[SIC] DAY TWO HUNDRED EIGHTY SEVEN

Vol. 3, No. 6 - Unlocked.

[SIC] DAY TWO HUNDRED EIGHTY SEVEN

Breakfast Club regular Zaira Stefani Vallejo text me a link last night, writing,

“Feel like you could make a compelling pitch for consulting this work in lieu / in support of them making this FT hire…can’t think of a brain more suited for it than yours tbh”

The link was for an open Director of Membership gig at A24. Per the listing:

"A24 is seeking a dynamic, strategic, and highly creative leader to head our membership program, AAA24. The person in this role will be directly accountable for the development and growth of AAA24: setting goals for the program, crafting a strong roadmap, and working cross-functionally to align teams to deliver. The ideal candidate is an innovative leader with stellar brand and business instincts and experience leading cross-functional teams, setting high level goals and priorities, and building and growing a subscription product. This role is based in Manhattan."

Honestly I’m flattered by the thought. Not only has A24 continued to kill it with its films (crucial, obvs) but its celebrated array of consumer products has become a linchpin of membership value in AAA24, its monthly membership scheme. I’ve been a member for a couple of years now mainly because I really like the print collateral (zines etc) they send once a month, but they also do a great job with extra touches like a free birthday present (chosen from unsold back-stock, but still) and, recently, a free ticket to new releases in theaters. At $10 a month it’s a bargain.

Notwithstanding the fact that I don’t want a full time gig, Zaira’s is an appealing thought; who wouldn’t want to help build that capacity? A24’s sense of product-as-storytelling is right up there, and the source material is uniformly great.

It’s made more salient by the timing of Zaira’s text, on the evening of Supreme’s new season reveal, which Hypebeast reliably collects here: [Supreme Spring/Summer 2025 Full Collection]. Whatever you think of ‘Preme’s relevance (personally or culturally), it remains the né plus ultra of inspired, unlikely collaborative product creation; every season delivers at least a few things that you definitely didn’t need in your life beforehand, but won’t be able to forget going forward.

This season the consensus star is the SpongeBob integration (more on that in a sec) but honestly it’s all pretty strong this time around. As Hypebeast notes it includes “Yonex EZONE 100L tennis rackets, an Everlast boxing speed bag, skate decks featuring artwork from Hirst, Barnes and Ayala, a leopard-print pool table … homeware pieces, chrome keychains, camping essentials and a Transformers model.”

I often use the co-branded Ski-Doo Jetski from 2021 as the ultimate example of the brand’s genius -who needs this?! But also, who doesn’t want it(?!), in some bizarre world where you own a jetski. Kenny Powers FTW or whatever. And it’s not a one-off: this season you can get a handheld version.

But what separates Supreme from other collab-forward operators is the level of weird they bring. Witness the acid-washed denim take on Mies Van Der Rohe’s “Pavilion” chair and ottoman. Ghastly. But pretty amazing for how audacious it is. Who thought of this? Who agreed to it? Who cares?! File under: so wrong it’s right. And expect a cornucopia of acid treated upholstery pieces to wash through CB2 in 2026.

Also present as always: the accessible onramp for aspiring art accumulators type pieces, like the Damien Hirst shark-plate triptych:

And the incorporation of a great unsung collaborator brand for something super functional, as with the Eagle Creek Pack-It Compression Bags (themselves an acknowledgement that we already have too much of this stuff but can’t stop accumulating it)

But of course what gets the headlines is the more broadly relatable (and broadly available) pop culture collabs - which this season is SpongeBob. There’s a NASCAR-style racing jacket that will reliably go dumb on e-comm and then on resale sites.

Great. But what’s more indicative of Supreme’s approach is the way they’ve convinced Paramount and Castelli to paste SpongeBob into a series of performance road cycling gear, or as Snob writes, “Finally! Clothes for Bike-Riding, Streetwear Shopping Spongebob Enjoyers”.

As niche as that sounds, I’d wager it’s even more specific a reference. I think I know exactly who (like, the specific person) this array is meant to make smile - it’s literally one guy at Supreme who likes road biking, doesn’t ride enough to stand apart as a racer, and so would dig a point of difference from his fellow road riders around on Sunday mornings when he stops for coffee after a trip around the Ashokan reservoir.

It’s essentially their version of a new show billboard on Sunset placed specifically to reach the Netflix EP en route to lunch at Chateau Marmont. But in spite of that it’ll sell to someone entirely different - and will end up in some System Magazine fashion shoot or on the lead singer of the next Living Color on SNL (looking forward to the Body Glove revival btw).

The trust that Supreme has - that its inside jokes are funny even to people on the outside - is what makes it so great at this game. And to my mind that kind of trust is a requirement these days - especially given young audiences’ predilection for absurdity and need for meme-ability. See: the (absolutely amazing) Primus x Lodge Frizzle Fry Cast Iron Skillet

You can see the requirement for trust in its absence, too. Case in point the vast array of ‘collaborative’ (ie: licensed) product dropping to coincide with the New Season of The White Lotus, as covered by CN Traveler [Corollary: Lauren Sherman’s two-word review in Line Sheet of the first ep: “Fell Asleep,” echoed my own]

Props to Mike White’s gang, or HBO or whomever for lining up brands like Away, Nest, Diff Eyewear, Abercrombie & Fitch and Aqua (Bloomingdale’s in-house womenswear label), but to my eyes it all falls very flat - mainly because rather than being unbelievable like SpongeBob x Castelli x Supreme, it’s just un-believable. Sorry, but Parker Posey’s Victoria Ratliff isn’t wearing an Away bag. She’s Gucci. Similarly Saxon (what a dick) is Vineyard Vines, not Abercrombie. Et cetera, et cetera. None of these products have an actual place in the show.

And so the stuff comes across as uninspired, airport gift shop level souvenir chintz. Knockoffs of their own IP. “Wow, huh?,” not “Huh? Wow.” to paraphrase Ed Ruscha. I could go on.

Which brings us to the cultural implications of the changing content economy from Oren John at Hyperstudios who wrote last week,

Moments are harder to engineer. In years past, you could have your PR teams seed a few publications, bring on a few major voices, and force a campaign into the conversation. No more. You can extend the reach of something actually resonant, but you can't game it. The smarter move is to create something unique, with groundswell, targeted purely towards those that matter to consume it.

But, he notes

you can market in waves. The idea of a campaign or throughline isn't that you launch a big campaign, and then get those with influence to discuss it or hope it resonates with your consume it. It's that you open a second chapter immediately. The post Super Bowl influencer campaign isn't talking about the campaign, it's launching its next extension, so that you can own the next moment of conversation.

I agree with this mostly. And following the logic you could reasonable expect some savvy connector at Supreme to be working now to get Brian Procell to seed Ken Carson with the SpongeBob singlet for his next Rolling Loud show.

To be fair, nobody’s probably doing that at Supreme. But whomever gets that AAA24 job should be adding the thoughts to the department’s vision board.

[SIC] DAY TWO HUNDRED EIGHTY SEVEN