Software as a style

Daisy Alioto on how nostalgia for an earlier internet bleeds into fashion. This article originally ran in Prune.

Last year, a viral tweet declared: “We're in the era of modern software companies as lifestyle brands.” Software mediates our work, our relationships and our innermost thoughts. It helps us organize our memories and correspondence. It is a lifestyle tool, and to the extent that we signal the software we use outward, it is a lifestyle brand.

The most compelling signaling happens sartorially, with garments that take the business behind software into the real world. This merchandise doesn’t just spring from the fandom of technology in general, but specific technologies (and technologists)—the more parasocial the better.

You don’t want to be the band that wears its own t-shirt to the concert, but you do want to see your merch throughout the audience. An acceptable compromise might include clamoring for a TBPN hat on Twitter, designed to mimic the aesthetics of F1.

F1 has a much better reputation than Silicon Valley these days, but that wasn’t always the case. Thus, the most sought-after software merch is not of the present, but the past.

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In 2020, the authors of Blackbird Spyplane went on a quest for a rare Apple t-shirt, specifically depicting The Power Mac G4 Cube. “It registers as simultaneously recent and distant, in a pleasantly paradoxical combination,” they wrote of the shirt, finding the more common vintage Apple logo (that rainbow fruit we all know and love) to be a bit too kitsch for their taste.

It is a requirement of software style that not everything rare can get the discerning consumer’s stamp of approval. The 1998 book Apple T-Shirts by Gordon Thygeson is the pinnacle of vintage software swag. It is a catalog of how Apple saw itself, and all of the ambition inherent in their early vision—untainted by the reality of the present.

The t-shirts in the book go for hundreds of dollars on resale platforms like Depop and ebay, where they are likely to be listed alongside (the more common) Napster t-shirts under the tag “Y2K.” They call to mind the golden age of the computer in the family living room, when desktop was still a place.

“For me it’s a way of capturing the boundless optimism of the Y2K era (or any other era of recent economic history). It’s also darkly funny because to wear the merch of a defunct company deliberately means you recognize that what once seemed great can collapse,” says Colette Shade, author of Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything.

I thought about her words as a 1997 Cisco Systems Asia Telecom t-shirt crossed my X feed, courtesy of designer and entrepreneur Emmett Shine. Two wooden-seeming executives shake hands in front of a warm gradient, hovering over a skyline of jewel-toned processors.

Though Cisco is still very much alive, the vintage design reminds me of the “world music” and accompanying global folk art that was popular in the 1980s, through the 90s when it morphed into projects like Pure Moods. Tracks like ‘Adiemus’ in a non-existent, universal language, speak to that turn-of-the-millennium promise to unite the world. They do aurally what the best Silicon Valley style does sartorially. Positioning music, or software as it may be, as a lifestyle brand that anyone can participate in.

If the 21st century has taught us anything, though, it is that these references are highly localized and specific. “If you live through a certain ‘logo era’ in real time you might take it as a given that one logo is the ‘true, golden-age’ logo, based on your personal associations with it, and that others are lesser by default,” says Blackbird Spyplane.

Josh Zoerner, who typically sells bootleg and sanctioned music swag through his label Night Gallery, was surprised by the popularity of the Soulseek shirt he debuted in 2024. (Soulseek is a peer-to-peer file-sharing network and application, primarily used for sharing music.)

“Soulseek has a huge community of users/true heads that still love the community aspect of music sharing and love dealing with rare MP3’s, files, and mixes,” Zoerner says. With over 700 of the Soulseek t-shirts sold, it’s Night Gallery’s second most popular design ever. “People still ask for it,” he says.

Of course, as with the TBPN hat, the more successful a piece of contemporary merch, the more memeable one becomes, an identifiable staple of a certain “type” of person. Charles Broskoski, the CEO and co-founder of Are.na, a creative research and archiving platform, knows this better than anyone.

Hats with Are.na’s logo, consisting of two identical six-point star shapes, frequently appear on “starter packs” for urban creatives. The logo was designed by Harsh Patel. “I love seeing it in starter packs and memes,” says Broskoski. “I totally get how [the logo] would take on a life of its own.” That is, a lifestyle. 💾

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