Why slogans won’t change the world $380 sweaters are for posers

What do the US arm of Guardian newspapers and Palantir Technologies have in common? Not much, you might think — except that both have just launched merchandise lines that come close to outright trolling. If your brand is vegan eco-socialist, and you have $380 to spare, you may now buy a beige cashmere sweater representing Guardian values, with “the whole picture” or “facts are sacred” embroidered across your chest in childishly off-kilter handwriting. Or, if hawkish scepticism about democracy is more your thing, why not opt for some black shorts for $99, tastefully adorned with the minimalist Palantir logo, evoking the “seeing-stone” from The Lord of the Rings? Alternatively, you could go to a Halloween party wearing both items, and call yourself The Horseshoe Theory.

The Guardian merch is made by New York brand Lingua Franca, best known for putting what it calls “thought-provoking and culturally resonant phrases” on expensive jumpers in cursive script, and getting celebrities to wear them on the red carpet. And — a bit like the newspaper — the fashion label’s current political messaging seems somewhat chastened compared to former cocksure progressive hectoring. Indeed, the semantic trajectory of the company’s sweaters would make for a fascinating modern history project: from the uncompromising “time’s up”, “we say gay”, and “Dr Fauci fan club” messages of yesteryear to the sullen “exhausted American”, “I didn’t vote for him”, and “I read banned books” of the current collection. Even the writing on women’s chests seems to have got smaller — or maybe the breasts got bigger. Either way, things have definitely changed.

During the first Trump presidency, company founder Rachelle Hruska McPherson was apparently able to claim with a straight face that luxury goods activism might change the world. “This is not a time to be silent,” she told Fortune magazine in 2020 “Virtue signaling to our communities on where we stand on issues is literally how change has happened historically, and it’s how it will continue to happen today”. This year, though, there are signs of adjustment to new political and commercial realities, and not merely in those defeated-sounding new mottos. According to a recent interview in Elle magazine, McPherson now “considers herself just as much of an activist… but she wants to fight that fight in a different, more measured way than she did the first time around”. She says she sometimes looks back and thinks: “‘Oh, that’s a little cringeworthy.’ And then I’m like, ‘Is it? We all were doing it.’”

Many fashionistas were, indeed, doing cringeworthy things in the heady days of woke, spurred on by their bottom line. “The future is female”; “transwomen are women”, and “I can’t breathe” were just three of the sartorial shortcuts to canonisation in a cotton-polyester blend. The makers of such garments didn’t seek to persuade by appealing to reason: t-shirt slogans are not exactly Aristotelian syllogisms. And nor did they even try to invoke much emotion — you can’t tug on heartstrings when limited to four words per line. Instead, they sought to appeal to the self-interested desire of the consumer. If you wear this, people will think you are a good person; and being a good person is very in right now.

Thankfully, things have moved on, and the cool kids these days wouldn’t be seen dead in a Guardian-Lingua Franca collab, assuming they could afford one. I know this because I read it in a Guardian article two years ago, and — as we now know — the paper treats facts as sacred. As the story explained, Gen Z hates “peppy but shallow” slogan tees: including “painfully tone-deaf” jumpers from, er, Lingua Franca.

But it’s not that the hipsters and taste-makers have gone off words on t-shirts per se. It’s just that they now prefer jokey, amoral, gnomic ones. For while Lingua Franca has stuck to the moralising high ground — “history has its eyes on you” etc. — a brief perusal of what the kids are into gives us slogans like “hardcore” or “I’m gonna win” or “follow me, I’m a cult leader”. You might even say that there’s been a Trumpian turn.

Perhaps the new generation is just more clear-eyed than its elders about the fact that wearing words on your clothes to bring about meaningful political change was always bogus. Unless you design your own, the words in question are nicked from someone else. In that sense, wearing a slogan tee is barely a genuine communicative act at all. And as soon as you are photographed wearing the item to put on your socials — essential for the pretence that you are making any kind of political difference — whatever independent meaning faintly resided in the slogan to begin with is now subsumed into the meaning of the person wearing it, as just one more visual aspect for the viewer to interrogate. Onlookers are asked to consider, not whether black lives really matter, or whether this is indeed what a feminist looks like, but rather the question: “what kind of person would wear a slogan like this?”.

As such, sloganwear fits seamlessly into a post-literate internet culture. Context collapse is a thing: the simultaneous exposure of your words to different kinds of audiences, with alternative ways of reading the same sentences; so that your in-joke or political point, meant for one group, can cause accidental outrage in another one. The desire to say as little as possible that might be challenged or misunderstood — while still saying something that gets you attention — means that the sort of vaguely ironic exclamation or sanctimonious tautology you might put on a t-shirt (or jumper) starts looking irresistible to many.

In face-to-face communication with a person you know, understanding what the other is saying depends on at least a rough understanding of the sort of person you are talking to. There’s a reciprocal relationship between interpreting the words — is what she just said meant to be sincere? funny? kind? patronising? — and assumptions about the deeper personal characteristics of the speaker. Very occasionally, a person’s saying something in isolation can radically change your view of who they are; most of the time, your prior view of who they are modulates your understanding of their individual statements. A benevolent and a malevolent person can say the very same thing, but you will hear it in very different ways.

This is also true of understanding great novels: the deep reader tries to build a picture of the sort of creative mind that wrote the text, at the same time as building a picture of what the text actually means. Is this a mind capable of irony? Of rich symbolism? Is it cynical or optimistic about human nature? Judgements about the author affect how the book is read, and vice versa. Despite the “death of the author” nonsense in Sixties French literary theory, great artists remained alive and kicking, way past their actual deaths. But on the internet of strangers, such subtleties break down. In this domain, at least, Barthes and Foucault were right.

Here there are lots of orphaned phrases, dislocated from concrete facts about the identity of the speaker and her accompanying thoughts. You publish or post something; I have no real idea of your character or history, which means I have no well-defined idea of what you, personally, mean by those words. Texts become detached from the intentions of their producers, floating about the internet like ghosts. This creates interpretative perils, but also opportunities in the marketplace of mass communication: I can write down stereotypically righteous, funny, or clever-sounding things, in a compressed way, and naïve observers will just assume I am righteous, funny, clever. Getting reposted by a big X account is a bit like persuading a red-carpet celebrity to wear your words, and so promote your brand.

At least the untrustworthy communicative dynamics are more obvious when the words are on someone’s chest, right there in front of you. No matter the thread count, sloganwear in the wild is usually easy to see through: the disconnect between desired effect, and the perceptible reality of the wearer, is often too great. The owner of the sweater wants you to believe she is the sort of person who holds facts sacred; but what you see instead is someone who wants you to believe she is the sort of person who holds facts sacred — and that is completely different. It’s a lesson in the complexities of human interpretation we would do well to hold on to elsewhere. You might even say that — for once, at least — thanks to the Guardian, we get close to the whole picture.

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