Meet the Designers Trying to Make Bernie Sanders Merch Cool

Even the staunchest Bernie Bro might be willing to acknowledge one criticism of the presidential hopeful: Sanders’s official merch is predictably unhip. Predictable because presidential merch is never really cool—it ranges somewhere between painfully bad and a shirt printed with the phrase “Boot Edge Edge.” One day we will inevitably have a presidential candidate who says stuff like “I want to cop your vote, fam,” but until then we have Sanders and his sensible Burton jacket over and over again.

So people outside the campaign have stepped in to create merch for voters who care as much about universal health care as they do about looking good. “Some of the official merch is a little dumb,” says Max Martin, of Cactus Store, who is hauling a truckload of big cacti through Los Angeles when we chat on the phone. “Part of the motivation was to make something we would actually want to wear.” In Martin’s case, this means a T-shirt with a photo of a Cephalocereus senilis—a cactus with a distinctive appearance thanks to a layer of wispy white hairs sprouting out of it—selected because it looks exactly like Sanders from behind. The plant is even known as “the old man” cactus.

As much as millennials love their succulents, Cactus Store’s isn’t the end-all-be-all of BernieGear. The Los Angeles–based Come Tees, every art student’s favorite T-shirt brand, launched a Sanders tee. Several punk-rock-inspired items appeared on the web shop manned by a graphic designer named Ben Clark. Meanwhile, one-man operations like BernYourFace are springing up to fill the surprisingly vast void of what the brand’s creator, Gordon Kenny, describes as “Bernie meets tie-dye meets Online Ceramics meets Grateful Dead” merch. What all BernieGear has in common is how experimental it is, whether it’s coming from very fashionable brands like Come Tees or name-dropping Online Ceramics as a template.

And while these are just T-shirts, we’ve repeatedly seen the impact merch—from inside or outside the campaign—can have on a presidential campaign. Shepard Fairey’s blue-and-red “Hope” image, created with permission from the Barack Obama campaign, was instantly iconic when unveiled in 2007. The “Make America Great Again” hats are now so recognizable anyone wearing a red cap runs the risk of being identified as a Trump supporter. Political merch can turn individuals into tribes in the same way logo-emblazoned caps do for fans of sports teams.

To that end, every campaign seems to have gotten the exact merch its circumstances demand. The lustrous candy-colored optimism of the Obama era or the brash siren-like appearance of a cardinal MAGA cap, for instance. For Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, designers Marc Jacobs, Tory Burch, and Public School made unique campaign merch for the Democratic nominee, and her “coastal elite” supporters.

Unlike the high-sheen merch created by Fairey or department-store-favorite designers, there’s something gritty and DIY about the emergence of BernieGear. “There's a message and vibe in the campaign that's really grassroots and that it's really owned by the people,” says Sonya Sombreuil, who designed the Rage Against the Machine tee. “Every little group can feel like they have like authorship in this how this goes. ​So I think it's the same with the merchandising of it.” Most of these T-shirts evoke punky countercultural music: Rage Against the Machine, Minor Threat, Subhumans, or The Grateful Dead.

Sombreuil originally designed her contribution as a one-off to give to her boyfriend as a Christmas present. (Her boyfriend works for the Sanders campaign and he loves the band Rage Against the Machine. Simple as that really.) And when Sombreuil posted the image of a grim Sanders on the shirt to Instagram she saw how much her followers took to it, despite her initial reticence to make a political statement. “My impression was that I was doing something that would make me a martyr,” she says.

Instead, the shirts have been so wildly successful that to donate the enormous bundle of proceeds on her own, Sombreuil would have needed to register as a Super PAC. (Individuals can donate up to $2,800 to a candidate while PACs can contribute $5,000) And unlike previous campaign merch, the Sanders tees aren’t always about showcasing a happy-go-lucky candidate brimming with optimism, or capital-H Hope. Sombreuil chose the photo of Sanders on her tee because “he looks so indignant and determined,” she says.

All the brands I spoke with mentioned making the merch as something they felt compelled to do to support the candidate they believe in—a moral obligation. Kenny put it to me slightly differently, in a way I really liked: what if you could make a T-shirt so irresistibly awesome a non-Sanders supporter might want it even if they’re, say, a Joe Biden fan? “I had this idea of, ‘Aw, man, if only there were an Online Ceramics-looking Bernie shirt, maybe we could win South Carolina!” says Kenny.

After all, getting the votes is the end game for all these designers. “T-shirts are awesome, but at the end of the day fuck a Bernie Sanders tee,” Kenny says. “I want a Bernie Sanders president.”

On TikTok and Twitter, at campaign rallies, and on Etsy, the old class warfare quip feels newly urgent.

Originally Appeared on GQ