Our Sad Souvenirs of The Pandemic

Americans can’t go anywhere, but we’re still buying the T-shirt.

- By Amanda Mull

Last May, when Connor Hitchcock decided to start a fundraiser for some out-of-work friends, he had modest expectations. Hitchcock and his wife, Christa, run Homefield Apparel, which licenses old collegiate sports logos to make vintage-inspired T-shirts and sweatshirts. They wanted to help out a handful of writers who had recently been furloughed from Vox Media’s college- football website, Banner Society. The couple drew up some designs based on inside jokes from the site’s two podcasts. Hitchcock didn’t tell the writers what he was up to. “I thought maybe we could raise $2,000 and help them buy some groceries,” he told me.

The response was enormous. In a short presale, Homefield sold thousands of T-shirts that would make sense only to devoted listeners. People wrote in asking to donate money on top of the price of the shirts; several pledged more than $1,000. In a few days, Homefield had raised $44,000. “It pointed to people’s own personal generosity, but also the motivations of people when they feel connected to others,” Hitchcock said. “Where you spend your money is, I think, ultimately the biggest sense of agency a lot of people have.”

I am a fan of Banner Society and its podcasts (I was a guest on one of them several years ago). I ordered one of each T-shirt design. Over the next six months, I kept buying tops adorned with niche jokes from podcasts, the names of local restaurants and concert venues, or logos from indie clothing brands. Also: tote bags, stickers, coffee mugs, and, yes, one wine key. Some of these items were explicitly marketed as fundraisers for businesses whose cash flow had been dented by the pandemic. Other purchases just struck me as a way to throw extra business to people who could probably use it.