This week, H&M released a T-shirt referring to a small area of Lower Manhattan known by some as Dimes Square. The neighborhood, named for Dimes, a restaurant on Canal Street, emerged as a vibrant hot spot in the early days of the pandemic, serving as the backdrop for sometimes maskless gatherings of the city’s writers, models, actors, artists and other unaffiliated provocateurs-about-town.
Over the years, Dimes Square has become no less scene-y but a lot more ritzy, and it’s now home to a swanky hotel, Nine Orchard, and upscale wine bars. Though H&M seems to be trying to project “downtown cool” with this e-commerce image — down to the sunglasses and baggy jeans — these days many of the bars and restaurants are populated by Zyn-popping finance workers.
Far from having a unified look, Dimes Square is an aesthetic slurry of fleece vests, streetwear, and luxury labels.
In an edited conversation, members of the Styles desk — Stella Bugbee, Marie Solis and Alex Vadukul — and the Times critic Jon Caramanica, discuss this perplexing garment, which appears to be sold out online.
STELLA BUGBEE: First of all, did any of you try to buy one?
ALEX VADUKUL: I did not. And I’ll be sleeping fine at night with that decision.
MARIE SOLIS: They were already sold out by the time they entered my awareness!
JON CARAMANICA: It will surprise no one that I tried to buy one. For the archive, naturally. But also, maybe not for the archive?
SOLIS: Who do we think this is for?
VADUKUL: I guess it could be considered a “historic” piece.
BUGBEE: It’s for people to wear in Dimes Square as a joke.
CARAMANICA: I don’t know that it’s only for that — there are plenty of people who might think this could pass as a slice of New York cool. How different is it from someone wearing one of those collegiate-style sweatshirts that say SOUTHAMPTON?
SOLIS: Well, what you point out is that Dimes Square — or “Dimes Square” — has become its own cultural export. Though Dimes as a cultural signifier is a slippery thing. It’s a place you can go, but it’s also a shorthand for a certain affect that’s more diffuse. What it isn’t is a totally definable style.
CARAMANICA: I don’t think of it as an aesthetic, no. But in the same way that a T-shirt that says “East Village” or “Lower East Side” purportedly telegraphs something about your cultural interest set, this is a version of that for the age of accelerated media, accelerated meme-ing and — here’s where the H&M part comes in — accelerated fashion.
BUGBEE: None of you think this was just a smart bit of marketing to get people like us talking about it? Maybe I’m too cynical.
SOLIS: That a mega-retailer is selling it feels in line with what we know about Peter Thiel and other corporate interests that have tried to capitalize on Dimes Square and the people who hang out there.
VADUKUL: Normally, I might think that. But I consider H&M to be so mass market that I do see the tee as the natural progression of a “scene” being rendered into cheesy apparel design. To me, it hits at the time-honored New Yorker talking point of: When is a downtown scene dead? When I see the conversation around this shirt, I see a much (much) less profound version of how people lamented CBGB becoming a John Varvatos store.
BUGBEE: Correct me if I’m wrong, but my impression is that there has always been a tension about Dimes Square: Was it a real thing or a fake idea of a scene?
SOLIS: Dimes Square’s close relationship to the internet is what has always made that a tricky question. It’s sort of like asking if what happens online is real life. Maybe part of what we’re reacting to with this T-shirt is the uncanniness of seeing something so niche to New York — as well as to social media — appear on an international shopping platform.
VADUKUL: I think early on there was some tension in the acknowledgment of it as a tangible scene, just because it’s considered healthy for “street cred” among cool people if something is left enigmatic. But eventually, it did get legitimatized and legitimatized even as a micro-neighborhood, partly because of the publicity surrounding it and the Chinatown community’s vocal response to its commercial expansion.
CARAMANICA: I’m loath to wade too much into discourse, but Dimes Square as a descriptor is largely a pejorative — a way to lump together folks who drink in the same bars, go to the same pop-ups, perhaps have the same taste or politics. Just like any good scene, it does not wish to be monikered. Maybe this is the uncanny thing that happens with foreign bootlegs of familiar brands that end up being unexpectedly poetic, or maybe some junior designer who works at H&M hangs out at Kiki’s and thought it would be hilarious, and somehow it survived 10 layers of corporate review.
BUGBEE: Anything is possible, but that theory seems naïve? Also, the data point that something is “sold out” is not meaningful, unless we know how many items were produced. To go back to my suspicion about this being a canny marketing stunt, I wonder if, like many things about Dimes Square, this was cooked up elsewhere to draft off the reputation of a spot — to get people like us to wear the shirt ironically, to talk about it, to wag our fingers. Meanwhile, it gets people talking about H&M. It’s been a while since people were talking about them.
CARAMANICA: Would this same exact shirt, but made by a random local art kid, or someone who specializes in bootlegs and meta-commentary merch, be better? I already know someone like that who’s selling remakes of these shirts — a dupe of a fast-fashion item that references an IRL meme of a geographic area that’s been saddled with the burden of literary, artistic and sartorial hustle and bustle.
BUGBEE: The ultimately irony-poisoned shirt for irony-poisoned hipsters?
CARAMANICA: I’d still prefer the original.
Stella Bugbee, Jon Caramanica, Marie Solis and Alex Vadukul contributed reporting.
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