Was the Marty Supreme Rollout the End of Merch?
At first, it looked like the perfect debut for a scrappy semi-indie flick. To promote Marty Supreme, distributor A24 turned a windbreaker into a water-cooler moment. The jacket itself wasn’t special — luxe-streetwear brand Nahmias, lead actor Timothée Chalamet, and Chalamet’s stylist Taylor McNeill created a color-blocked windbreaker stitched with the film’s title — though it was sort of stylish in a ‘90s-kinda way. What made it feel huge was the greater Marty Supreme promotional blitz, which walked the line between brilliant guerrilla marketing and semi-corporate cash-in until gently tipping into the latter, reflecting (perhaps) the final swelling of the indie-film merch bubble.
Between branded cereal boxes and Instagram photos of household names like Kid Cudi — himself an A24 star — and Tom Brady clad in the jacket, the Marty Supreme jacket was inescapable. “C u at 7,” Chalamet, who stars as the movie’s titular ping-pong phenom, posted on IG alongside the address of a Marty Supreme popup in New York where hundreds of college-aged customers lined up to buy a piece of Marty merch, catch a glimpse of Chalamet or the rest of the starry cast (Gynewth Paltrow, Tyler, the Creator) or director Josh Safdie (Uncut Gems) — or all of the above.
The hype paid off. “The Marty Supreme jacket,” as it’s known, sold out swiftly with the blue variant being the clear favorite. (The windbreaker, which looks not unlike that ‘90s Nautica jacket you may or may not have owned in middle school, was priced at $250 and also came in orange, red, and black.) An "extremely limited collector’s item,” per the listing, recently sold for $4,000 on Grailed.
But with Chalamet putting muscle into the marketing, buzz was a given. The jacket itself was powerful until it became tangible — crazy to see it on Tom Brady, less cool to see it on NYU students wearing it like so many ESSENTIALS sweatpants.
The problem with claiming it as an “important” cultural item of 2025 is that the jacket's sale had an air of inevitability, an obligatory nature tagging along with the endless headlines about which cool-to-Gen-Z celebrity was donning it now. And with it being dragged down by a deluge of accompanying Marty Supreme drops — Wheaties boxes, Tyler the Creator's thematic Golf Wang capsule — the results, which initially came off as thrillingly unexpected, ended up halfhearted. Kevin Abstract of the hip-hop group Brockhampton looked downright bored to be wearing the thing. And it’s hard not to take his Instagram caption as faint fashion praise: “Solid.” Ouch.
Then there’s the manipulation factor. We know by now that A24 is clever, maybe sometimes a little too clever, about flipping its mass-arthouse cinematic fare into material goods. The “Party Hand” tied to the horror movie Talk to Me was morbidly funny, as was the Pearl tree decoration. But an Iron Claw action figure that looks like something out of Toys “R” Us, also circa 1995, starts to feel esoteric for its own sake in a way that’s enervating. Same for Everything Everywhere At Once’s hotdog hands: some things are better left to the screen.
The beauty of surprise film-to-wardrobe hits like the jacket from Drive and Barbie’s Birkenstocks is specifically that they were uncalculated. You can’t plan for a million wannabe Goslings because you can’t plan for an object (or film, really) to be a cultural touchstone. It just is. That’s what made the Dune popcorn bucket a glorious moment in time and the Anora thongs a blip soon to be forgotten. The Marty Supreme rollout was great because it was so extra — Blimps! Brady! — but then it became a commercial thing. If the jacket had never been released, or at least if it had been released in small numbers around the time the film premiered, it would’ve felt that much more special. As is, it’s just another saleable product soon to be worn, discarded, and rediscovered in a few years as a “Hey, remember this?” oddity.
Plus, did we really need to be fed this item this early on? The Marty Supreme jacket launched a full month before the film premiered on Christmas Day. Surely the studio, which has suffered its own recent box office setbacks, is sweating the outcome of Safdie’s film. But there’s nothing like the tang of desperation to taint the joy of an unexpected streetwear collab, which is to say that the Marty Supreme jacket feel less like a significant event in the history of pop-culture wearables and more like the pinnacle of a certain kind of corporate marketing-driven merch. Or at least the end of merch that will make us care about a movie that doesn’t come out for another month.
This article was published on November 29 and updated on December 24.
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