The fantastic world of Italian museum merch From simple souvenirs to hallmarks of a community

Every museum path in the world ends in the inevitable gift shop. A place where there are books, t-shirts and commemorative hats, tote bags and all sorts of hamlets on which you can print on top of a famous painting: keyring, ashtrays, puzzles, cups, umbrellas, notebooks, scarves and so on. All objects that often fall into the kitsch category, both for their poor quality, for the dubious art direction with which they were produced, and for their status as a somewhat childlike souvenir. But things have changed over the years. For example, the world's leading museum, the Louvre, recently collaborated with both Netflix on the occasion of Lupin's release, Uniqlo and, before the lockdown, Virgil Abloh. Last April Pangaia and Takashi Murakami created a capsule for MoMa - just coming back from a collaboration with Vans. Also in 2019, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago collaborated on a capsule always designed by Abloh on the occasion of its exhibition. In 2020, Daily Paper collaborated with the Van Gogh museum, which is now about to launch its perfume line. It had already collaborated with Vans in 2018. Sotheby's has created a collection of merch with art prints together with Highsnobiety. 

A vision that Eike Schmidt, director of the Uffizi, tried to change in Italy amid many efforts and that led him, for example, to promote museums through Chiara Ferragni and by selling digitized works in the form of NFT. But even if these initiatives are entirely laudable and modern, starting from the merch of museums to promote social relevance is a path that does not seem to have been travelled yet. Yet ignoring this aspect means ignoring huge commercial and marketing opportunities, without mentioning as a collaboration between a prestigious museum and a prominent fashion brand, following the example of the Louvre, would help to age the public's perception of the museum itself.

In line with the new goals to be achieved to overcome the pandemic crisis, therefore, the world of Italian institutional culture should begin to reassess the potential of its merch: 2021 is the era of communities and collective identities, speaking this type of language could allow the many Italian museums to find that young audience and that new relevance that they have been desperately looking for for years.