I'm not sure they do not profit from it. But I'm sure if it was a bit more elaborate, people would go crazy to get it.
Do you have any thoughts?
Harry's merch is one of the biggest mysteries of this fandom to me, and I have lots of thoughts and struggle to resolve them.
The first contradiction is that he always has great imagery to work with, because Harry and his team are pretty intentional about things like album covers and invest heavily in them. But to turn great imagery into good merch requires careful thinking about fonts, placements, and the colour and shape of the blanks. And most of Harry's merch shows exact the opposite of careful thinking. I thought some of the Fine Line cover merch was well done. Nothing special, but competent. But other merch from Fine Line looked like it was put together in 10 seconds by someone whose main goal was to minimise the printing colours, nothing was even competent from HS1, and some TPWK merch is legendarily bad (even if Louis would get it as a tattoo according to some guy in Amsterdam).
I think this set of merch runs into exactly the same great imagery not used well problem of earlier merch. The rabbits stuff seems OK and I think the white long sleeve tee with yellow bubbles on it is well laid out. But with everything else the placement is just slightly off, or slapdash. 'Harry's House' in thin small pink letters across the chest and then an image on the back where it'll be covered by long hair is certainly a choice. But not a well executed or thoughtful one.
The second contradiciton about Harry's merch for me is that it never speaks to who he is as an artist at all. There's just this huge gaping cavern between how he presents himself and the aesthetics of his shows and the aesthetics of the merch. And that's true on individual pieces, and the collection as a whole. There's never anything cool and Harry in there - or anything besides the very obvious. It doesn't fit his brand, it just repeats element from his brand.
Now the most obvious answer to all this is that nobody cares and that merch can print money so this is what they do. And I think that there must be at least some element of that.
But at the same time Harry wears his merch, including the extremely ugly merch. He's also interested in and engaged with merch more broadly - he's worn a lot of other people's merch - and obviously really likes merch. I do have to sometimes wonder if he actually likes the merch, which asks more questions than it answers.














