Merch Machine
About that Sotheby's x Frame collab...
Last night, I was walking with a large group of women down Madison Avenue when my friend, Quinn (not her real name), alerted me to something truly shocking:
The Frame x Sotheby’s Collab.
Coyly peeking out of pine crates, cotton t-shirts emblazoned with Sotheby’s Mercury type-face wink their way through the glass windows onto Madison’s sidewalk. Soft-cashmere, cropped t-shirts and baseball caps advertise both the company itself, and the fact that you, the wearer, are a “Collector”. What do “Collectors” and “Sotheby’s” (employees or fans in this case) also like to wear”? Classic white V-neck sweaters, and argyle vests, of course. The crates are a clever marketing gimmick suggesting that the wares inching out of them are themselves, pieces of art. The tote bag is coming out of its [crate] and is doing just fine!
Meanwhile, down the street, the long-beleaguered Breuer Building sits under construction. Its windows are covered with requisite brown-paper, and in its fourth iteration in 11 years, the “Sprit Halloween” of the cultural and architectural behemoth seems less than an inspired reinvention. Where is the excitement?[ Sotheby’s impending move could really push the boundaries of the Breuer’s capacity to inspire new audiences. Bringing together constantly rotating groups of the most historically and materially diverse collections. This is the blend that the Met couldn’t master, and the Frick achieved to fanfare (although not mine), combined with what makes the Breuer shine the most; modern and post-modern art. By moving Sotheby’s into a traditionally museum space, the auction house is not only asserting itself as an institution of a museum’s caliber, but also (hopefully) will engage with the public on a more inviting basis.
However, this relocation seems more akin to two people who should have gone to couples therapy before they signed the lease, and not after. Sotheby’s has been going through its own market woes in the past several years (although the mid-May sale season seemed to have gone well), but there’s a foreboding gloom that comes over me when I think about Sotheby’s expansion into the Breuer. Not to totally personify a building, but it seems to have gone through a bit of a lot in a short amount of time, hasn’t it? The Art Market’s current precariousness, combined with an expansion during a possible recession, makes this seem like an incredibly inauspicious time to try one’s luck on the fortunes of Madison Avenue. Unless of course, you’re a relatively stable American denim brand…
Before you jump on those $228 unisex “Sotheby’s” branded boxers, let’s hear a bit more about the collab. The online feature is a mix of chic Sotheby’s staff choosing their “picks” and posing in white-walled studios and offices adorned as you would imagine a well-to-do art history professor’s might appear - covered in artbooks, classic museum photographs, stuffed pheasants, half-empty crystal decanters et al. The campaign describes itself thusly, “Introducing Frame x Sotheby’s- a first-of-its-kind collaboration that brings together two cultural forces through craft, heritage, and timeless style.” Reader, if I were writing this with pencil-and-paper, I would have chewed the eraser clean off by now. While I do like the Frame brand, it’s hard to compare the “heritage” of a contemporary sports-wear brand that has been around only since my freshman year of college with a storied and important international auction house founded in 1744. Frame is cool and sleek- but it’s no Ralph Lauren, a brand that references Americana and mines the very idea of “heritage” for all its collections (and certainly the overall aesthetic of its Madison Avenue stores). More importantly, what does this collaboration say about the values it espouses for the campaign: heritage, craft, and timeless style? I agree, the styles here are timeless, which is part of the reason why some feel successful off the bat - and others feel hollow.
Many of the designs are incredibly simplistic, honing-in on the beauty of Sotheby’s branding, it does so well; I am the most drawn to the cheeky baseball caps and tote-bags - and this is most possibly because they echo well-loved trends and items associated with art-world in-merch. 56 Henry’s “Moran Bondaroff” and ArtNet’s “Wet Paint” baseball caps were it-items. The National Arts Club sold dinner jackets. Everyone has a go-to gallery tote be it Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, Lisson, Artsy (from Armory 2016), 192 Books, etc. etc. If a downtown gallery made truly excellent merch and sold it at affordable prices, they would become items for those in-the-know, and highly covetable at that.
Frame’s high-prices and fanning about of the word “Collector” suggest that the collab is not for those in the industry, or even for those who work at Sotheby’s - it might not even be for people who have bid on an item at Sotheby’s. The V-neck sweaters and argyle vests read as cosplay; “this is the uniform art people wear”, they whisper. Because these items also have smaller logo placement, they remind me more of dark-academia-core v-necks I found at my college’s bookstore when I visited in the spring. Much like the debate around the “Old Money” aesthetic, these customers could just find secondhand and well made V-necks and argyle sweaters sans the Sotheby’s logo to indicate they are of a monied class. Sotheby’s slapped on logo reads more of an actual branding than anything else; property of the Sotheby’s brand not actually someone invested in the heritage and art that has moved through the halls of the house itself.
Conspicuously left out of the collaboration’s branding and design itself save for a few photographs here and there is any art. The products don’t even signify that art is what keeps the auction house’s lights on, but simply, it is a place where the act of collecting takes place. I wish that the campaign took more care to engage with the storytelling aspects of auctioning off work and artifacts that actually does invoke the classic aesthetic they hope to capitalize off of, choosing to focus more on Sotheby’s brand identity than Sotheby’s purpose. There’s a queasiness I get when I think about the collaboration- art workers are perpetually underpaid, the art market (especially the secondary art market) is on shaky ground. Is there insult to injury in this collaboration? I believe so.
In 2021, Frame came out with a similar collaboration with another Madison Avenue darling - The Carlyle. At the time, Frame co-founder and creative-director Erik Tortensson described why he moved forward with the collaboration in Vogue, “Since we started Frame, we’ve looked at classic, timeless style and the Carlyle is just that. As an institution it is elegant and sophisticated, but never tries too hard and stands proudly as it has for decades,”. Sounds familiar! When the Carlyle collaboration launched, I engaged in a debate about the line with one of my friends, who had a distain for it much the way I do for the Sotheby’s collab. She felt it diluted the brand of the Carlyle; I think it’s a clever way to expand on the idea of “merch” for a hotel, a chicer extension of the sweatshirts you’d find at a gift shop. Much of this debate can be wrapped up in Henry James’ favorite bow, “Old Money vs. New Money.” Sotheby’s collab with Frame insists you, too, can look like old money, but under a shiny new package.