Last week, Justin Timberlake extended to his fans in New York City an invitation to a pop-up storefront. According to Timberlake’s Instagram account, there would be a “custom, collaborative product for every song on the album”—the critically panned “Man of the Woods,” released earlier this month. Pop-ups have settled into a rite of passage for celebrities in recent years. In 2016, I didn’t bother trying to make it to any of the twenty-one pop-ups that sold the merchandise designed for Kanye West’s tour for his seventh solo album, “The Life of Pablo.” The same month, when Frank Ocean, having emerged from a long dormancy with two bodies of music and a zine enticingly titled “Boys Don’t Cry,” announced a pop-up, a crowd seemed to materialize at Mulberry Iconic Magazines as soon as the address was disseminated. Last winter, I walked by Kylie Jenner’s Kylie Cosmetics less compelled by the Lip Kit Wall than by the chance to experience the force of the Internet in the wild. I am historically a fan of Timberlake, and so, late on Friday afternoon, I went.
Experts in the science of album drops anticipate these openings. Usually, a rumor is spread, via text messages to strategic power players and then on social media. Speculators loiter, waiting for confirmation of the address from sites like the Fader and Pigeons and Planes and Complex. Crucially, all this usually happens in a single calendar day. Digital natives have a craving for tactility, and resellers an instinct for immanent vintage value. Rumors that the artist would stop by were, in the case of Timberlake, proved correct; on Thursday night, as hundreds waited in the sub-freezing temperatures for an early look, the singer—warm in a Levi’s trucker jacket from the collection (lined with Pendleton wool that was milled in 1982, the year his wife, the actress Jessica Biel, was born)—visited the store on Wooster Street in SoHo, bearing pizzas.
Timberlake is still enjoying an uptick of attention following his Super Bowl halftime performance, but the thirty-seven-year old, whose last album was released in 2013, is far from a social-media sage. The day after his visit, I found a quieter scene outside the store. Twenty-five or so people were waiting on a ramp next to an arrangement of barriers that were uselessly positioned on the sidewalk. A man named Ricardo, who was waiting with a friend, behind me, said that he’d liked Timberlake for a long time but hadn’t made his mind up about his fifth solo effort. Ricardo became more excited talking about Heron Preston, the streetwear savant who consulted on the early seasons of Yeezy, Kanye West’s fashion brand, and also designed the tour clothes (T-shirts, hoodies) for the “Man of the Woods” collection. “I met Heron Preston at a Yeezy show,” Ricardo said, showing me a photo taken at Madison Square Garden in 2016. Since around that time, shrewd young dressers have been living in the wardrobe West sanctioned—ironic fonts and faux-Gothic epigrams printed on denatured beiges and crisp whites. The merch of artists as musically heterogeneous as Beyoncé, Ariana Grande, the Weeknd, and Drake all derive from that initial Yeezy germ, itself a conceptual distillation of decades of athletic wear.
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The store’s windows had been blacked out with posters of barren trees, and, inside, near the entrance, a television played a video of Timberlake brooding in a wheat field—footage from the trailer for his album, I thought. Deeper inside there was a sort of hearth, framed with branches and a bit of fence, replete with burgundy rugs and comfortable chairs that faced the products, which were bolted to the walls. The clubby shopper experience resembled the one found at the sneaker temple KITH, which opened its first location in Brooklyn, in 2011, where items are presented as elevated art objects and customers must approach floor workers to access more sizes of the rarefied streetwear samples on the rack. From Sonos speakers tucked into decorative roots near the hearth, Timberlake could be heard singing on the chorus of the rapper T.I.’s dirge, “The old me is dead and gone.”
A salesperson wearing one of the hoodies designed by Preston—ink-black, featuring a handsome range of forest and the word “Tennessee” on the chest—handed me what looked like a periodic table. I was to indicate what I wanted. Preston, who has designed for NASA and Nike, has débuted his own collections of heady, “eco-conscious” streetwear—outfits that recall the rectangularity of working-class uniforms and prognosticate a long-sleeved, genderless future. Preston’s contributions to Timberlake’s collection (instigated by Bravado, which is owned by Universal and manages the merchandising of more than two hundred artists) flaunt Preston’s wit: a purple T-shirt with the care instructions printed in huge font on the front (“Made for mostly outdoor use and long trips”).
Timberlake’s sylvan look at the halftime show—a neckerchief, a shirt emblazoned with deer—was in effect an advertisement for the rest of the collection, a belated synthesis of aughts hipsterism and Midwestern Americana. Bravado had brokered a deal with eleven brands, which did not include Timberlake’s own clothing label, William Rast, which was founded in 2005 and relaunched in 2016. Timberlake may have spent the last decade two-stepping in European-cut suits, but, wanting to broadcast a return to some Memphian authenticity, he had chosen to sell flannel from Levi’s, bandannas and strongboxes from Best Made Co., sunglasses from Warby Parker, and beard wash and beard butter from Maestro’s Classic. Not-yet-released sample colorways of resurrected Nike Air Jordans 3s—created in collaboration with the legendary sneaker designer Tinker Hatfield and corresponding to the fifth track, “Higher, Higher,” on the album—taunted buyers behind glass. The unfortunate implication was that the album’s songs of the self were also jingles. (It was Timberlake who sang “I’m Lovin’ It” for the McDonald’s “urban” ad campaign.) The album’s closing track—“Young Man,” a letter to Timberlake’s son—corresponded to a Lucchese workman boot.
A savvy alignment of celebrity and brand can be riveting; the most innovative thing the artist Lil Yachty, a.k.a. “King of the Youth,” has done, for example, is to accept a role as creative director at Nautica, placing him in a lineage of black interpreters of prepster script. In 1997, the Gap asked LL Cool J to be a spokesman for the brand in a commercial. He felt that the representatives at Gap had been condescending to him, but he did the commercial anyway, inserting what was essentially a covert advertisement for the hip-hop apparel company FUBU into his verse. “It made them cool,” he told Oprah, in 2013, referring to Gap. With “Man of the Woods,” there was little transfer of cachet, no such productive clash. The collection has the same problems as the album: it is under-edited, and takes its inspiration too literally. Timberlake’s face or imprint is nowhere to be found, although some of the tour clothes features his last name, which already sounds like a Patagonia-esque heritage brand.
Soren, a physician from Brooklyn, was evaluating one of the five iterations of the Levi’s “Montana” denim trucker jacket in a floor-length mirror. “Do I like the album? I think it’s different,” he said. He appreciated that Timberlake and Pharrell were experimenting with what he called “Southern guitar riffs.” But he really liked the jacket, which, at a hundred and ninety-five dollars, was close to reasonably priced. When he flipped up the collar, the text “Montana,” scrawled in white, revealed itself against the denim’s light wash.
The fashion critic Matthew Schneier, writing about the hugely popular paraphernalia from Justin Bieber’s “Purpose” tour, also by Bravado, which borrowed heavily from eighties heavy-metal T-shirts, recently wrote that merch is “edging even further from mere memorabilia and closer to a fully fledged, if single-minded, fashion collection.” Such collections appeal to non-fanatics; T-shirts and cinched sweats and roomy hoodies are cozy. More than that, wearing a sweatshirt featuring the scowling face of Bieber is an acknowledgement of, as well as a participation in, the inherent fake-ness of the era of artist as corporation. The stylish—conformist, sardonic—know to join the stunt.
I considered a beautiful flask from Best Made Co., on which “Sauce,” the name of the album’s third track, had been engraved. I was unconvinced. The most attractive merch contains its own commentary—like the “Boycott Beyoncé” shirt released post-“Lemonade.” Timberlake wasn’t always so self-negating; “Cry Me a River,” a song of extraordinary beauty and cruelty, in which he enacts a solipsistic revenge fantasy against Britney Spears, appeared to let the listener in to his personal fury. The political objection to the Timberlake revival—that he is an entitled white man who doesn’t get the times—struck me as facile. But what the aging Timberlake lacks is a compelling fantasy, a frame of self-reference. “Sometimes the greatest way to say something is to say nothing at all,” he sings on “Say Something.” The track corresponds to a yellow Moleskine notebook.
