How the Paris Review Overtook The New Yorker in the Smarty Pants Merch War
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The New Yorker tote owned the 2010s. Thanks in part to inclusion in subscription promotion offers, everyone’s mom’s favorite literary magazine was NPR-level underarm ubiquitous. Then the hats got popular and it looked like the top-hatted visage of Eustace Tilley would dominate the smartypants merch space forever. But no. The Paris Review saw an opportunity.
The Paris Review, the 71-year-old, tony, tweedy, and relentlessly literary quarterly founded by George Plimpton to champion the new writers like Adrienne Rich, Philip Roth and Raymond Carver, didn’t set out to get into a merch war with The New Yorker, but these things happen.
“When I joined the Paris Review seven years ago, our merch was fulfilled from the office by the interns,” Executive Director Lori Dorr tells SPY. “We had one tee, one cap, maybe a tote. Maybe we sold out, but we weren’t really concerned about it.”
But in 2021, a perfect storm turned what was once a poky little operation into a legitimate revenue stream. That year, the Review got a new editor, Emily Stokes and then, in winter, went live with a full redesign from vaunted design firm Pentagram (best known for doing the American Museum of Natural History and Prime Video rebrands). Suddenly The Paris Review had a whole visual world to map across a range of products. They also dropped a limited edition pair of glasses with Warby Parker. Demand was real. The glasses sold out..
Attitudes changed internally. Money was interesting! A middling sideline clearly deserved some focus.
The mag’s shop now has sweatshirts, sure, and tees, and caps, and a startlingly rad series of prints by leading artists, including Ed Ruscha and John Currin. And then there’s that mock neck that, like an Adrienne Rich poem, has the strange destabilizing power to bring you up short and make you wonder what precisely is going on.
“We take our partnerships very seriously,” says Dorr. “We don’t just slap our name and their name on the thing. We’re very specific. We need a partner that really understands us and our aesthetic.”
The top sellers are caps, t-shirts, and totes, in that order, and the aesthetic is punchy and of the moment. Call it boxy normcore with a downtown edge, Gen Z meets MFA. A far cry from the New Yorker tote, which basically says “I give money to Joe Biden and I can direct you to a farmers market.”
No wonder all the bookish kids on the UWS started sporting Paris Review caps in dusty pinks and hunter greens all at once. And no wonder lit-leaning celebs like Emily Ratjakowski, Pedro Pascal, and Chloe Sévigny, food star Alison Roman, and head of fashion partnerships at Instagram Eva Chen all sport Paris Review gear. Cool guy podcasters Chris Black and Jason Steward of How Long Gone have also been spotted in Paris Review swag. It’s a perfect amalgam of band merch and high-brow signifier.
According to Dorr, revenue from Review merch is up eightfold in three years.
The New Yorker tote went mainstream as a mass giveaway, an object of convenience. The Paris Review has pulled off something much more difficult: creating objects of desire.