“Omfg, they took our branding!” read an incoming all-caps text in one of my friend group chats last night. “We need to send a cease and desist,” read another. Just a couple of minutes earlier, Kamala HQ, Vice President Harris’s official campaign office, announced on X that “new merch just dropped.” The product in question was a Realtree camouflage snapback with the Harris-Walz logo embroidered in bright orange, which the singer Bon Iver just wore to perform at the campaign rally in Eau Claire, Wisconsin this afternoon.
A couple of hours prior to the merch drop, Vice President Harris announced Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate in a video posted on social media. In the clip, Walz was wearing a camo hat, which commenters pointed out somehow sat perfectly at the intersection of the “Walz” and the “Bushwick gays” (basically my friend group). Just last week while I was on holiday with the aforementioned crew, one of them had the lovely idea of commemorating our vacation with exclusive merch in the form of a camo hat embroidered in orange.
The hat, dear reader, looks like a not-so-distant cousin of the Harris-Walz chapeau. We were at the Fire Island Pines in New York (which was also the setting of a fundraiser hosted by Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff and Vice President Harris), and our hats all read “The Pines.” They were a hit on the island—all through the week fellow holidayers asked us where they could purchase one. “The Pines” is very much a bubble, a queer and gay safe haven a short trip away from the city, and it’s exactly where something as cute and silly as friend-group-vacation-merch can easily become a thing.
The hilarious synchronicity of the Harris-Walz hat resembling ours so closely epitomizes something I’ve been dying to write about for months: Fashion-inclined gays and queers in Brooklyn and middle-aged midwestern dads are, as it happens, not entirely dissimilar aesthetically. The only differentiating factor is a tinge of sartorial irony. I’ve been particularly tickled recently by the way many liberal and leftist queer folks have been embracing signifiers of masculinity that would have once frightened us back into the closet—trucker hats, camo, white ribbed tank tops, bermuda shorts. But I never expected election merch, of all things, to be the where the Venn diagram between midwestern American dads and fashionable New York gays would intersect.
That Tim Walz types and members of my own community—many of whom have pre-ordered the hat, which quickly sold out—are equally keen to sport this piece seems symbolic of the wide-ranging appeal of the Harris Walz ticket. And without trying too hard to make this cap more than what it is, it does seem to encapsulate Walz’s attractions as a face of a different kind of masculinity. A chill, friendly, unthreatening kind of man, dad, and politician; certainly a welcome change from his “weird” opponents.
It’s hard to say whether this new It-hat had been planned as campaign merch all along, but judging by the way the Harris HQ has been operating, it is more likely an impressively swift reaction to social media discourse. TikTok videos and fan cams of VP Harris have certainly helped nurture enthusiasm among young voters, and this “Camo-la” Walz snapback is just the latest achievement in a savvy presidential campaign that has capitalized on social listening like none other before it.
(Funnily enough, X has also identified a similarity between the Harris Walz hat and a piece of merch from budding pop star and fellow Midwest import Gracie Abrams.) Just a couple of weeks ago, when Harris formally announced her campaign, a designer friend texted another of my group chats: “I’ve just ordered my Kamala t-shirt in a XXXL to wear as a dress, I’ll send pics.” Will election merch be all over street style at the shows in September? Check back here to find out.
