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Akou on Trump merch

Washington Post cites Eskenazi fashion historian Akou on political apparel

By: Maura Judkis

Wednesday, April 05, 2023

Donald Trump did not have his mug shot taken on Tuesday, but what do facts have to do with the marketplace of political ideas and/or merchandise? Within a day of the former president’s arraignment in New York, hundreds of Trump mug shots appeared on Etsy products. There were mug shots with Trump wearing an orange jumpsuit, or saluting, or flipping the bird. There were mug shots accompanied by words such as “Guilty,” “Not Guilty” and “Legend.” Law enforcement might not have required a Trump mug shot, but America seemed to demand one.

Before the arraignment, a Fox News host suggested that a shirt with Trump’s mug shot would become as iconic as shirts of Cuba’s Che Guevara.

But New York law enforcement has discretion over whether to take a mug shot of someone charged with a crime. Trump’s was not expected to be taken, according to the New York Times, because he is easily recognizable and was not considered a flight risk, and because taking a mug shot would complicate security efforts.

Photoshop and AI image generators quickly filled the void this pragmatism had created, creating artificial images of the former president in the harsh glare of police station lighting for schadenfreude and hero worship.

The Trump campaign released its own “official” fake-mug-shot T-shirt, available for $36 (or “free” with a donation of at least $47). The campaign’s shirt appeared to incorporate one of the former president’s official White House portraits superimposed against a police-lineup backdrop. There is an old-timey card bearing his title, the date of his arrest — and, in a hopeful touch, the numbers “45-47,” a nod to his distinction as America’s 45th president and his aspiration to be the 47th. Many, many observers noticed that the mug shot’s graphic designer added two inches to his height: Trump is 6-foot-3, not 6-5, as the police backdrop suggests.

That demand came from the left and the right. His opponents wanted yet another Florida Man staring into the lens of the law. His supporters wanted martyr iconography.

“For the record, it will be the most manly, most masculine, most handsome mug shot of all time,” said Hogan Gidley, a former Trump White House spokesman, to Time. “I can say that definitely, before having even seen it.”

In a true story of American capitalism, many Etsy sellers didn’t pick a side. Some sell pro-Trump and anti-Trump shirts in the same store. Some of the sellers are apolitical, but pro-money.

“Realistically, I just saw it as a hot-topic item, and I thought it would be a hot item to sell at the moment,” says a seller named Richard, the 24-year-old who runs the Etsy store TheRetroHabitat and who spoke on the condition of using only his first name to protect his privacy. “I don’t really care what happens to him personally. I’m not pro, I’m not con. I just think some people might want the shirt.”

Don Meeg, a 36-year-old from Los Angeles, is dipping his toes into the print-on-demand shirt business as a side hustle. His shirts have an AI-generated mug shot of the former president surrounded by the words, “F**k around and find out.”

“This was just sort of a test run just to see how quick I could set things up,” Meeg says.

He is glad the former president was indicted — “I think that it’s fair that a citizen is held accountable for their actions,” he says — but isn’t planning to add more anti-Trump merch. “It looks like it’s very easy for the market to just instantly become saturated,” he says.

One of Richard’s shirts is just Trump in an orange jumpsuit, which he says he pulled from an AI-generated image that had been circulating online. Looking at it — and at other similarly ambiguous, minimalist mug-shot shirts — it’s hard to tell where the wearer’s loyalties lie. That’s intentional, Richard says.

“Someone could purchase the shirt either way,” he says, regardless of their political leanings. “Somebody who is pro-Trump could wear it as a gag.”

Heather Akou, an associate professor of fashion design at Indiana University at Bloomington who has studied political apparel, says the ease of starting a print-on-demand T-shirt brand “has really diluted the collectability of graphic T-shirts.” People might buy them thinking they will become a collector’s item or a piece of history, but Akou suspects that many of the mug-shot tees will ultimately end up in a landfill.

“Political T-shirts can be very powerful if people really get excited about the message and start buying them in large numbers,” the professor says, but the effect can be short-lived. “It’s also a very flash-in-the-pan kind of phenomenon. So, you know, you might buy a T-shirt and wear it to an event and then never wear it again.”

“I don’t think that a manufactured mug shot is going to be a lasting historical image,” says Meeg, the Etsy seller.

Nevertheless, there’s money to make right now — regardless of one’s personal politics.

Says Meeg: “That’s capitalism, isn’t it?”

Washington Post cites Eskenazi fashion historian Akou on political apparel

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