Interesting report from Inside Hook …..
From the Grateful Dead to Vampire Weekend, fan accounts highlighting bootleg designs have become devoted communities
When Mason Warner first created the @fromthelot Instagram account in 2015, he had no idea it would take off the way it did. “It was more just a resource to collect graphics,” he tells InsideHook. But since then, the account, which highlights bootleg Grateful Dead merch past and present has evolved into a bonafide fan community, a digital extension of the Shakedown Street parking-lot vending areas outside the band’s concerts in the ’80s and ’90s.
“The funny thing about From the Lot is when I sort of decided to make it more like ‘okay, this is gonna be like the Instagram archive of Grateful Dead graphics,’ I assumed there would be an end date at some point, like, dude, how many Grateful Dead tees can there be out there, you know what I mean?” he says. “But yeah, it’s almost five years, and I still see stuff like almost weekly that I’m like, ‘whoa, I’ve never seen that one before.’”
That should come as no surprise if you know anything about the power of Deadheads’ devotion. But it’s not just fans of the Dead or punk and hardcore bands (whose long history with making and sharing bootleg t-shirts and other merch make their continued DIY-ing a no-brainer) who have taken to showing off their undying love in the form of unlicensed merch posted online. Fans of Vampire Weekend, once saddled with the college-kids-in-boat-shoes stereotype, have built what GQ recently called a “very deep merch galaxy” that put the band “squarely into the Grateful Dead merch tradition.”
Read full article: https://www.insidehook.com/article/arts-entertainment/how-instagram-is-keeping-the-bootleg-band-merch-tradition-alive
