I think this comes into the revulsion we might feel when confronted by all the merch.” “It’s a way to convince cis-het allies to be a part of Pride without actually taking real action to support the people they love, who are the producers of the culture they want to consume.
They’re for straight audiences who would consider themselves to be allies in some way,” the academic says. Yet it stands to reason: if not even gay people want to dress like they taste the rainbow, then who, exactly, are these collections aimed at? “I don’t think these things are for queer people. The “ brands marketing to gays versus me and my gay friends” meme is well-established on social media, with people splicing a photograph of, say, Ross Matthews in a sequined mankini next to a picture of Grandpa Joe from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in his soiled and crunchy nightshirt. All of which are at odds with what real life queer people actually want to wear – trousers. So while this entire piece is obviously just an aesthetic judgement linked to my own tastes and sensibilities, there is an evident lack of care put into the vast majority of Pride collections, manifesting in glitter jockstraps, rainbow umbrellas, and plastic shutter shades. A put-upon design assistant who’s been given a couple of days to come up with half a dozen Pride-themed products is unlikely to produce the most innovative of designs.” And then there’s the conversation surrounding donations, which seldom take place without someone making a purchase first. “What you’re left with isn’t terribly chic or innovative,” adds Jay McCauley Bowstead, author of Menswear Revolution, “but the so-called ‘creative industries’ don’t allow much time or space for creativity. Not only did the department store appropriate the symbol without permission or payment, but it sat alongside dog tutus, ”adventure” sandals, a t-shirt printed with a Schitt’s Creek quote, this thing that my brain is refusing to provide words for – each one uglier and more rainbowfied than the last. Perhaps the most ghoulish of these instances, though, was when Target released a t-shirt bearing the pink triangle associated with ACT UP, the grassroots organisation that helped to end the Aids epidemic. Subject lines were laden with words like “identity” and “they/them” only for me to realise that I was actually being asked to purchase a tin of CBD-infused gummies, or worse, a plug-in air freshener. intercoursed the contents of a DFS warehouse.įrom early May, my own inbox began to read like the treatment for a Nationwide advert. This suit, the Home Office’s technicolour rebranding, and all those IKEA sofas that look as though the cast of Monsters, Inc. The rainbow fanny packs, the LGBT sandwiches, and the concept of Pride A Manger. Yet the aesthetic crimes that accompany all the honking Pride floats and retina-burning merch are just as, if not more, heinous. Every June, internet thinkers will enrage themselves over successive examples of pinkwashing, with someone guffing about how neoliberalism killed the radical roots of gay liberation, and another about how queer culture has been commodified under Primark and late-capitalism.
At this point, to comment on the corporatisation of Pride is a fairly anodyne undertaking.